What is Repair hair transplants?
Over the past 30 years, roughly half of our procedures are repairing hair transplants done elsewhere. They generally fall into 3 categories.
1. Plug repair
Plugs were the doll like hair tranplants done in the 80s and 90s where pencil sized plugs of hair were placed. That was state of the art back then…but the limitation was that it looked like a barbie doll’s hair. We’ve fixed AT LEAST 500 plug cases, and we generally just pack individual follicular units around the plugs, like planting new trees around a Christmas tree farm, and once they grow in…the results are dramatic.
2. TOO little hair over too much bald head
This occurs because the first doctor may have worked around existing hairs which subsequently went a way, or they just spread the hairs out trying to get the patient as much coverage as the salesperson told the patient up front. Treating this is easy…just pack it more densely.
3. FUE repair
While there are good candidates for FUE…about 2 times a week we see patients who were told they had 2000 to 4000 fues, and have either minimal results, or donor depletion or both. More often than not it appears when we repair them, that almost no hairs were successfully transplanted…and likely techs place hairs without roots…the doctor often was not in the room, and the patient has no idea..so its simply WRONG. Donor depletion is harder to address if at all, but generally we adopt an approach of excising some of the donor depletion and using what hairs that are there..to get results up top..where the FUE was not successful, and the have hair above the donor depletion cover the back. It would have been FAR easier to just do the procedure correctly the first time.
