News In Hair Transplant Surgery
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
Yes, I am back from Amsterdam. I spent one week there and I was mostly involved with the meetings of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery. The city of Amsterdam was beautiful and I still cannot believe in this day and age people still bike to work on a regular basis in a capital city in Europe.
As always of every year, we had a large number of hair transplant surgeons come from all over the world. My lecture this year was on a new application for the Laxometer and the title was Laxometer and Sequential Strip Removal for Increasing the Safety of Strip Removal in Mega-session Hair Transplants. We will be placing a summary of the lecture in the hair loss library on our website US Hair Restoration soon.
The research results that was presented by the consultant of Intercytex for hair multiplication was disappointing and basically despite the fact that they announced they started Phase III of the study, this year they said they have not even finished the II yet. They claimed financial problems to be the cause of that. We will look closely as we were before to see what is going to be out in the horizon for hair multiplication or as it is often called “hair cloning”.
Several new automated techniques were also introduced for FUE harvesting but I was not impressed by any of those. It seems like no one could come up with an ideal technique for the automated FUE that does not have significant problems. We will continue with the manual methods for FUE hair transplant graft removal and placement at this time.
There were many nice discussions on new techniques in making sites, closing the donor wound and preparation of the hair transplant grafts. The aesthetic aspects of hair restoration surgery was also discussed in many sessions and nice new concepts were introduced by several doctors. Hairline design and temple points were again discussed and it seems that more doctors are realizing the importance of restoration on hair in the temple areas. We at US Hair Restoration are very big in restoration of the temple points in the patients that need it and temple hairline is a necessary part of our hair restoration and hairline designs.
The comparison of the maintaining solutions is always part of the discussions. This year there were a few nice comparative researches on densely packed hair and also the comparison of the grouping of the hair grafts in follicular unit form or isolate single hair groups.
Hair Restoration is one of the young fields of cosmetic surgery. It has been revolutionized in the last 10 years with development of the idea of follicular unit transplantation and stereotactic microscopy that gave us the capability of producing such great results that are undetectable from the natural hair. Presence of hair transplant doctors in scientific meetings of this kind help the hair transplant surgeon to be able to deliver the highest standard of hair transplant to his patient that can eventually guarantee both the doctor and the patient satisfaction. I recommend the meeting of ISHRS to every doctor who performs hair transplant surgery as a big part of his practice. In fact I do not understand how some doctors can afford not to be there while new findings are changing the face of hair restoration medicine on a regular basis.
