“This is one of our hair cases, this is a person who’s had actually cranial surgery before and there’re a scar right down the center here that we’re going to completely obliterating by placing hair grafts in it. Now you see my pattern that I have under here marked very carefully in the boxes that gives me a number of square centimeters that I’m going to be grafting and you can see already along here I got my nice density in the frontal hairline and as I work back here, I’m going to make sure that we got good density because he’s got reasonable density in between here, but I want to make sure that when he parts his hair he’s not showing scalp so we’re going to work on grafting along here and then this segment here in the box and get really some more density here so that from his natural part this is about where he parts his hair in here that we got excellent coverage of the scalp. So the key to this is really making sure we understand what the patients desire are, and for him he wants to have very little or minimal scalp showing and then I created these little one squared centimeter boxes knowing that I can get in somewhere between 20 and 30 grafts per centimeter, sometimes as much as 35 it does on the scalp squared and that gives him a nice full dense thick head of hair as we finish.
So we’re well underway with this, he’s very comfortable and we’ll be working on increasing the density along this part in the area where he combs over and there will be no, as you can see here already with his nascent hair and with the graft sites that we’ve already created, there will be no bald areas whatsoever, you won’t have a “comb over hair-do”, we’ll have a natural hair style.
These grafts are cut into follicular units which are 1, 2 or 3 hair units that are the graft himself and that’s how our hair grows naturally so we’ll be focusing on that and focusing on making sure that this density is fully covered.
My technicians are in the other room, they’re working under microscopic magnification to cut those follicular units and we’re placing these tiny little cuts that are made with this. Basically i’ve modified a 19 gauge needle used for injecting someone with a local anesthesia and I’m going to place this little slits where they’re needed in each one of these little boxes. I’ve done my counts so I know how many we need to place and we know how many remove the end here going for that maximum density range about 25, 35 grafts per centimeter, and I’m going in between the existing hairs here to save every single hair follicle and every single hair shaft not just the one we’re transplanting but the ones that are already existing and you can see I’m angling this so it helps to accentuate this natural part.
So that’s really the strategy in hair grafting and for every person it’s different, it depends on their style, it depends on how many graft they want to place, what their investment is and then we’re doing this as simple math, we’re just sitting here counting each one of these as I place them very carefully between each hair.
Now I’m working right along his part side and you can see that the hair goes in different direction so I’m altering the direction in which I’m making the little slit to accommodate that. I’ve injected this with a very nice sort of combination of local anesthesia, little adrenalin in it which helps to make sure they just get little tiny pin point areas that bleed, you really just don’t have any bleeding on these things at all, and while I’m talking here I’m also counting so I’m working very diligently on making sure that the hair density right along this part is perfect, I want to make sure he’s got excellent hair density along this part.
So that’s really the key to grafting as proper placement of these little tiny slits and then ultimately we’re going to be placing each one of these little micro grafts and once these start growing, you can’t tell the difference between these hairs than the hairs that I’ve placed in these little tiny slits and the natural hair that’s growing on his head right now. So I’m saving everyone of this natural hairs by carefully placing this between those little hairs, pain staking, time consuming, diligence, sort of going for perfection with the place of these with each single hair, and naturally the key to a natural and really long lasting thick head of hair that people appreciate, this hair will never go away the transplanted hair is hair that’s genetically programmed to be there forever.
So people who do these really are making a great investment for their whole life, they’re going to have this hair forever in the density and very, very nice procedure, comfortable, easy, the recovery for this procedure in this patient will be, they will wear a hat leaving today and with a hat on you won’t even know he had anything done. It will be a little red on the scalp and the forehead for a few days and outside of that there’s really no recovery. He’ll be showering in a couple of days normally washing his hair, I don’t have him blow dry it or run a comb through it, but he can wash it normally and towel dry the hair by patting it and he’ll be doing little spritzes with the water to keep the hair nice and soft and moist and that’s really the only recovery component that he has for the next 4 or 5 days by two weeks where even by a week, we’re really back to normal activities with this procedure.
If you’re interested in more information on hair restoration, hair grafting, micro follicular unit extraction, also called FUE, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at DrMaas.com, you can go to our website at MaasClinic.com, and as always you can reach us at our phone number at area code 415-567-7000. This is Corey S. Maas MDTM on Looking Your Best.”
