State of the Industry
We are in an epidemic of problems in the hair industry that I encounter almost every day and it has made me incredibly sad and upset. A huge part of who I am is the desire to combat social injustices, especially human trafficking and child abuse. I see today that we are sliding into an abyss where surgeons no longer play a role in the care of their patients but are sidelined as individuals who simply rubberstamp the process and are there to only “supervise” even though they have no idea about hair diseases, no idea about how to draw a hairline, how to harvest with FUE or strip, or how to make recipient sites. Here are some examples of the things that I have seen in the past few months walk through my door. I had a gentleman who has diffuse unpatterned alopecia (DUPA), which means his entire donor is unusable for grafts due to miniaturization and there is no workaround on this problem. If he should have a transplant, the grafts will fail, and he will be left with scars on the back of his head. He was told by a Turkish outfit that they would give him a free transplant if he would promote it to his 1.8 million followers on YouTube. I have attached that video here. It is sickening. I have seen countless cases of overharvesting where the donor area is simply destroyed and decimated because inexperienced fly-in technicians are taking all the grafts out of the back with no concern for the patient. That is one of the many reasons why I perform all my own FUE harvesting. The sad thing is there is no escape to this disaster. The patient will have to live with it. My colleague said the cheapest hair transplant you get will become the most expensive, especially considering that it may take multiple tens of thousands of dollars to make the disastrous result slightly better, all the while still leaving you unnatural and scarred. I saw a Black patient recently who had a transplant into what was obviously a scarring hair loss condition (central centrifugal cicatricial alopecia) and wondered why all the grafts failed and his condition worsened. I am hoping that if you do not come to me that you do proper research and seek an ethical, experienced, compassionate hair physician and surgeon. I tell my patients every day not to have surgery and can turn away 9 consultations in a row. Does that help my business? Of course not, but I have done the right thing for my patients. Do I try to sell them a bucket of non-surgical treatments that do not work? No, I work with my patients’ budgets to try to help them use only the most effective therapies with the fewest side effects and the easiest compliance. I will leave you with this quote from Albert Schweitzer, “Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.”