This is going to be a long post, but this week I saw two patients (on the same day) that had transplant growth failure nearly a year after they had follicular unit extraction (FUE) surgery… and I needed to vent / post a reminder / warn about researching certain doctors and looking beyond the hype. I’ve written before about what doctors don’t want you to know about FUE and I’ve probably written enough posts like this one before, too. But it doesn’t hurt to try again.
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We performed a strip surgery this week on a patient who was disappointed with the FUE procedure he had done by a well known surgeon that promotes himself all over the hair loss forums (we’ll call him Dr. X — I can’t name him as I do not need the possible legal hassle). This patient reported that he received 1500 FUE grafts from Dr. X, and it was very long and very tiring, even though the doctor routinely brags that he can do up to 4000 FUE grafts in under 8 hours.
Many months later, by the time the grafts should have grown out, there was very little actual growth. The patient said that not only was the FUE surgery disappointing, but additionally he now had thousands of very visible white dot scars at the back of his head that were highlighted after he had a buzz cut. He is in the military and these white scars bothered him more than the graft failure! He had learned to live with his balding, but could not deal with the dots. He previously had a strip procedure with a barely detectable scar, and these dot scars were more visible and bothersome to him… which is why he came to visit our office, where he knew that the surgery would work.
Coincidentally, later the same day I had a consultation with another patient who had a complete failure of FUE from the same doctor. That is what has prompted me to write this post. We have seen quite a few similar cases that originated from that doctor’s FUE practice. In other words, these aren’t isolated cases.
What is appearing today with FUE failures is similar to what happened in the mid-1990s when I started routinely doing megasessions of between 2000-4000 grafts. At the time, surgeries weren’t that large, yet many doctors were eager to claim a share of this new emerging market and reported megasessions as they performed them. These doctors presented their experience to the public in press releases and even reported them before our professional society with a promise that they would return to show the results the following year. Few did the follow-up that they committed to. When 8 months passed, many of the megasessions failed, but the check had already long cleared the doctor’s bank account.
Eventually some of these doctors learned how to do these large procedures after many failures and a trail of victims. Other times, the doctors never learned. Today, FUE is increasing in frequency (just like the megasession history in the 1990’s), because the doctors promote it as a scar-less surgery (not so). FUE is fast becoming a common a surgery, reflecting what might now be nearly half of the market… yet there is no real training programs to teach this very difficult technique!
As the inventor of the FUE technique I can ask the logical question: Where are the doctors who claim skills in this area getting their experience? The answer is that they learned on people like you without any accountability to anyone. Most patients who are the victims of the failures do not demand to get their money back because (they tell me) that they feel somehow guilty for this failure.
It is unfortunate that the hair transplant community can not police this process and the medical boards who are the legal authority to protect the public, just do not have enough money to do their job. Few patients take the step to lodge a complaint with the medical boards. If there were a trail of unwarranted deaths, I suspect that these boards would be more proactive, but for hair transplants… well, after all, hair transplant failures are not serious conditions like deaths, just criminal activities reflecting fraud and misrepresentations by the doctors who promote what they can not do. They create a trail of victims just like you.
Don’t get me wrong, FUE is a good procedure in the hands of good doctors who know how to do it. My advice for those of you looking to have an FUE procedure reflects what I have been promoting for years here. Only you can protect yourself and there is no substitute for the research described.
