Dr. Rassman
i have stumbled upon a hair transplant clinic in Prague called the “GHO clinic” which offer a proprietary FUE in which apparently the donor hair will regrow (page here)i don’t know how well the human body would repair a partially punched out hair follicle, i just want to ask if this procedure is actually hair multiplication available today or just someone trying to make his FUE look better than everyone else’s?
I just chaired the session at the annual ISHRS meeting in Amsterdam and had Dr. Coen Gho as one of the speakers. I had lost my voice, so I could not comment as the chair of that session, but considering that you asked me about him, I will use this as a forum to speak my opinion on what I heard.
Dr. Gho reported that he did 1500 patients with his “cloning” procedure. If I had to give a score to the material he presented using a 1-10 scale for scientific credibility, I’d score it a 1, with 1 being the lowest possible. His science was pathetic, with slides that were blurred and blackened out so that there was really nothing to see. He claimed that his FUE technique cut the follicular units in half longitudinally, and that the part that remained regrew hair, but there was no proof of this in any of the material he showed. He did not show any patient results and certainly was never reviewed by any credible agency or physician.
Partially divided follicles have been well studied by many prominent researchers. Despite their attempts, none succeed to create even an equal amount of hair (equal to the original divided follicular units). Dr. Kim (Korean researcher) had done some wonderful research on this very subject and failed to do what Dr. Gho claims. I believe that what I heard from Dr. Gho is marketing hype without any evidence of any hairs regrowing.
Come on now, I’m sure that he believed that the solution would be at hand in 5 years or so. If a weather man predicted a sunny day tomorrow, and tomorrow came with heavy rain, would you call that unethical behavior? There are limits as to the predictability of the future. In our capitalistic society, the entrepreneur believes that his inventions will work, will take less time than it really takes to develop a marketable product, and he often puts his hard earned savings into that business. Not all businesses succeed, not all ideas work and when they do not, it is the entrepreneur that usually pays the price for it. I am sure that Dr. Washenik was humbled by his failure to predict the timeline for cloning correctly. I personally commend him and Aderans for their persistence in working on the problem.