At the first mention of hair restoration, most probably you would relate the term with a surgical procedure. While this is not a mistake, it isn’t the complete truth either. Surgical procedure is only one of the many methods that are covered by the term. The other methods include, among others, hormone treatment and medication. The point is that the term refers to an effort to re-grow the hair on the certain parts of the scalp that had completely lost their hair-producing capabilities. Hence all of the methods are basically curing efforts — not prevention effort.
However, surgical procedure is indeed the most popular method although you would need meticulous calculation to determine whether it is wallet-friendly or not. But first of all, let us begin with the one of the less scary methods, namely the medication hair restoration. So far, FDA approves only two medications that are considered safe and legal for the effort: Propecia or Finasteride and Minodixil. The first is produced exclusively for men so that you can skip that off and go directly to Minodixil which can be used both for men and women.
The Procedure
But of course people who had completely lost their hair must have been tired of many kinds of drugs. If you can’t bear another treatment, although Minodixil indeed deserves a try, then your last hope should be the surgical hair restoration. The principle is simple: a graft or a compile of tissue, roots and healthy follicle are taken from the donor and then transplanted into the recipient. But the donor as well as the recipient is you: the donor from which the graft is taken from is the back area of your head. This area, and the side area of your head, is usually the latest area which will be ruined by the hair loss progress.
Almost needless to say that it means that the back and the side areas have the capability to grow healthy hair. The surgical hair restoration is simply using the logic: if the tissue on those scalp areas can grow healthy hair, then if they are moved to the other area that had experienced balding, there is a very huge chance that the tissue will produce healthy hair too just like what it did on the back and the side areas. But of course there aren’t two similar scalps. Graft taken from other’s scalp won’t fit with the existing environment of your scalp so that the graft, or the donor, should come from your own scalp.
There are two techniques in surgical hair restoration. In Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT), the surgeon extracts the follicular units from the donor strip — a strip of skin taken from the back of your head. The scalp area from which the donor strip is taken becomes scarred so that the surgeon has to stitch it back up. The extracted follicular units, called grafts, are then transplanted into the balding area where they become follicles which are capable of producing hair.
In Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE), the surgeon extracts the donor using a surgical punch or other device. The most often used punch is a 1-mm punch. With this punch, the surgeon makes a small circular incision on the skin, right in the upper part of the follicular unit. This is then extracted directly from the scalp and transplanted into the recipient area.
The Result and the Cost
Just like anything transplanted into the body, the graft transplanted into your scalp becomes a permanent part of your scalp. It means that every follicle or piece of hair that grows on the recipient area of your scalp is permanent part of your scalp. Is it natural? If you look at the grown hair, of course it is natural because it is grown by the permanent tissue of your very scalp. What is not natural is the way your sterile scalp was engineered — surgical hair restoration — so as to be able to grow hair.
Well, it isn’t natural if you look at it that way but of course it doesn’t matter at all when you see that your head is covered with thick, naturally grown hair, right? Now, is surgical hair restoration is reasonable option for your wallet? Let’s do some math. When you go to a surgeon, you would have to pay from $3.00 to $8.00 for every graft. The average is therefore $5 or $6. You probably would need multiple sessions throughout the year so that you can have lower price.
But you should take the price per graft as a determinant and if there are 10 grafts that you should plant per session, you would have to produce $60 per session off your wallet. Then you should multiply the $60 with 12 for one year cost — if you are planning to visit the surgeon once a month — and you would have to pay $720 for your hair restoration project per year.
$720 per year is not a large sum and this makes surgical hair restoration reasonable enough.