Dear Dr. Cole, I read your article regarding hair transplant surgery in Bangkok. I currently live in Singapore. Do you have any plans to come to Singapore? I’m interested in hair restoration. Huang
Dear Huang, the purpose of our trip to Bangkok was to help train physicians in the art and science of FUE. We do not have an office in Singapore at this time. Asian physicians are very skilled in FUT. You are in good hands in Singapore, however. I recommend that you see Dr. Tyng Yuan Tan. She has extensive training in hair transplant surgery. She is a very conscientious physician dedicated to her patients. I’ve personally seen her perform hair restoration surgery. She has excellent hands and assisted me in one of my hair restoration surgery procedure in Bangkok. Not only that, she is a very pleasant person with remarkable compassion. She impressed me immediately. Thank you very much for your interest.
On his way to the airport, a 25 year old soccer striker from Manchester shows a picture of his recipient area after having a hair transplant.
When checking into the airport Wayne covered his area with a baseball cap.
Short after he announced on twitter: “I’ve had a hair transplant. I’m delighted.”
Now he has posted the photo – with the misspelled message: “Hi all there’s my head. It will take a few months to grow. Still a bit bloody to. But that’s all normal.”
The Sun revealed that the 25-year-old England star had a FUE hair transplant procedure that lasted for day at a Medical Institute in central London.
(Click On the image to view full size)
I am planning to get FUE hair transplant surgery and would like to know how can i be sure that the doctor provide me with the accurate number of grafts i have requested?
There is an excellent way to know how many recipient sites were made, you should insist that your physician use the Counting Incision Device (CID) from Cole Instruments Inc. You can see this at the Cole Instruments website: FUE hair transplant tools. This device will cost your physician only 22.00 to use and he can give it to you at the end of the procedure. This device allows you to know precisely the number of incision sites filled with grafts and it is the only way you can know for certain how many incision sites were made. Of course, if you have a site that is not filled with a graft, then you should not be charged for the graft.
We have found that most physicians are not willing to spend the extra 22.00 to be accurate with their incision site count. While the Physician is making thousands of dollars on your procedure, he appears to be less concerned with accuracy and more concerned with the extra expense. Therefore, you might want to purchase one for your physician and insist that he use it and then give it to you at the end of the case. This way you can be certain what was done.
Don’t rely on the surgery staff to count your grafts or your incision sites. They have no real interest in being accurate and they are often more concerned with what they are going to have for dinner than an accurate graft count. Try sitting at a counter and cutting grafts day in and day out. It becomes routine and monotonous. Over time, the surgery tech’s mind begins to wander and they next thing you know, they have lost count.
Insist that your physician use the Counting Incision Device (CID) so that you can be certain what the exact graft count is.
One important point to consider with the CID is that it is disposable. There is no way to properly sterilize it once it has been used. Insist that the physician use a new one on you and not one that he used on someone else the day before. It really is up to you to insure that you get what you pay for and that your physician use properly sterilized single use CID instruments on your case.
I find this interesting. This is another FUE extraction site treated with ACEll in a hyaluronic acid mixture after 5 weeks. It is still too early to tell if the hair might regrow in the extraction site though I have seen this. It does appear that a single hair is forming in the extraction site, which appear as a black nub. What is interesting is the appearance of a capillary in the skin. These are usually missing following FUE and help lead to the loss of pigment in the extraction site. I’ve done enough FUE to spot extraction sites anytime I look at a donor area even when no hypopigmentation occurs. It is an observation based on experience with FUE. With this donor area, I could not find any evidence that FUE was performed. The red circle is where I would expect a follicular unit to be. The entire donor area looked like this. The black circle is 10 sq mm. I had the dermlite people make this reticule for me.
The long hair after 5 weeks is a result of a completely non-shaven procedure of 1464 grafts. I call this C2G. It is still to early to say for sure because I need more results, but this is an example of what I have seen in donor areas treated fully with ACELL with my method of FUE where I use minimal depth control. The initial problem was treating all the extraction sites with a powder. I overcame this with mixing it in a viscous hyaluronic acid. More recently I have been mixing in a more viscous cellulose. I have a few comparative examples where I am looking at powder, hyaluronic acid, and cellulose. Time will hopefully tell. I think the minimal depth incision technique along with Acell may result in better healing than a full depth incision. Maybe we will see more hair regrowth over time. Maybe not. Still no one could comb through this donor area and find any evidence that a hair transplant had been done. It appears that we really are coming full circle today. Not only have we produced optimal results in the recipient area such that you cannot tell that a hair transplant has been done. Even the trained eye cannot see evidence that a hair transplant was done in the recipient area.
It is always exciting to read about advancements in the hair restoration industry. The field has come a very long way since the days of plugs and scalp reductions. It is the belief of the editors on this blog that we are on the verge of a new revolution in hair transplantation: one that will mark an official departure from the prominence of strip surgery.
Strip surgery has remained popular, while FUE is only now being more widely adopted, for a number of reasons. For one thing, physicians who have mastered a particular method (strip) tend to be change adverse when it comes to learning a new, more challenging technique. Physicians who have not received proper training, or put in sufficient time learning the technique, can find FUE, and the skill required, frustrating. Many physicians have therefore been quick to dismiss the technique as being unsuccessful or limiting despite their own inadequate knowledge of it. Strip surgery has also traditionally been a faster procedure, as the physician only needs to excise the strip of tissue and can then pass the dissection work to a team of surgical technicians. FUE is a more labor-intensive process for the actual physician, who must do all of the extractions himself. Finally, some patients continue to turn to strip, despite the linear scar it leaves, because the procedure is less expensive than FUE.
Dr. Cole, however, is preparing to release a new motorized extraction instrument for FUE which will make the safe extraction of follicular units faster than ever before. This instrument also allows physicians to use smaller punches to safely and effectively remove grafts. With this device, Dr. Cole can successfully remove over 2000 grafts an hour (minus donor site preparation time). One must understand that strip surgery requires the precise extraction of a portion of scalp tissue, the careful suturing of the wound, and 3 to 5 man hours for every 1000 grafts that are cut by technicians. Dr. Cole’s new instrument substantially undercuts the time it takes to harvest an equal number of grafts using strip methodology. We anticipate that the ability to perform top quality FUE procedures in far less time will translate to the ability to lower prices and take on more patients- allowing more hair loss sufferers than ever to achieve their hair restoration goals. The era of the strip scar in hair transplantation may very well be on its way out!
Click on the “play now” to watch Dr. Cole using the new CIT Power tool on patient’s beard hair and scalp
