Category: Other Surgical Procedures

Snippet from the article:

Thick, handsome mustaches have long been prized by men throughout the Middle East as symbols of masculine virility, wisdom and maturity.

But not all mustaches are created equal, and in recent years, increasing numbers of Middle Eastern men have been going under the knife to attain the perfect specimen.

Turkish plastic surgeon Selahattin Tulunay says the number of mustache implants he performs has boomed in the last few years. He now performs 50-60 of the procedures a month, on patients who hail mostly from the Middle East and travel to Turkey as medical tourists.

He said his patients generally want thick mustaches as they felt they would make them look mature and dignified.

Read the rest at CNN — Mideast men go under knife for manly mustaches

The article was published just in time for Movember.

I am going to have a face/neck lift in the next few months. The skin on which my sideburns are will be cut out as part of the procedure. I wonder whether I could use those hairs to fill up my eyebrows? Could they be ‘saved’ by the surgeon temporarily for the hair surgeon?

Face lift and hair transplant can be done with the extra hairs harvested from the face lift surgery. But it needs to be coordinated by a hair transplant doctor and be done on the same day.

So technically yes, the hairs could be transplanted to your eyebrows… but both procedures need to be organized so that the grafts are not kept out of the body for too long.

I have been asked the question posed in the title of the post many times, and each and every time I answered it on this site, I was emphatic that this could not be done because of the problems that we see in kidneys, livers, and hearts when they are transplanted (i.e. they get rejected by the body). Now, the possibility that this may not be the case was raised by Dr. Sharon Keene after she read this article in the LA Times about a small pilot study which may lead to the elimination of taking anti-rejection medication for life following organ transplants — Study suggests breakthrough in organ transplants.

Japanese doctors tried homografts and allografts of scalp hair back in 1928 and again in 1938. They left detailed descriptions of the results. The growth rate was zero percent; however, we have learned much about transplanting organs since then and maybe we can apply what we learned to allow for a better outcome.

Of course, I am not saying that my answer has changed, but who knows for sure what could happen. Successful transplants have been done between different people, in baby hearts under a year of age and in face transplants where the anti-rejection medications can be far less and possibly stopped, but the experience is still very sketchy, as not many face transplants have been done to really know what it takes to sustain such a transplant without anti-rejection drugs.

There are also ethical considerations and medical-legal ones imposed on doctors who think that they could experiment on people without legal ramifications. When I was in medical school our most famous surgeon was Dr. David Hume, who made his reputation in Boston at the Brigham hospital doing a kidney transplant from one twin to another in the wee hours of the night without the permission or knowledge of the medical staff. It worked and he became a hero, but had it not worked, he would have become vilified and this act could have ended his career. With stem cell progress and some of the tricks outlined below, who knows what the future holds; however, I have long believed that the really important problems we, as doctors, will be allowed to treat, will not initially be for the vanity of perfectly healthy men who are balding.