Hair Transplantation for Men:... Video Transcript

Participants

Michael L. Reed MD

Summary

If you're planning to undergo a hair transplant, or you're just curious about the procedure, here's a unique chance to view the surgery as expert surgeon Michael L. Reed, MD takes you through the process step-by-step. Watch as Dr. Reed performs a micrograft on a man suffering from male pattern baldness.

Webcast Transcript

Introduction

MICHAEL REED: Hello. I'm Dr. Michael Reed. I'm a dermatologist who specializes in microsurgical hair restoration. I'm a faculty member at the New York University Department of Dermatology, where I specialize in microsurgery. And I teach the residents how to move hair around successfully to cure baldness.

Today we're going to be presenting a case of the latest in follicular unit hair transplantation. This technique has evolved over the past 10 years and has become highly specialized and has become the state of the art method of correcting baldness. The patient today is a healthy 42 year old man who has no medical problems, no bleeding problems, no problems with infection, and is a good candidate for this surgery. He has been slowly losing his hair, starting at the front of his head, for the past 10 years or so. And he has been treated with medical treatment, including topical minoxidil and Propecia with limited results in the frontal scalp, which is the area where the forehead ends and the hairline begins.

So the purpose of today's procedure is to show a state of the art method and to show the ideal way to do a hair transplant that's really the best for the patient. The basic rule that we follow is we do one patient at time; we have one surgeon-that will be me-with him the whole time. We have one team working, coordinated in time. And we want this one hair transplant we do to stand the test of time, to stand alone. And if he never had another one, to still be a good result that will last him a lifetime.

Preparing the Donor Area

MICHAEL REED: Now first I'd like to show the area where we're going to perform the transplant. This is the patient's frontal scalp. If we draw a line from the top of each ear across the top of the head, and we stay in front of that, that is the frontal scalp. So the frontal scalp is where the hair starts, in the so-called anterior hair zone, or hairline, and then where it stops, at this point between the ears.

This is the target area for today's hair transplant. This is the area where hair will do Mr. T the most good in terms of his day to day life and how people see him and perceive of him in terms of his hair. Remember this: that when somebody looks at another person, they first make eye contact. Then their eye unconsciously travels up the forehead until it stops at the hairline. If it does not stop at the hairline and it goes off the head into outer space, the mind perceives baldness. So what we're going to do here is create a new hairline, which is natural in the front and dense in the back, so that Mr. T will basically no longer be perceived of as bald by people who look at him in most normal circumstances.

Now I'm going to go around to the back and mark the donor site that we're going to harvest for hair to move to the frontal scalp. Okay, put your head down. This area, which roughly speaking, if we draw a line across the top of the ears in the back, and we stay below that, is the potential donor area. This is about 25 to 30% of the total scalp. And we can safely remove half of it or a little more, and move it elsewhere, without this area becoming noticeably thin.

Also, from the nape of the neck we generally try to go up about four centimeters, approximately 1.5 inches, and leave this area alone, since this is really a part of the neck and does not heal well. Staying above this narrow zone, we enter the donor site area. And that's what we're going to prepare now.

So now we have an area that is 12 centimeters in length, by 1.5 centimeters in width.