Future Issues in Hair Transplantation for You

This audio podcast has been transcribed using an automated service. Please forgive any typographic errors or other transcription flaws.

I entitled this podcast future issues because the first thing I think about when I see you for a hair consultation as actually not your present problem and it’s not even your past problem but is your future issue. I’m really looking at what is going to be the problem in 5, 10, 15, 20 years. I had a gentleman that came to me, who is 27 years old. He wanted an incredibly low hairline like a Norwood one, which is a prepubescent hairline. And he said, I don’t really care what I look like at 40. At the time, I was 42, which is 10 years ago, and I was saying sir, I care what I look like. And at the time for me, 50 years old, seem old because I was 42. I’m now 52, 60 seems old. My mom who’s 80 years old thinks 80s, really young. So, the definition of old is a very simple term, as just someone that’s older than you are. And that number continues to change because older you get, the younger everyone else seems and you just there’s a relative change a thing. So, what’s very important as a Hair surgeon is when I see you I think about the future issues. And during the consultation I have with you, I won’t just talk about your past problems what you’re currently facing, what you want to have done. I’m also thinking, what do I have in my back pocket and that means your donor hair for future sessions? What are the things that I could have a problem within five or 10 years? And how can I avoid an issue? Now, the one thing that’s true with a hair surgeon is that there is no such thing as a hundred percent risk-free. There’s no such thing as that you’re absolutely stopped losing hair and that I’m not going to worry about future hair loss. That’s why medicine is so important. That’s why judging the amount of donor capacity versus what you have, the degree of loss, depends on the degree of miniaturization how old you are. There’re so many factors that go into my judgment for future safety. But the one of the biggest things that I think make me different from a lot of hair facilities, where they’re just there to make a dollar off, I consult you very aggressively sometimes I lose cases because patients get scared. And I said, you know what? It’s fine, I rather scare you away, then just operate on anyone that walks through the door, I actually turn away huge percentage of my patients. In fact, now, in order to minimize some of the demand issues I have is I pre-screen a lot of my patients via photographs submitted to me to say, look, this guy is not a good candidate for a hair transplant. I don’t think we should do a formal consultation, we can do something where my hair coordinator walks you through the basics of what you need to do to prevent further hair loss and medical therapy, and I just manage a lot of more of the surgical consultations. So, a large component is really thinking about future hair loss. You do not have the capacity as a lay person to understand what’s safe and what’s not safe, relative degrees of risk, relative degrees of safety, but it’s so important not to focus on your current problem alone but think about it in an integrated fashion with future issues.