Understanding the surgical options for hair restoration

This story was produced for Physician’s Hair Institute by Tucson Digital Media.

So you have hair loss and want a more permanent solution than medication. Let’s talk about what your surgical options are.

According to the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery (ISHRS), the most common procedure is hair transplant surgery which restores naturally growing hair to areas where the patient is thinning or bald. This procedure can be done in a couple of ways, strip harvesting, where a strip of hair-bearing tissue is taken from one part of the head and placed elsewhere, and follicular unit extraction or FUE, where groups of one to four hairs – or a follicular unit— are taken and transplanted.

The option for some patients is scalp reduction surgery. This process involves removing the bald scalp portion and stretching the hair bearing scalp upward to replace it. Dr. Keene of Physician’s Hair Institute does not typically recommend scalp reduction due to the risk that the hair being moved may not be permanent, as in the future the hair that was stretched into the preciously bare area may shed. This could leave you with a scar in an area where the hair has shed. There are exceptions where moving the scalp may be beneficial, such as when someone with no genetic hair loss wants to move the hairline they were born with forward. But hair transplants typically afford a more permanent solution if you do have hair loss occurring.

The ways in which the FUT and FUE procedures are performed vary by physician. Pioneers in follicular unit transplants “didn’t know what the scalp could take, 500 transplants at one time took a whole day, now we can do 3,000 in a day,” says Dr. Sharon A. Keene of the Physician’s Hair Institute. This kind of innovative efficiency allows a patient to complete the process and heal much faster.

What’s stopping you from having the hair you want? To schedule your personalized hair restoration surgery consultation, call Dr. Keene’s office at 520-290-5555.

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About Physician's Hair Institute

Dr. Keene’s clinic, Physician’s Hair Institute, in Tucson, AZ, utilizes state of the art equipment and techniques in hair transplant surgery. For the FUT graft dissection, this includes a form of magnification that offers improvements over the standard stereoscopic microscope used by most hair restoration surgery practices in graft dissection. It involves a high-resolution digital video camera, in conjunction with a backlight, projected onto an LCD screen. Dr. Keene announced this technique at the Orlando, Florida conference in 2002, and presented the technique in 2003 at the Italian Society of Hair Restoration Surgery conference in Rome, Italy. The technique was well received and has been adapted by many of the top hair restoration clinics. It is an improvement over the stereoscopic microscope in that it allows the doctor more direct supervision, while improving ergonomics for the technicians, and provides excellent magnification for dissection.

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