Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Hair Transplants - What You Must Know Before Taking The Plunge

By Jay Bateman

Hair transplants are complicated procedures. They are expensive and the surgery will have an impact on your body just like other surgeries. Yet, hair transplants can restore part of your hair and make you look better. Before you decide to get one done, make sure you learn about them in advance.

In this article, I will describe three important steps involved in a hair transplant. Different hair clinics will have different methods of doing the procedure. But the steps below sum up the procedure in general.



1. A strip of hair is excavated from the back of your head. Before this happens, the back of your head will be anesthesized. This strip of hair on the back of your head is resistant to the balding hormone called DHT. The hairs that are yielded from it, maintain their resistance, even when transplanted to another area of your scalp.

2. While you wait, a team of medical staff carefully dissects the strip of hair under microscopes. The hairs are cut up into something called 'grafts'. These grafts are groups of hair that can either have one, two, three of four hairs. These grafts are the units of hair that will be used in the actual transplant.

3. When the team is done with the hair dissection, it is time for the hair follicles to be transplanted into the bald area on your head. While you sit in a chair, the doctor makes tiny openings in your scalp. This can be done using either a very tiny medical instrument, or a high precision laser. Once the openings are in place, the medical staff will implant the grafts one by one. The grafts with the fewest hair will make up your front hairline to give you a natural look.

These steps pretty much summarize what is involved in getting a hair transplant. The hair from the back of your head is DHT resistant and is therefore used in balding areas of your scalp. These hairs are obtained by dissecting a strip of hair that comes from the back of your head. The grafts that this procedure yields, are implanted into tiny openings on your scalp. When these openings heal up, the grafts are firmly in place. The hair from these grafts then continues to grow normally.

After your transplant is complete, the hairs will continue to grow normally for two weeks. Then, they fall out due to something called shock loss. This is normal and not something to be concerned about. It is simply a reaction of your grafts to the operation. After a while, the hairs will continue to grow normally and uninterrupted all your life long.

Hair transplants can make you look and feel a lot better. But they are not a miracle cure for baldness. The rest of your hair will continue to fall out, so you might have to get more hair transplants in the future. There are many celebrity hair transplant pictures available on the web, so make sure to take a good look before you decide to get one yourself. Also keep in mind that hair transplants are getting better and cheaper all the time. So it can pay off to put them off for a while.

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1 comment:

  1. This is a good explanation of the general way a hair transplant procedure is carried out. I also feel it’s important how you pointed out that a hair transplant is not the miracle cure for balding.

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