My Remarkable Hair Transplant Journey | Hair Surgeon Reacts

I was wrong about what hair transplants were supposed to do I thought they would totally restore my hair to its original state which is not quite right nope let's react to air R's video on my remarkable hair transplant Journey from baldness to boldness ah I see what he did there hello my name is Amir and this is the story of my remarkable hair transplant Journey you may know me as a computer programmer and a travel vlogger from my YouTube channel where I share my travel Vlogs and Tech tips but today I'm going to share something different something very personal the story of my hair loss and the transformative experience of a hair transplant nice the story of how I got my life back on track and I hope my experience will be insightful for many of you me too the hair loss process began when I was 22 years old I was lucky to have thick beautiful hair back then I didn't worry about my hair much like most people who have good hair yeah for most of my male patients they start to experience loss more significantly between the age of about 25 and 35 though there are some who experienced significant hair loss even in their teenage years back then I had no idea how much I would miss having hair I should have been more grateful for this wonderful gift from nature and taken better care of it in reality my hair loss wasn't caused by using bad shampoo or using some water that wasn't right for no most hair loss for men and women has to do with androgens it's androgenic alipa as we talk about extensively on the channel and it's around the time that you start to see that there's more significant loss that's when we should be on medical therapy to try to protect and preserve the hair that we have left as you know go to feelc confident. to find out about these medical therapies that have been proven to work over the course of decades and are not just some random potion that people are selling you online in 2014 I started my first job this is when I started to lose my hair now it could have been the stress of the job that may have propagated some of this loss but most likely just because he was a bit older I guess maybe in his mid-20s of when he started this job or maybe early 20s and that was the main reason for the loss because he just progressed in age rather than necessarily the stress of a job I thought about my hair loss sometimes and it scared me to see how quickly I was losing hair still I never thought I'd lose my hair but my hair loss didn't stop when you start to experience significant hair loss early in life like say your early 20s the odds of you losing a lot more later on are much higher than someone who begins to have hair loss later in life like let's say in their late 30s or 40s so with these early signs of hair loss that's the time to get on the medical therapy like finrod and minoxidil I didn't even notice that I had lost almost 20% of my hair before I knew it it and he may have thought it was 20% but in reality the areas that had thinned out reached at least 50% of loss for him to have noticed and that's pretty common when it comes to hair loss takes about 50% of loss in a specific area for you to start to appreciate that thinning quality so that's a significant amount of loss that has already occurred this is a common issue you might lose a significant amount of hair but still convince yourself that you have plenty left and cleverly cover up the bald spots with the hair that you still have that's super common for people to do I moved to the UAE for a job opportunity as a web developer it's a well-known rumor that water in the UAE is not beneficial for hair while I can't confirm this my hair loss seemed to accelerate I've had patients who've told me that their family thinks they've lost hair because they've moved to the United States so I think there's a lot of these uh myths that go around about um the exact water quality and if that's contributing to your hair loss the overwhelming reason for the hair loss is as he said earlier likely the genetic or androgenic type of Reason rather than thinking that it's uh your water or you know the the neighbor next to you who you know Cooks at odd hours of the night you know I mean there's lots of things out there within less than 2 years I had lost between 44% to 50% of my hair 44 is very specific at this point the idea of a hair transplant became a serious consideration for me a little bit difficult to interpret because there's just so much glaring light on his frontal scalp but it definitely looks like a significant uh amount of loss more than even the 50% that he mentioned and it's going back all the way to the posterior Crown which you know is what we um see in some patients with Advanced androgenic alipa I chose to have my transplant in Pakistan primarily because it was the option I was most familiar with some Clinic will bandage your whole head up like he has here we don't feel the need to do that we find that that just makes it a little bit more complicated for post-operative care for patients because there's just a lot to deal with on their heads so we try to keep it simple and uh we don't cover the head but in some clinics they do I knew that turkey was known for having good hair transplants it's not like the whole country is good at hair transplants there may be some clinics that have good skill and produce very consistent results and there are many others where it's you know not consistent and it's the same thing really in every country so it's not to say that somehow turkey is all good or all bad you know that's a way more simplified perception than than reality so if you're going to Turkey or if you're going really anywhere make sure to do your homework to find out what the quality of the work is and who will actually do your surgery and what you can expect when you're there the hair transplant procedure went smoothly and I'm looking looking here at the immediate posttop result and it looks like they had some good ideas in the fact that they focused on his frontal scalp where it seems like he needed the graphs the most it looks like they made sure that the frontal inch inch and a half were placed at a higher density compared to the area further back I will say that the density other then in that frontal inch inch and a half is quite low and it looks like there's really not that much irregularity that's worked into the actual transplant I don't see the uh front like hairline like that frontal few rows but even looking beyond that further back it looks like the graphs were placed in in just rows hair naturally doesn't exist like that it exists in a much more irregular type of pattern so it's important to create that type of pattern when you're doing surgery and I'm seeing something that looks a little bit more almost like grape Vines at a a Vineyard and a year later I was happy with the results but after 2 years my hair started to thin again for no reason well his pre-existing hair started to go and maybe even some percentage of the transplanted hair my guess is he wasn't necessarily stabilized on medical therapy and this is why we always harp on the fact that you want to make sure that your hair is stable prior to a hair transplant and the way to do that for most men is finasteride minox still can help with the overall fullness of of your hair but the one thing that truly prevents further loss of your hair it would be finasteride and we always send people to feelc confident. comom to get their Finas ride delivered to their door at least in the United States I thought that after the hair transplant my hair would grow back the way it was before I think a lot of this comes down to proper patient education I think it's important to tell people that they're not going to get back to their original appearance with a hair transplant almost never I mean it's possible if you do a few surgeries into the same area at and the rest of the hair are super stable and you're just working some finesse job right at the hairline maybe I'll get them back to where they were but for most people when there's significant hair loss it's very difficult to bring them back and part of the reason just comes down to sheer numbers you have about 25% of your hair in this classic donor area so you're trying to take 25% and recreate the 75% and the numbers just don't work out so it's important to have realistic expectations and to make sure that your surgeon explains these things when you're going in for a procedure I was wrong about what hair transplants were supposed to do I thought they would totally restore my hair to its original state which is not quite right nope if you want to keep the benefits you need more than just one procedure and you need more than just surgery you need medical therapy medical therapy I'm always talking about it because it's important I talk about it with my patients and I talk about it to all of you on YouTube cuz it's super critical you may need ongoing care a healthy lifestyle and even more treatments for second hair transplant I once again picked Pakistan okay so now this is the second one so they went back with fuee into the same donor area for the recipient area you know I'm seeing maybe more spread out density compared to after the first where they really just line that first like inch and a half primarily here they have a pretty even distribution throughout like the whole frontal scalp that seems nice they did invest more graphs into his temples given the degree of his hair loss I'm not sure I would have done the same I think Temple work can be very nice but usually takes about 300 graphs or so on average let's say per side to try to recreate the temples and so that's now 600 graphs total that you've taken away from putting them on top and on top I think is where you're going to get a little bit more bang for your buck so I don't think I would have addressed this temples the second time but it looks like they added to that and then they add it to the frontal scalp after the transplant once again things went well for about 8 months so yeah so he has this very youthful looking hairline the problem is that if he starts to lose hair you know higher up into the mid scalp into the crown or maybe in some other parts of the frontal scalp it's not going to look totally natural to have such a tight you know hairline and to have a lot of missing hair further back so I truly hope that he's on medical therapy and that will hopefully allow him to keep his overall uh hair appearance for many years come but then I started losing a lot of hair I asked my doctor about it he told me it was because of the medicine he had given me after my surgery he gave me a certain drug that I had to take every day it turned out that this medicine was making hair grow temporarily as soon as I learned this I immediately stopped taking the drug I wanted to see the genuine outcome of my transplant without any medicine no no no no no B big mistake there big mistake because the finr or the medical therapy is primarily for the hair that you had prior to the hair transplant to protect that hair and then you come in with a transplant and you build on top of that stable Foundation stable base that's going to always look better and it's always going to be much more full result compared to just transplanted hair alone so coming off of the medicine in this case finast was a big mistake as far as overall prevention of further loss and for his final sort of like look and and for you know something that would be an impressive appearance you know and then if he's just left with his transplanted hair I think he's ultimately going to find himself not completely satisfied it was sad that after 2 months I started to see gaps in my hair again cuz think about it when we do the transplant we design the recipient area and we actually place these graphs relative to the hair that you already have there now if that hair is no longer there because of of let's say stopping finasteride there's going to be some gaps right that weren't accounted for in the planning and design of the hair transplant itself and remember he's going for all these different procedures But ultimately what happens is that you run out of donor Supply there's a limited number of graphs that can be used for a transplant and in most patients for Fue let's just round it to about 6,000 graphs and he's already had two surgeries I'm assuming they've used up at least 2/3 of the fly and uh you know he's running out of options right so it's very critical to first of all have a solid strategy before you get your first transplant and then maintain a strategy with a doctor that you trust throughout time it's not just about going a turkey and getting a hair transplant it's about having a solid hair restoration strategy that will work for you for years to come that's the right way to do it with my family in turkey when I started to notice gaps in my hair again it was hard to miss people walking around Istanbul with bandages on their heads which meant they had just had hair transplants and it made me think about getting a third hair transplant I wasn't even sure if a third method was possible the first thing I did was talk to a few doctors and they told me it was possible it may be possible but remember it's going to deplete your donor further you're going to have more scarring and you have to make sure that the plan for the third one makes sense like how many graphs are you going to be transplanting you know is is it going to address all of your concerns do you still maybe need medical therapy these are all things you need to discuss with your doctor many doctors were showing off great results which made it hard to choose when I visited them and talked about my hair problems they were really helpful hair transplant surgery can take anywhere from 5 to 8 hours can even take longer than that unlike my past experiences they only prescribed medication for the first week post surgery it was new for me as I was expecting a lot of medicine for the next 8 months I asked why I wasn't getting any extra medicine they simply said it wasn't necessary if it's that they're saying that he no longer needs finast ride I think that's probably a mistake unless he had some you know side effects or something like that so I'm not really sure which medicines he's talking about if it's just the um antibiotics that are given post-operatively yeah those last for usually 3 days maybe some clinics give up to a week there aren't too many like medicines that you need to take after other than the medical therapy that you should be on for your hair preservation in general the transplant process went well most clinics around the world when it comes to fuee surgery will shave the entire head for the transplant in my clinic when it comes to the recipient area we're often able to not shave it though there are some exceptions there are times when I strongly recommend to my patients that they do allow me to shave their head for the actual surgery because I think it's going to be a bit more accurate so in this gentleman's case having had two prior hair transplants I definitely would have recommended that we shave his whole head but keep in mind that most clinics will just force you into that and not really ever give you an option of not shaving a recipient area though usually we do give people that option now the donor area is more tricky and usually we are shaving the donor for Fue though there are no shave techniques and we have a video on that but keep in mind that up to a certain number of graphs in my clinic up to about 6 00 we do offer a No Shave option for fuee but it's more expensive because it's a lot more work for us and it can take us as long as a large shave case so fewer graphs With No Shave can cost as much as more graphs with a shave because of the complexity of the work without shaving my healing and hair growth Journey started so it's good that for the donor they went fairly broad it looks like with the Harvest which is what you want to do when there's this much uh scarring already there for the recipient area it looks like they worked broadly throughout the frontal scalp and they again went back and tripled down on his temples which I don't know how good I feel about that here I think he could have used it more in the frontal scalp but again patient and and the surgeon I guess felt that it was worth that investment again into the temples for the third time and the first few months went as expected similar to my previous transplants but I told myself not to get too excited too soon so he looks pretty good I will say that you can still see that thinning throughout that frontal scalp that's where I would have made sure to add that additional density as opposed to the temples I think he he could have used it more here in the anterior frontal scalp but again everyone makes their own decisions here the results I saw were incredibly phenomenal unlike my previous experiences where I had covered gaps with my hair this time my hair looked naturally full I'm glad he's happy with uh this third procedure the costs of my hair transplants changed depending on where I got them and when my first hair transplant took place in Pakistan I don't know what that conversion is 70,000 PKR in 2019 let's see what that conversion is wow $250 that is impressive my second transplant in 2021 also occurred in Pakistan it cost about 100,000 $355 wow that is again quite a bargain the third surge took place in Turkey in 2022 at that time their fees were €2,200 okay so his surgery in Turkey was like under 3,000 you know good for him so I'm happy for Amir that after his third hair transplant he feels like he finally arrived at where he originally wanted to be in terms of his hair appearance and that's awesome but I think what's most important for Amir Now is really to be on medical therapy going forward because if he's not he might continue to experience thinning and further recession because some percentage of the DHT resistant hairs that are moved with an fuee surgery are actually not DHT resistant and will be DHT sensitive because remember for fuee surgery we go off of a pretty broad area in the back and you can see you saw earlier how broad of an area they were targeting for the donor area so some percentage of those hairs are going to still be DHT sensitive meaning that they will have fallen out on their own over over time and so now you've moved them to a new location which in his case was mainly frontal scalp and temples and so those hairs might fall out over time unless you protect them with safe and asterid so I hope he's on medical therapy I hope he continues to be happy and I appreciate him sharing his Journey on YouTube

Channel: Doctor Gary Linkov

Views: 375,669

Keywords: My Remarkable Hair Transplant Journey | Hair Surgeon Reacts, My Remarkable Hair Transplant Journey | From Baldness to Boldness, Hair transplant, Hair transplant surgery, Hair transplant results, Hair transplant before and after, Hair regrowth, Plastic surgeon, plastic surgery, celebrity plastic surgery, Doctor Gary Linkov, Gary Linkov, Dr. Gary Linkov, Aamir R., Turkey hair transplant, Hair surgeon reacts, plastic surgeon reacts, surgeon reacts, doctor reacts

Id: l-KmhWNSMDo

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024