Although many technical advances have already been made in the field of surgical hair restoration over the past decade, particularly with the widespread adoption of follicular transplantation, many problems remain. The majority revolve around doctors recommending surgery for patients that are not good candidates. The most common reasons that patients shouldn’t proceed with surgery are that they are too young and that their hair thinning pattern is too unpredictable. Young persons likewise have expectations which are typically too much – often demanding the density and hairline of a teenager. implant capillaire Many people that are in the first stages of hair thinning should simply be treated with medications, instead of being rushed to go under the knife. Plus some patients are just not mature enough to make level-headed decisions when their problem is indeed emotional.
In general, younger the individual, the more cautious the practitioner should be to operate, particularly if the individual has a genealogy of Norwood Class VII hair thinning, or diffuse un-patterned alopecia.
Problems also occur when the doctor does not adequately measure the patient’s donor hair supply and does not have enough hair to perform the patient’s goals. Careful measurement of a patient’s density and other scalp characteristics allows the surgeon to learn how much hair is available for transplantation and enable him/her to create a pattern for the restoration that may be achieved within those constraints.
In all of the situations, spending a little extra time listening to the patient’s concerns, examining the individual more carefully and then recommending cure plan that is consistent with what actually can be accomplished, will go quite a distance towards having satisfied patients. Unfortunately, scientific advances will improve only the technical aspects of the hair restoration process and can do little to insure that the procedure will be performed with the right planning or on the appropriate patient.
Five-year View
The improvement in surgical techniques which have enabled an increasing number of grafts to be placed into ever smaller recipient sites had nearly reached its limit and the limitations of the donor supply remain the major constraint for patients getting back a complete head of hair. Despite the great initial enthusiasm of follicular unit extraction, a method where hair can be harvested directly from the donor scalp (or even the body) without a linear scar, this process has added relatively little towards increasing the patient’s total hair supply designed for a transplant. The major breakthrough should come once the donor supply could be expanded though cloning. Although some recent progress had been manufactured in this area (particularly in animal models) the opportunity to clone human hair reaches least 5 to a decade away.