Researching Your Hair Transplant Surgeon
To know if you’ve found a surgeon you can trust and count on, be aware of the things a bad one might hide during your first consultation. In researching your hair transplant surgeon watch out for the following:
A Hair Transplant Surgeon Might Hide his/her Board Certification
In the process of researching Your Hair Transplant Surgeon, you already probably know that the ideal hair transplant surgeon has a board certification in either dermatology or plastic surgery. Other certifications may be okay, but these two are ideal. In any case, a competent M.D. or D.O. shouldn’t be afraid to prominently display his or her certificate on an office wall.
The Doctor Might Hide his/her Results
This is an important factor in researching your hair transplant surgeon. Results includes any photos or videos that document the before and after of prior work, as well as the patients’ testimonials or contact information. It is imperative that a doctor has presentable proof of his or her continual success and at least one patient willing to report positive testimony. If a doctor seems to be hiding this, start looking for other doctors.
A Hair Transplant Surgeon May Hide his/her Experience
Finding out the years a hair transplant surgeon has been in practice and the number of procedures performed is an important piece of information. It tells you about his or her level of experience and expertise. Novice surgeons tend to increase the rates of graft burial and transection due to their limited practice. And this inexperience can ultimately ruin a result. So make sure your doctor is being honest about the experience factor.
The Doctor Might Hide Who Actually Performs the Surgery
It is common knowledge that the strip harvesting procedure often uses medical assistants to perform the majority of the procedure. The doctor must always be present, but may not actually do any of the excisions. While this is standard and accepted for strip, it is illegal for follicular unit extraction. In FUE, the surgeon or an equally licensed person must perform every single excision. For either technique, your hair transplant surgeon should be upfront and honest about who will be removing the grafts and implanting them. beware of switch and bait, whereby the Dr presents the front of the operator only for a traveling crew of FUE technicians to perform the actual surgery. This is common practice in the marketers of certain FUE devices.
HIDE THE QUALIFICATION OF THE PERSON DOING YOUR CONSULTATION
It is also a red flag if the person doing your consultation is a non licensed medical person that is not legally allowed to diagnose or treat any disease. In many clinics, these are people pulled of the street whose sole aim is to get the patient into the operating chair. They are typically paid based on commission of how much they bring in. The more patients they get to the chair, the more they make. You can imaging where in the totem pole of priorities the patient’s interest is left in this scenario. Patient should insist on the person doing their procedure to do their consultation. If this cannot be attained, the patient should walk out of the clinic. It is better to be safe than sorry.
A Hair Transplant Surgeon Might Hide the Complete and Total Cost
Hair transplant clinics usually charge somewhere from $5 per graft to $12 per graft. But you need to know whether this includes consultation fees, anesthesia, follow-up visits, post-op medication, and so forth. Make sure your doctor isn’t concealing any additional fees.