Doctor Frechet hair restoration surgery - Frequently asked questions

These are some of the questions frequently asked during the consultations:

Will the transplanted hair last all my lifetime, doctor ?

Yes, you will keep it indefinitely.

What are the risks of an infection, doctor?

Scalp infection occurs rarely, and “never” if one takes all the necessary precautions. The only cases of serious infections have occurred due to transplanting artificial hair.

Doctor, does laser therapy result in a growth of hair ?

No, laser therapy does not grow nor create new hair. And neither does ultrasound.

The use of laser impairs healing and may create bad scarring.

Therefore it should be avoided if one has just undertaken an operation.

Is it true that the FUE technique does not leave scars?

No, that is not true. This relates to the old method of hair extraction from the donor zoneusing a “punch”, which is a cylindrical instrument with a blade of 1 mmin diameter.

By using this instrument to harvest the grafts,holes are made and spaced one from another.

Each hole will leave a small white scar: 1000 scars if one was doing 1000 transplants, and so on, so that at the end this will produce a mottled aspect in the donor area filled with dotted like white scars.

Furthermore in this way the follicles are extracted blindly so that up to 40% of their roots could be damaged and therefore not grow into new hair.

Doctor, why do you recommend doing several transplant sessions rather than doing the whole process at one time?

Although the idea of doing the transplantation all in one go appears attractive,in reality it is risky and often not possible.

Why is it not possible? Simply because one cannot safely transplant in one single session 6000 to 9000 hairs which are necessary to treat a frontal zone.

To harvest such a large number of grafts would require such a large donor zone that the resulting scar would be unacceptably large.

Also we must bear in mind that each time we make an incision in the recipient site to insert a transplant we cut and destroy the capillaries which provide the blood supply for their growth. And the closer the incisions are made to obtain the required density, the more we damage the capillaries.

Therefore by making such a large number of incisions, very close to one another, too many capillaries are destroyed and the result will be a poor growth.

So, in conclusion, after having observed poor results for patients in terms of hair growth and even areas of no hair growth, replaced by scarring tissue, this approach called Megasession is much less practiced today.

To obtain the best results in terms of both hair growth and density it is far better to do the treatment in 2 or 3 sessions.

Doctor, why crown baldness cannot be treated with grafts?

Because baldness is a progressive process.

The hair will continue to fall around the grafts, and after a certain time the patient will find himself with a tuft of grafted hair on the top of his head in the middle of a bald area which continues to grow larger.

The quantity of hair in the donor zone is not sufficient to cover effectively the baldness of the crown.

Only in cases of very small “stabilized” bald spot in men over fifty years of age, crowns may be grafted.