Dr. Robert M. Bernstein was interviewed by Fox and Friends over the weekend. He discussed hair loss, hair transplant surgery, propecia hair loss medication, hair plugs, and more.
Watch the full video here:
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Q: Hair transplantation sounds like a really time-consuming procedure. How long does the hair transplant actually take?
A: An average hair transplant, that involves the movement of 1,500 to 2,500 grafts, can take a team of up to six people, five to eight hours.
Surgical hair restoration is a very time-consuming, labor intensive process, where every aspect of the surgery must be precisely controlled to get maximum growth and an optimum cosmetic result.
Q: I have heard that staples are uncomfortable after the hair transplant, why do doctors use them?
A: Staples are used for two main reasons.
The first is that being made of stainless steel; they don’t react with the skin and, therefore, cause little inflammation.
The second is that, unlike sutures which are used with a continuous spiral stitch, each staple is separate and this causes minimal interruption to the blood supply. The combination of little inflammation and minimal interference with the blood flow facilitates healing and minimizes damage to hair follicles.
Although sutures are generally more comfortable after the hair transplant, the doctors who choose to use staples do so because they are the least injurious to the hair in the donor area.
Q: What can be done if I want to have a hair transplant and my scalp is very tight from prior surgeries?
A: Follicular Unit Extraction is ideal in very tight scalps, provided that there is enough hair to extract without leaving the donor area too thin and provided that the follicles are not too distorted from the scarring.
With strip harvesting, undermining techniques may be helpful to close the wound edges once the strip is removed.
In undermining, the surgeon uses either a sharp instrument (scalpel) or blunt instrument (the dull edge of scissors) to separate the upper layers of the scalp (dermis and epidermis) from the lower part of the scalp (fascia). The hair transplant surgeon accomplishes this by spreading apart the fat layer of the skin or by cutting through scar tissue.
Undermining allows the upper layers of skin to literally slide over the lower layers and can significantly increase the ability to close a tight wound. However, if not done carefully, it may increase the risk of bleeding and injury to nerves and occasionally may damage hair follicles.
Undermining is usually used with a layered closure where the deeper tissues are brought together first with a layer of absorbable sutures before the surface of the skin is sutured closed with sutures that are removed.
Q: I am Norwood Class 6 and have read about both Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) and Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT). Which will give me more hair?
A: In general, FUT will give you more hair since, in FUT, the best hair from the mid-portion of the permanent zone of the scalp (also called the “sweet spot”) can be utilized in the hair transplant.
With FUE, since only the hair follicles are extracted and not the surrounding bald skin, if too much hair is removed, the donor area will begin to look thin as hair is removed. This will limit the amount of hair that can be harvested.
Although in FUE additional areas of the scalp can be utilized to some degree, this will generally not compensate for the inability to access all of the hair in the mid-permanent zone and the total amount available for the hair restoration will be less.
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Disclaimer: The purpose of the Hair Transplant Blog is to provide the public with general information on hair restoration. Information provided on this site should not be used for medical diagnosis and/or treatment.
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