A botched hair transplant can be traumatic to say the absolute least. At best, the scalp is scarred & the distribution of hair looks less natural than ever before. At worst, serious infections can occur & have a major effect on one’s health. The emotional fallout should be considered as well; for people who pursue a transplant to tackle self-image issues, there’s no worse feeling than ending up in a worse position with less money as a result of trying to fix it.
For people in that situation, things might seem hopeless, as though they’ve been removed from their old selves & placed away from them at an unreachable distance. We understand that fear better than anyone, which is why we’d like to let you know that there’s a way to not only undo the damage, but obtain the refreshed look you were searching for in the first place.
Many of the cases we see at Modena Hair Institute in Orange County are repairs, and they come in quite a few varieties. One major type of case we see is people who went to clinics being operated by inexperienced surgeons & assistants at a low cost. As we’ve written about on this blog before, going to a cheap clinic will always cost more in the long run, and you’ll have to pay with your confidence & appearance along with money. Many of the most serious cases come from patients who received a botched FUE transplant. Often times this is due to inexperience and obsolete technology and surgical tools; while an experienced hair restoration surgeon like Dr. Yazdan will use small punches ranging 0.7mm – 1.0mm in diameter today, older varieties used by inexperienced clinics are far larger, sometimes reaching a massive 2mm. These outdated punches will very often lead to the area surrounding each follicle sustaining great damage. Issues also tend to arise when inexperienced assistants, rather than a trained & licensed physician who specializes in hair restoration surgery, perform the procedure, since the skills required to competently perform these operations only come with years of training & education. Whether it’s one or the other, a mix of these, or other issues, it’s an unfortunate situation to say the least.
The other types of repair cases we see involve patients suffering a large donor scar from an FUT transplant that fails to properly heal. Whether it’s an error in the closing technique itself (a typical result of an inexperienced surgeon’s work) or an aggressive harvesting of hair to force results, these scars are understandably devastating for our patients.
Dealing with any of these fallouts is an arduous task, and reversing them requires heavily trained hands, knowledgeable minds, and attentive eyes. This, as a matter of fact, is exactly what we offer at Modena, whether you come into our Newport, Beverly Hills, or Las Vegas offices. Through countless hours of time spent with these procedures, we’ve developed a wide range of methods to tackle botched transplants of many varieties.
To start, we’ve found that patients dealing with damage from outdated procedures achieve significant results after we perform our repairs. As described on the Modena site, “…new, natural follicular units can be transplanted to soften or camouflage the old plugs and restore a natural appearance. In some cases, if the plugs were placed incorrectly, we can re-transplant the hair from the plugs to the correct area & [set them] in the correct growth direction.”
Our years of experience also come in handy when repairing botched donor scars. Above is a photoset showing the steps in this process. A patient of ours was dealing with a scar along his posterior scalp after a botched FUT “strip” hair transplant performed at an outside clinic. To assist him, Dr. Yazdan took hairs from the undamaged parts of his donor area, transplanted follicles directly into the scar, and completely camouflaged it as a result. In less than a year, virtually nobody would be able to tell that there was any procedure done to begin with.
Even if the donor area in the back of your scalp can’t be used in a repair, which is unfortunately the case for quite a few of our patients, you still have a chance to regain your hair. When the patient in the video below came in with notable scarring & an unusable donor area, Dr. Yazdan, with the help of his longtime team of assistants, was able to extract donor hairs from the beard & chest, placing them in a way where they were indistinguishable from natural hairs from the scalp. No visible scarring resulted, and the patient gained a far denser hairline in turn.
To sum things up, a botched FUT or FUE hair transplant is far from the end of the road. When you come into Modena for a consultation, we’ll stop at nothing to determine every option you have in your hands, and we’ll dedicate ourselves entirely to giving you the look you set out on achieving from the beginning.
Learn more about our hair transplant repair services, along with everything else we offer our patients, and be sure to get in touch with us if you have any questions.