Obviously Hair Transplants Work. Why don't more people have them?

[CIT_Girl]

Sure, except that if you have to go back to get more grafts once you've lost more hair -- which is always almost the case - you're left with only the grafts that contain less hairs. So in the end, it's a wash isn't it!?!?

This is a good question...

If you assume that a donor area has predominantly 1- and 2-hair grafts with a handful of 3+, you’d be correct, because once you took out all of the 3-, 4-, 5- and occasional 6-hair grafts, you’d be left with only 1- or 2-hair units. However, unless you have a very low density, and a very low calculated density (average number of hairs per follicular unit), you are not going to have many natural single-hair follicular units (probably no more than 10% in most donor areas). Therefore, cherry-picking grafts certainly will not clear out all acceptable grafts in one pass: there will be plenty of multi-hair units left if subsequent procedures are necessary.

The fact is, if you select the better grafts in the first procedure, you’re giving your patient better coverage from the very beginning. What hair transplant patients want is to achieve an acceptable level of density in as few procedures as possible, and for as little money as possible. By selecting grafts containing more hair from the first procedure, the person will get significantly, if not exponentially, more hair with a FUE procedure.

In an ideal transplant, you want to achieve an overall appearance whereby the density on top of the head is similar to the back. FUE is the perfect means to do this as you are thinning out the back subtly while improving density on top and up front. With a strip procedure, you’re clearing out a center section of scalp but leaving a dense section of hair above and below the scar. To me, this doesn’t look as natural as thinning out the donor region slightly so as to achieve an equal appearance in density throughout.