Hair Transplant Procedures

Hair transplantation surgery takes many hours to complete.  However, it is performed within the doctor’s clinic and he or she is assisted by a team of medical technicians and nurses who each play a highly specialised role in the procedure.  You should not feel any pain throughout the procedure, and at first you will be given a mild sedative, followed by injections in your scalp that will numb the donor and recipient areas.  These injections are very similar to the injections given to a patient by a dentist.  Throughout the procedure you will either be in a reclining chair or lying down.  It may even be possible to listen to music or chat with the medical team during the lengthy transplant session. Once you have been anesthetized the procedure will begin. 

The doctor will select a strip of donor hair, which is then cut short.  Then using a scalpel the doctor will remove the strip of scalp from the donor area, either the back or side of the head, and this is then place in a container filled with a chilled saline solution or a special fluid known as Ringer’ lactate. 

The donor area is then stitched closed, this prevents any infection following surgery and any scarring will be slight and will be covered by the surrounding hair.  The wound should heal within a week or two and the stitches will then be removed, unless dissolvable stitches were used.

The next step concerns the medical technicians who will dissect the strip of donor hair under a microscope and trim off any extra fatty tissue if evident.  This can be a long and exacting process, resulting in parts of the donor strip being placed in a fridge while other parts of the strip are being dissected and then implanted in your recipient sites.  It is during this dissection that the donor scalp is cut into follicular units of one to four hairs each.  These are the naturally occurring hair clusters, and each unit whether one-hair, two-hair, three-hair, or four-hair units will include the hair strand, the hair follicle and some of the surrounding tissue and skin.  It is vital that great care is taken not to damage the follicles.

The doctor will draw on your scalp an outline of the area receiving the transplants.  Before the procedure began you will have chosen the area of your scalp to receive the transplants.  Each individual site within the overall area is well prepared to receive the transplant graft, and a very small incision is created for each with a small, specialised scalpel.  The follicular unit hair grafts are then placed into the recipient sites in the correct direction of the natural hair growth.

During the transplant procedure you must remember that the transplanted hairs were cut very short, these hairs were transplanted along with their follicles and its now time for them to do their work in their new home.  Follicles are like hair factories, they make hair that sprouts from your scalp and grows longer and longer according to your body‘s natural hair growth cycles.  These are also the hairs that fall out, and are replaced by new ones. However, in people who suffer with hair loss, the follicles are unable to produce new hairs pf proper size and length, and ultimately fail to produce any new hairs at all.  The hair transplant has provided healthy new follicles which will create new terminal hair strands.  First, however, the trimmed hairs in your new follicles will fall out,  this is known as shock fallout, and may also affect a y original non transplanted hairs within the recipient areas.  Try not to panic at this point, as this is just part of the follicle’s natural cycle, and in your original hair as well as your newly transplanted hair will return in a normal growth cycle.  Hair re-growth normally takes place after about 3-4 months following surgery.

Good creative hairstyling will help to enhance all hair transplants and will most likely benefit women even more so than men because of the many hair lengths and styling options available to, and popular with women.