Why Istanbul Is The Place to Get Your Hair Back | Surgeon Reacts

I'm going to react to why Istanbul is the place to get your hair back by Bloomberg quick tape [Music] place to come if you if you want your hair back Istanbul's hair transplant Industries worth north of a billion US Dollars and it's estimated over 200 000 people a year come here in the hope of regaining their hair that's a lot I wonder how many overall clinics they have there and there's like different calibers of Clinic they have some great clinics and then they have ones that just trying to make money don't really know what they're doing so I don't think it's that different from here to be honest in that sense you know you have clinics here that do hair regularly like ours and then you have some that don't you know but it's a lightly regulated industry no one knows exactly how many clinics are out there that's what I was wondering operations take place sadly I have no idea and I've been looking at this for over a decade it is a data black hole I I need a calculator to tell you a number actually we are assuming about 1500 2000 operations are made daily basis in Turkey the industry has exploded in size over the last decade attracting patients from across the world and in this situation you really need a lot of attention but as more men pack their bags and fly to Turkey our medical standards being dropped in favor of profit no that's always you know what we worry about you know we worry about the overall quality dropping when people are just trying to make you know some money so for many patients going to Turkey is less expensive than going to other places in the world and for turkey though the people who are there and with the cost of living the amount of money that they're making is substantial on these surgeries so you have many I'm sure people trying companies trying to make it happen and and to make money and probably not always following the right protocols and the safest protocols air transplant surge in many ways has become a market so people see her transplant surgery as a commodity the business unfortunately it's seen that way in part here as well like I was just driving from New Jersey back into New York City and there was this big billboard that read like you know I Fue 2000 grass or six thousand dollars you know no scars know this know that you know it's just not very accurate it's a it's not truthful um and there's this guy who probably never had a hair transplant but just has perfect hair on the picture and um yeah it's really seen like a commodity you know and in a way you know Aesthetic Surgery you can think about it in that way in part but there's a whole other side to it which is that it's a medical surgical procedure so has to be done safely and properly and also it's a major aesthetic change to the individual and it's not something you can easily reverse back right because it's surgery it's it's more or less permanent you know you have these scenarios where you have many people who don't really care about the Aesthetics or the medical element of it and all they care about is just making money and that's dangerous whether it's in turkey or anywhere else businesses of hat transplantation has been very much designed on bumps on seats and telling people what they want to hear and sadly this this is a this is surgery and that's what we're trying to do with this channel right with all the videos that we're putting out there I'm trying to give you guys as factual and honest of a take on hair transplants as I possibly can whether you decide to come to us for a surgery or you decide to go to Turkey or you decide to not do surgery at all I really don't care I just want you to get the best information possible because that gives me intrinsic satisfaction that I'm able to just report honest things right whether it's what we actually do in the practice or just the concepts that we're trying to teach you surgery and in the wrong hands it can be devastating and when he says devastating part of it is like people are spending money on something that they don't really need or you know can benefit from part of it is that aesthetically they can be sort of ruined with like you know bad hair lines and things like that and part of it is that like if the surgery is not done safely then you know you can end up uh with a big big problem right because there's real medications being used if they're mishandled misused I mean you can end up you know in really bad shape Hussein hazim and Saad Nam Assad have traveled from the USA to Istanbul to radically change the way they look how do you feel good they're here at Blue Magic a premium hair treatment clinic in Istanbul I started losing my hair about five years ago it was very upsetting very you know when it started to shed basically and uh it was like every day in the morning when you wash up you see it more hair in the sink and you're thinking to yourself like what's going on what can I do different who from Detroit Michigan his friends from Scottsdale Arizona yeah most of them they seem to be black they discovered Blue Magic online and I actually looked away from your site to other people that did their own videos so that gave me a good feeling about it they said that they got a lot of attention that gave me a good feeling about it so what do you do actually we expecting this one because people don't want to feel like just a number right I mean they want to get proper Medical Care and feel like the clinic cares and there are some you know all over the world including in Istanbul where you know that's the case and that's what people ought to find like most patients in Istanbul Hussein Assad have undergone a procedure called follicular unit excision or Fue this is where clumps of hair follicles are removed from the sides and back of your head and implanted into the areas where the hair losses we have many videos on this topic so make sure to check those out it takes about four to five hours and if it's done correctly it looks natural it usually takes much longer than that I mean four or five hours is is not enough time for a full head of hair almost anywhere I would say for realistic expectations you're looking at closer to 8 to 12 hours of actually being in the office having my hair back will probably make me feel better than I have in a long time it's been it's been a long time since I felt this way just having it would be great with their luxury offices and Clinics Blue Magic are at the expensive end of the spectrum but even with the hotel and translator included clients can expect to spend around four to five thousand US dollars for the treatment that's typically half the price you'd pay in the USA UK or EU you look like a bucket people sometimes ask can I wear a hat after surgery you can see if it's a loose fitting type of hat um and I'd say if you just don't want to be wearing a hat where it's really tight or it's like rubbing up against the grass exactly how large Istanbul's hair clinic industry is is impossible to pin down although the Turkish Ministry of Health sets standards for the industry which are in line with EU regulations clinics are not required to say how many procedures take place and medical associations are voluntary so I think it's difficult because there aren't any official numbers there are clinics that perhaps have multiple websites perhaps named differently but actually are just one organization I mean I don't know if it's that important to get down to exactly how many surgeries are taking place or exactly how many clinics there are it's just good to know what those clinics are and just to make sure that they're properly following regulations and just the protocols that are standard you know for some of these procedures so I think that's the most important thing when you don't want to have a clinic that's not registered it's not just about the overall number you know the shared number of them but it's about them being properly registered so you know they can be tracked and that there is some accountability right you don't want to go to a clinic that you know the the state doesn't know anything about so if something bad happens I mean who are you going to turn to you know they can just close pack up shop and go to some other place and and no one knows what even happened Greg Williams is a practitioner and president of the British Association of hair restoration surgery people see hair transplant surgery as a commodity that they can shop around for the cheapest price but I think the issue is that hair transplant surgery can be um shall I say bought so much cheaper in some of the the health tourism destinations that are marketed to the male public you know I don't know I'm okay with that like if someone wants to fly over from the states to Turkey to get surgery for cheaper as long as they know where they're going and have a good sense of what the experience will be like I'm fine with that I mean I you know yeah like you can't blame someone for wanting to save some money I mean it's not the most convenient thing to have to fly somewhere and you know there's obviously some element of risk and fear that they're going to be in this foreign place getting a surgery so if if you have folks willing to take that risk then more power to them you know as long as the place where they're going to is really putting in the proper effort and attention that patients deserve I think my colleagues in Turkey have a better feel and I hear from them but but even they I don't think have I have a full grasp on the magnitude of the hair transplant surgery industry in Turkey yeah I mean I wonder if like some of these clinics are more underground in Turkey right like without like a you know a solid uh you know business address like it's like in someone's you know I don't know basement I I wonder if that's what they're trying to get at here um in the states it would be rather difficult to pull something like that off maybe not impossible but uh surely I think you'd be discovered pretty quickly so I don't know if more of that activity goes on some other countries including Istanbul potentially but I think that's like the main fear that maybe they're expressing here if getting exact numbers is hard finding clinics is easy you only need to type Istanbul hair treatment into Instagram and you're down the rabbit hole I think it's fair to say that there are some clinics that are spending thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pounds on their social media marketing and and the problem is that younger well you know most most clinics whether it's here or abroad um are spending lots of money on social media I mean that's where everyone is for for marketing because that's where people are spending their time right so instead of how it used to be with like the Yellow Pages and getting like one ad or getting your ad on like the the Subway or the bus people still do that too but you know social media is like the newest way to to Market so there's nothing unusual about that young guys who have hair loss are just quite often so devastated and so desperate and just needed and I get that so often once you click on any form of advert or any form of product or any form of service they are cleverly kind of heavily weighted the adverts that come through here are last consultant Spencer there are people who are you know hair loss Consultants they maybe have had their own hair transplants in the past and now feel like they can advise people on the best place to go for surgery and you know I think there's a niche for that and that kind of resonates with that hair loss sufferer and is there as a constant reminder that there are solutions out there and that you need to take a step forward with this the pressure of social media is something Spencer Stevenson knows well he hosts a podcast called the ball truth UK and speaks with men who've jumped on it yeah we've heard of these guys done a plane to get surgery and then regretted it sadly there are a number of uh clinics that don't necessarily perform surgery in the best interest of the patient I see here in the UK a high number of repair patients I was a repair patient all this is hair transplanted hair this has come from the back and then move to the front Spencer's had 13 hair transplant operations many to repair the poor work done when he was younger the first procedure that I had done was relatively small but it was done with a strip via the strip procedure and it ended up being many a micro grafts in the hairline so it looked like a hair transplant it didn't look like a natural head of hair which then meant that I had to continue to find a way to resolve that and make it much more natural yeah I mean your surgery is no joke I mean it's not something that you can easily reverse I mean he's had to have repair work but that's additional surgery more and more so imagine 13 surgeries so of course it's always better to think things through from the beginning and try to do the initial surgery well so that people don't have to go through all these reparative procedures finally I set a great deal that people have a knee joint reaction they see an advert they see an affordable price and they're so desperate and they are so vulnerable that they feel that it's a solution to all their problems and that it can be fixed very quickly yeah I mean I definitely get people who come to me for second opinions and they've talked to other clinics especially some clinics in Turkey where they're quoted for a very high number of graphs where I feel like we can still do great work with maybe a third of those graphs and again I'm always thinking about the patient first and foremost so can we preserve a lot of their donor supply for potentially the future for a rainy day when things change with their hair as opposed to investing everything they have like to go all in on a surgery that may or may not work properly so that is something that I definitely encounter in my practice quickly and they are on a fly out of here choosing the right clinic in Istanbul's crowded and social media Savvy Market isn't easy there's many clinics which offer surgery for less than two thousand dollars with little to no medical oversight you know oftentimes the doctors are like nowhere to be found right you have technicians that are throughout all the different rooms of the clinic and um they're just doing what they're doing and I think that's what they're getting at here when the doctor will give us the confirmation that everything is fine haseem atel runs blue Magic's Medical Teams and he argues only a fraction of the city's Clinic's prioritize Medical Care over profit 350 clinics I can tell maybe 10 percent of them they do this job in medical way they focus on the medical side and the rest it's a business it's a job it's a work okay because there are some clinics some clinics sadly enough I don't think it's that different here in the states I think it's still probably 10 maybe up to 15 percent of places that offer hair transplant surgery that try to do it the right way and try to stay up on the latest techniques Technologies and are not just offering hair to make money I mean I sometimes hear this in meetings for like at least the facial Plastics Community where someone will go up there on stage and say oh if you want to improve you know your profits you need to start offering hair transplant surgery and that's kind of upsetting you know because it shouldn't be done just to make more money it should be done because you really care about it and you've done all the proper training and you know have the right people in place or also properly trained to offer these complex nuanced surgeries they were making daily up to 50 operations daily okay one Clinic doing 50 operations I can't even imagine that scale how big that place needs to be how many employees they need to have how you can possibly keep track of everything that's going on this conveyor belt approach relies on one of the most controversial elements of the hair transplant sector the use of technicians in Turkey as in the US and the UK technicians are often used to assist the procedure but it's the extent of their use which makes the difference yeah that's a really good point let's see what they say about it here and then I'll give some thoughts as well when you cut into the skin I would suggest that surgery and that should be done by a doctor who is part of a who is has a governing body to whom they are responsible to keep their license and in uh in a lot of Health tourism destinations that's not what happens that step is delegated to non-doctors now a lot of um doctors in these clinics will justify that by saying well these non-doctors are trained they're technicians they're very good at the job a lot of doctors will say the technicians are better than they themselves a doctor that does not make it right that does not make it ethical and in some countries that does not make it legal now what's made this a little unique as far this again a more nuanced I think response in what he's giving what's made this unique when it comes to hair transplant is that nowadays more and more of the hair transplants are being done with the Fue method as opposed to fut with fut the person who is doing the excision had to actually cut into the skin and then like peel back and go into the fat underneath the hair follicles and and remove this whole section of scalp tissue right and then the technicians under the microscope would cut it up into all the graphs and then the team would place it back into the head that cutting was traditionally always done by doctors I don't think you know this whole big industry in Istanbul I don't think it was that big when strips were primarily being done but it couldn't have been that big because everyone knew that that step had to have been done by a doctor preferably a surgeon of sorts but when Fue became more popular around like 2010 all that changed and so the technology to doing Fue is different it's not I mean you're cutting into the skin but it's like a punch into the skin so all of a sudden it became almost more acceptable to allow technicians or non-doctors to do that type of punching to do that punching well and to do it efficiently is a difficult skill it's difficult I mean it was hard for me to learn right and I came from a head and neck surgery facial Plastics background and it still took time for me to gain some speed and to do the extractions quick enough so you can get through a lot of extractions in a day but to do it efficiently enough so you're not like getting five good graphs for every 10 punches that you make right because that would be poor efficiency so in all of that Fue hoopla the technicians became more prominent because you had some technicians where you know they're very comfortable with hair that's all they've been doing for like you know decades some of them so for them to pick up an Fue punch and get comfortable with Fue extractions was much more natural than a doctor who you know has trained in something totally different to all of a sudden start to learn how to do so doctors then became basically delegating out to technicians to do the extractions but at least in the United States that definitely is illegal but it's done all the time there are very few clinics where the doctor actually does the Fue extractions the other caveat that I'll make here is that there are at least in the United States mid-level providers such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants that technically are allowed to learn how to do Fue extractions and do them safely under a surgeon's watch if they go through the proper training and they have enough experience and if they're supervised properly so that is very much legal and very much something that's done but unfortunately in many clinics they don't have a PA or an MP to do the extractions and they use you know just technicians and that still is technically not allowed but technicians are very involved with many other parts of the surgery so that's where this is a very nuanced discussion a lot of this boils down to the extractions that are done for Fue who should be doing them who shouldn't be what level of training what level of licensure foreign the technician model is one of the biggest factors in helping to drive down the price of surgery a doctor oversees the work a technician does it if you are requiring this like you want a doctor to do it from A to Z this will cost you a lot of money because you are requesting a private doctor to be from A to Z with you so the cost of course will be too much high and this is another misconception because the other extreme of the doctor not being present and just approving the surgery and then like disappearing for the whole day The Other Extreme of that is a doctor who is doing every single part of your surgery and has no proper help that is also not good because this is all day surgery this is very labor intensive and it would take much too long for any one person to do the whole surgery and would be nearly impossible so it does require a team effort but you want to make sure that the team is properly configured so that each person is doing something that they're best at and something that's that they're legally able to do so that's important so that's why technicians are needed technicians these days with the experience they are having they are reaching an amazing they are doing an amazing work actually it's true yeah I mean we can't get through hair transplants on a consistent basis without having wonderful technicians so they're an important part of it but you just don't want to allow them to overreach their legal potential operating room is ready for tomorrow's patient Dr Cayenne cyanoglu is one of three fellows of the international Society of hair restoration surgery in Istanbul he like everyone else uses technicians but he does the incisions and extractions himself it is a competition between this kind of technician clinics and this kind of companies uh uh yeah they may compete I don't think there's a big competition between doctors there's a competition between technician clinics yeah I mean most reputable doctors will be happy to have another good reputable doctor in town who does good work at least that's how I feel I don't see some of the other surgeons in town at least here in Manhattan as being my competition because we do get patients fortunately from all over the place and that's because of the draw of Manhattan but you know I'm happy when I hear that a patient had wonderful work done by a colleague and I on the flip side it gets saddened when I hear of poor work being performed so I think there's enough to go around and I think reputable doctors should be and mostly are happy to know that there are other people who care and who are doing good work because at the end of the day if I had like a family member who needed something not just hair related but anything else I want to be able to send them to somebody hopefully a colleague that I trust and sometimes those colleagues do similar procedures to what I do but you know they are great and I trust them and I would trust my family with them so we want to know that there are other well-trained professionals who are doing good work whether it's local or just in general internationally Dr cyanoglu like the other clinics we've spoken to believes it's time the sector was regulated but he's got concerns venue put big restrictions and regulations they I mean sector will go uh illegal way so it is not easy to regulate but it has to be regulated because it's about life I mean you are doing a procedure on human the most people have died from hair transplant surgery because of the levels of anesthetics that they've received because of other potential complications this is very rare but it has happened and this is what he's talking about and I 100 agree risk group a young man who rushed to get the operation done by clinics who are only too happy to take their business yeah I'd love to know how often those clinics say no like you're not a candidate for the surgery we're not going to do it I think that overall rate of rejecting patients that who are interested in the surgery and willing to pay is unfortunately very low you have their transplant quite often it will be done to a design that they've requested which is low youthful rounded squared off temples and it may look good for a couple years but when they reach 30 40 50 60 and they've lost a lot more hair that's going to be their permanent hairline because those hairs don't deteriorate when they're taken from the sides in the back of the head and transplanted they're there for the we have a video on why my young men should not lower their hairline please make sure to watch that now there are different scenarios different exceptions here and there but as a general rule you know make sure to watch that video duration now what I do think is going to happen in 5 10 15 20 years time is I think we're going to see an absolute epidemic of men who had aggressive hairlines transplanted when they were young by aggressive I mean low and quite rounded and then go on to lose significant amounts of hairs to start to look like they're balding fathers and grandfathers which is what they wanted to avoid Happening by having a transplant without realizing that the transplant's not going to stop that happening people think that medical therapy and surgery somehow mutually exclusive and the truth is that it's not most of the time you need both and many people don't want to hear that they assume for some reason that if they already are getting surgery that they don't need anything else that because they've decided on getting the more aggressive procedure or a more aggressive treatment so now for some reason they're exempt from needing any type of medical therapy and I try to summarize this as best I can in many videos but sometimes maybe I feel like I'm not doing a good enough job of it but just to kind of put it in clear terms right here right now medical therapy is for the hair that you naturally have and it's in this whole DHT sensitive Zone and the surgery is for augmenting that whole Zone with hair from the DHT resistance Zone in the back end on the sides and the hair that you move from the back to the front is not going to miraculously help the hair that you naturally already have in that area or hair that you may have lost that you can regain at least partially so in a way the medical therapy treats one type of hair and then the transplant is bringing in a different kind of hair so they're complementary they're not mutually exclusive from a man's point of view when you start to lose your hair you are very isolated and it is very easy to become very consumed by hair loss and seeking a resolve for that and because of the nature of the internet and the nature of social media the the information is a plenty out there but the accurate information isn't a plenty and we need that's again what we're doing with this channel you know we are no BS giving you guys all the info up front and again we enjoy this process and you know luckily for us you know people see this content and then they choose to call and chat and we really appreciate that but beyond that the the bigger goal here is just to give people accurate information that they oftentimes are not getting because who you're going to trust are you going to trust the clinic that's trying to like sell you on the surgery my Approach from the beginning of my practice when I had like no patience and I just had people coming in for free consults here and there and I had a part-time job my Approach has always been to just be honest with people and give them the truth and then let the person decide I was never trying to sell myself as the best surgeon and this and that it was always like let me tell them what I can do for them and if we see eye to eye and they choose to proceed then we can do something and unfortunately that's not always the type of sentiment that people get from many places out there to make sure that people find those resources to get the right decisions made the messages are do your homework do your research just don't make rash I'll argue that one of the issues with some of these professional organizations is that they're not trying to reach like the people right they have their like small organizations and you know it's tough to get in and you have to like apply and you have to take a test and you have to pay money every year I pay my dues to multiple organizations including you know the hair organization and and that's fine and that's all well and good and the intentions are usually good right like these doctors like this gentleman is the president of the the British so I mean that's all great that's fine and they have these journals where you know people do research and they submit and the journals yeah again to only to get access to the journal you have to you have to pay and be a member of this organization so my point is that the information then is not available to the general public and a lot of doctors don't spend the time to create good information and to convey like the things that they know to the people and again that's what we try to do here um and that takes effort and it takes more time and oftentimes you're not getting the same level of compensation because compared to just doing more surgery and doing more procedures decisions and if you are a proper candidate for hair transplant I recommend hair transplant to everyone but everybody who look for a solution for hair loss has to do their homework very well and you they have to find the right doctor and right right place everywhere and a lot of the comments that I bet we're going to get on this video which we've gotten in other videos related to Turkey and hair transplants is it's gonna be a split right there can be some people who comment oh you know I went to Turkey and I got my you know three thousand dollar two thousand dollar hair transplant and I look great and I love it and that's all well and good and then other people are going to say like oh stay away from Turkey like a place is scary don't go there and um I hope in this video what you've gained is a more nuanced understanding of the overall like process and the pros and cons of going not just the turkey but to any place and it's not about just price uh even though price is an important component for many people but there's a bigger picture here there's a safety element here and there's an an aesthetic result that we're trying to create for the long term here that's often overlooked you want someone who's thinking about that thinking into the future since you enjoyed this video make sure to check out our reaction to Mike maylak's hair it's my experience in Turkey

Channel: Doctor Gary Linkov

Views: 550,964

Keywords: why istanbul is the place to get your hair back, surgeon reacts, surgeon, hair transplant, hair restoration, fue hair transplant, hair transplant surgery, hair transplant surgery turkey, hair transplant surgery cost, istanbul hair transplant, hair transplant in istanbul, fut hair transplant, Dr. Gary Linkov, hair transplant results, doctor reacts

Id: WcDviinTBsw

Length: 31min 53sec (1913 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2022