The Procedure

From a surgical standpoint, a hair transplant is extremely simple. It is a very safe, relatively minor surgical procedure. It is all performed under local anesthetic, and takes only a few hours. The patient is awake during the procedure, and can watch T.V. or talk with the doctor. It is virtually painless aside from the few initial local injections of anesthesia which feel like pin pricks. Typically, men experiencing male pattern baldness will have hair growing at the sides and the back of their head, this is where hair is harvested from for transplantation. This hair is genetically programmed to continue to grow even in the worse cases of male pattern baldness. Females often lose their hair in a more diffuse pattern around the head. However, the back of the head also retains the most hair for most women.

A hair transplant is done by removing the hair from the back of the head, and putting it in the thinning or balding areas on the top of the head. Once this hair is moved it should not fall out because the hair at the back of the head is genetically programmed to not fall out, unlike the hair at the top of the head. The number of procedures depends upon the extent of your hair loss, the amount of hair (density) at the back of your head, and other artistic and medical considerations. Often you can have the results you are looking for in just one or two hair transplant sessions in which thousands of hairs are transplanted in follicular units of one to four hairs each.

Two Methods of Harvesting Follicles

There are two methods used in doing transplants. The Strip method or FUT ( follicular unit transplantation) and the FUE ( follicular unit extraction ) method. With the Strip method the hair at the back of scalp is cut short. That section of scalp is excised and the scalp is sewn up. Next, the hair follicles or grafts as they are called, including their bulbs are separated from each other into units of one to four hairs by the technicians and inserted into tiny slits in the balding area. The follicles with a single hair are placed in the front, to give a natural hairline. The rest are placed behind.

With the FUE method there is no need to excise a piece of the scalp because the follicles are removed directly from the donor area by several technicians. In this hair restoration procedure, a 1-mm punch, or smaller is used to make a small circular incision in the skin around the upper part of the follicular unit (hair follicles), which is then extracted directly from the scalp. The hair follicles are then placed into tiny slits in the balding area as with the Strip method.