By Dr. John Frank, M.D. – IAHRS, ABHRS,ISHRS, AHLA, XM Radio: ‘The Bald Truth’, NYC, Aug 15, 2011
Losing one’s hair is life changing and often traumatic for most people – just ask Atul:
“You become obsessed. Every moment is spent looking at yourself in the mirror, looking at your hair, analyzing what can be done and how”. (Bald is not beautiful).
Advanced Techniques in Hair Transplant Technology Have Caused Them to Lose Their Social Stigma
Sanjana agrees saying her husband Mukesh went through a rough time when he started losing his hair.
“[He had] real identity and confidence issues because he took it as a sign of aging.”
When people start to lose their hair, they start spending more and more time and energy trying to compensate for the loss.
At some point, however, the hair loss becomes too great and then they must make a hard decision: live with the loss, e.g., permanently cover it up with hats or wigs, or – fight fire with fire, so to speak: if the hair is disappearing in one location, replace it with hair from another location. In short, they opt for a hair transplant.
Hair transplants work because whatever the cause of hair loss, it turns out to be located in the hair follicle itself, not in the scalp on that part of the head that’s losing hair. Early hair researchers hypothesized that “transplanting” hair follicles from a part of the head that continued to experience hair growth to a part of the head that was going bald would cause hair to start to re-grow in the bald part. Moreover, the re-growth would be permanent. This turned out to be the case and the “hair transplant” was born.
Early Hair Transplant Techniques & Social Stigma
However, the social stigma attached to hair loss was transferred to hair loss treatments, especially the hair transplant, and early hair transplant techniques that were crude and resulted in an unnatural look only encouraged the stigma. Even as techniques evolved to produce natural looking results, most people rarely announced they were going to have a hair transplant and – even if it looked great – they were in no hurry to admit to having one.
Recently however, celebrities such as Kevin Costner, Tom Hanks, Brendan Fraser & Matthew McConaughey have started to come forward admitting they’ve had a hair transplant.
The most recent celebrity to come out of the hair transplant closet was Wayne Rooney (a striker for Premier League club Manchester United and the England national team). He was going bald and he decided to do something about it. Mr. Rooney has probably been one of the most open celebrities in the press about his hair loss & hair transplant experience. Among hair loss sufferers, Wayne has become such an inspiration and a source of encouragement that hair transplant surgeons, at least in England, have seen such an increase in the number of inquiries about hair transplants that they’ve called it the ‘Rooney Effect.’
Today hair transplants have more going for them than just celebrity endorsements. Probably the greatest endorsement for hair transplants today are its results — an unprecedented natural look, so natural, in fact, a layperson would have a heck of a difficult time telling who had a transplant.
Advances in Hair Transplants & The Natural Look
Most of the advances in hair transplants have come from a relatively recent technological advancement called FUE or Follicular Unit Extraction. This technique is interesting because each individual hair is removed one at a time rather than subjecting somebody to the typical, strip technique (where a strip of hair bearing scalp is first surgically removed from the thicker areas and then whittling down the strip into individual hair follicles before inserting them.) Many devices are currently in development while the FUE technique evolves and more and more hair is transplanted resulting in even thicker, more natural results.
Additionally, newer cellular growth factors are being developed which may cause some of the transplanted hair to in fact multiply. This is on the brink of hair “cloning” when we’ll be able to transplant an unlimited supply of valuable hair. And when this is perfected, baldness may become a thing of the past.
© 2012, John Frank, M.D.
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