How much would a hair implant cost for me?
I'm looking to fill my hair temples and was wondering how much grafts I would need?
Thanks
Thank you for your question!
You’re asking the most common question people ask in trying to combat their hair loss which
is how much will a hair transplant cost and how many grafts do you need.
And this is understandable because the reality is, for the longest time, the only solution
for progressive hair loss to improve the cosmetic appearance was hair transplantation.
And unfortunately, the industry of hair transplantation has been so commercialized that people think
of it as a commoditized way where people sell cost per graft and offer specials and all
kinds of things.
But I think many of the doctors practicing hair transplant and doing this aggressive
selling are not informing adequately the patients that they will continue to lose hair.
So when I look at your photo, it is clear that your hair loss is fairly advanced.
So in your question, you didn’t mention whether or not you’re taking finasteride
to try to stabilize your hair loss.
You see, hair transplant is usually not a single procedure.
And because the challenge of the hair transplant is to achieve a density that will give you
a coverage that is consistent with nature creates.
The limitations of hair transplantation has to do with the number of hairs available in
the donor area and the number of hairs that can be transplanted in a square centimeter.
You see, when you look at the donor area, the true donor area, is the band of hair in
the baldest man you’ve ever seen still has, that’s what is called genetically resistant
and that’s the area where we harvest hair grafts.
So there’s that technical limitation.
And two is the number of hairs in a square centimeter, so when you go into a bare scalp
and you’re trying to put as many hairs as you can in a square centimeter, there’s
no duplicating to what nature has already created.
In other words, when nature has placed hairs together, their clustered in a way that is
more dense than a surgeon can do.
And the reason is when you place a hair graft, you have to have a certain perimeter of skin
for that hair graft to survive.
Survivability is a big issue in hair transplant surgery.
What we’ll do is what we do in our practice is, in a patient like yourself, who does ultimately
need some kind of hair transplant surgery, we first aim to stabilize hair loss.
and we do this with medical therapy such as the use of finasteride and the challenge with
that option is that many people are concerned about long term sexual side effects from finasteride
which has made an unpopular drug these days.
We developed an alternative called Hair Regeneration where what we have figured out based on observations
we made when we use this stem-cell based wound healing technology for hair transplant surgery
that we can make thinning hair thicker.
We are able to restore a lot of hair without doing surgery.
Now, the general rule of thumb based on the results over several years is that if the
area of skin has not had hair for more than 5 years, it’s not likely that we’re able
to regenerate.
There are always exceptions to that statement but we try to give our patients very realistic
expectations.
However, on the flip side is that in the right candidate, we’re able to regenerate enough
coverage that exceeds the results of two hair transplants which is very significant given
how long it takes to do a hair transplant which is usually 6-8 hours and how long it
takes to see the results which is about a year.
We have seen patients see improvement in less than 6 months.
Now we don’t want to generalize.
We want to always emphasize that every patient is an individual and we follow our patients
very closely.
So for someone like yourself, Hair Regeneration would be our first line of treatment.
We almost ceased doing transplant surgery because we’ve gotten such great results
and when we explore the options out of a year, 18 months after the injection, most of our
patients are satisfied and are happy with results.
So I would suggest to you that before you go into the rabbit hole of finding the best
deal for a transplant or to find who does the most grafts, remember there’s always
a limitation for the number of grafts you can have, that you learn more about your options
for stabilization.
I always say to my patients that when we do this injection is that every hair that I am
able to regenerate or effectively improve its thickness and quality, is a hair I don’t
need to transplant.
That means you can more strategically use the hairs in the limited donor area for grafting
where you need the most.
So learn more about these suggestions I made and meet with a right doctors with the experience
with this new technology I described.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question!