All Roads Lead to Hair Transplant Surgery

Hair transplant surgery is, besides wearing wigs and using concealers, the only method of hair restoration that produces guaranteed results that everyone will notice. If you use medicinal drugs or believe in magic and employ herbal remedies to regrow your lost hair, it can take years to see any results and most likely you will be the only person to spot them. Medicinal therapies such as pills and topicals may be good at preventing hair loss but do not yet offer a satisfactory solution to restoring lost hair despite tremendous progress in medicinal drug research and development in recent years.

The main drawbacks of hair surgery, as perceived by potential patients, are its high cost and the inconveniences that you have to put up with. The cost of hair surgery starts at 5,000 US dollars per procedure, which is between three and ten US dollars per graft, depending on the geographical location, the extent of the surgery and the technique used (as follicular unit transplantation is less expensive than follicular unit extraction). But this is not the total expense. You have to include the cost of finasteride or any other hair loss treatment that you will have to bear with for the rest of your life, in order to prevent further loss of hair in areas adjacent to the current bald spot. The second factor that puts many people off is the inconvenience. Hair transplant surgery is a cosmetic surgery and as such requires local anaesthesia and a healing period of a couple of weeks. Additionally, most patients require two or more sessions to achieve a satisfactory improvement. It also involves the risks typical for any surgery performed on the head, such as excessive swelling and bleeding, a long healing process for the scar, shock hair loss, scalp numbness and tension, etc. And lastly, there is the aforementioned need to stay on hair loss prevention medication for the rest of your days that could one day become unbearable due to its side effects.

Hair transplant surgery requires a strong commitment to one's own hair but offers benefits that will remain unrivalled by any other hair restoration method in the foreseeable future. Hair loss drugs are not going to provide satisfactory regrowth earlier than the next ten years, whereas new surgical technologies such as hair cloning or generating new hair follicles in wounds will most likely also require surgical hair implants in the frontal area of the scalp. It appears that some kind of hair transplant surgery will remain unavoidable for restoring lost hair for many years to come.

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