The following are excerpts from the Question and Answer segments of Dr. Bernstein’s Open House Seminars. |
HAIR TRANSPLANT SEMINAR: PART 4
Post-op Care After a Hair Transplant Surgery
Attendee: A man is getting a procedure done now. He said he is going back to work tonight.
Dr. Bernstein: That would be a record. We have had people work the next day, however. We transplanted the superintendent of our New York office. In fact, he is the first person on the website, the man with blond hair, and he was doing construction the next day. However, we actually do not – we do not encourage it. I prefer to have people rest the day after their hair restoration procedure. We also want people to take three or four showers the day after their hair transplant surgery and this is easiest to do if you are at home. After that, you can do normal activities such as deskwork and light work after that.
You can go to the gym a couple days after the hair transplantation as long as you are not doing things to stretch the scalp. No headstands, no crunches and no squats with a bar placed behind your neck. The thing you do not want to do is you do not want to do a lot of flexing of the neck soon after the surgical hair restoration. Most other activities are okay.
The important thing to do after hair transplants is to take frequent showers. The recipient sites, where we place the grafts, are made with a 19 or 20g hypodermic needle or its equivalent– they are extremely tiny. Blood is drawn with a 16 or 18-gauge needle. In addition, as you go up in numbers, the diameter gets smaller and smaller. Therefore, at 19- or 20- it is quite small. With eyebrows, we will go as small as 22g. Consequently, the wounds are so small that in 24 hours they are sealed up, so there is no more oozing. Therefore, if you take frequent showers right after the surgery, you can get all that oozing off and then in a few days you can be squeaky clean.
Invariably people baby their scalps too much after the procedure and don’t wash the crusts off and so the crusts will linger, but if you do wash according to the instructions we give you, you can really be crust free in just a few days.
Attendee: It won’t endanger the hair transplant? You cannot rinse them out?
Dr. Bernstein: You cannot rinse the hair follicles out. However, you can dislodge them if you scrub hard the first couple of days following the hair restoration.
We did a study a couple years ago that is going to be published this January in Dermatologic Surgery, where we showed exactly how long it takes for the grafts to be completely secure in the scalp – so that they can’t be physically removed. It is a period after the hair transplant surgery that everyone always talks about, but no one ever knew for certain.
Several years ago we said, why don’t we just do a study and know once and for all. We had consenting hair transplantation patients come in and we used a pair of forceps and to tug on their grafts after their surgical hair restoration procedure. We found that about three or four days after the procedure, the hair was dissociated from the graft. After three or four days, with five days as the outer limit, if you pulled on the hair, the graft would not come out.
However, you could pull a graft out up until nine days after the hair transplant if you grabbed the scab, rather than the hair. The graft often has a little scab that sits on top of the graft and is attached to the skin. Therefore, nine days post-op, if you really yank, one out of every five times you would pull out a graft. After ten days, it was part of the body. You could not even yank them out. So at ten days you can really shampoo as aggressively as you like and if there is any residual crusting, you can literally scrub the crusts off without harming the grafts.
Attendee: I was just wondering what the major complication would be in a hair transplant for men specifically.
Dr. Bernstein: The most significant medical risk during hair transplants is really the anesthesia – and that is extremely rare. We dramatically minimize this by using local anesthesia. Hair transplant surgery is safe because we do not use general anesthesia – we do not put people to sleep. A hair restoration is about a seven or eight-hour procedure and if someone would have general anesthesia it obviously would be significant risk. With a local, there is really none.
You want to make sure that a potential hair transplant patient does not have cardiac arrhythmias, in other words an irregular heart beat, because we use a little bit of epinephrine (adrenaline) in the anesthesia and this can sometimes make arrhythmias worse. You also need to be careful that someone does not have significant underlying medical conditions. For example, patients with diabetes may have a slightly greater chance of having an infection. In a healthy patient, hair transplantation is an extremely safe procedure.
Bookmark This Page and return next month to read more of this transcript.
Back To Top
110 East 55th Street, 11th Fl., New York, NY 10022 212-826-2400
Toll Free: 1-866-576-2400 contact@bernsteinmedical.com
Bernstein Medical: Center for Hair Restoration in New York - offering hair transplant surgery
and hair loss advice to New Jersey, Connecticut, and patients around the world
Hair Loss Genetics | Contact Us | About Us | New Patient Info | Hair Transplant Resources
New York Hair Transplant Center | New Jersey Hair Transplant Clinic
Male Hair Loss Information | Hair Loss in Women
Causes of Hair Loss in Men | Causes of Hair Loss in Women
Home | Site Map |Privacy Statement | Top of Page
