Looking for the best location overseas for a hair transplant?
When it comes to a hair transplant abroad, the patient must first choose between quality and safety verses the cheaper options. That means between 1) a doctor-led clinic, where a properly trained and licensed physician diagnoses the hair loss, plans the surgery and personally performs the key medical steps, verses 2) a black market “hair mill” clinic. Black market clinics are high-volume operations that rely on non-medical or poorly trained staff to carry out substantial parts of the surgery. They often have just one doctor present and that can be mainly for show. This exposes patients to serious risks such as misdiagnosis, overlooked underlying diseases, unnecessary or ill-advised surgeries, permanent scarring, infection, and disfiguration. There is often little realistic recourse to correct surgeries gone wrong.
How does a patient find a hair transplant doctor abroad? One way is to locate a doctor who is registered with a professional body like the International Society for Hair Restoration Surgery (ISHRS) or FUE Europe and FUE Asia. These professional bodies provide lists of doctors who perform the surgical parts of the procedure themselves. ISHRS, for example, is a global non-profit medical society founded in 1993 by pioneer hair transplant surgeons who wanted a formal organization to advance hair restoration surgery and to raise standards in what was then a very young field. Today, the ISHRS has more than 1,100 physician members in over 70 countries and focuses on education, clinical guidelines, ethics, and patient-safety campaigns.
The advantage of going to members of ISHRS or FUE Europe and FUE Asia is that these professional bodies insist that only a physician may make incisions and extract hair.
The danger of going to lower-cost “hair mills” is that no one knows who the technician is or what training they have completed. That can lead to a myriad of problems, including bad hair design, over harvesting, and even problems like necrosis where the hair follicles die. The advantage of a hair mills is that prices seem cheap, from $1,000 to $3,000 per hair transplant. A hair mill will almost NEVER say no to a patient getting a hair transplant because it is a volume-based business and not an ethically regulated one.
If you go to the ISHRS website you can find examples of black market surgeries that have gone alarmingly wrong.1
Here are some examples of bad outcomes from black market clinics:
This is a patient who came to Dr. Maxim Churk (an ISHRS member) after experiencing severe necrosis upon his return to the U.S. from Turkey where he had gone to an illicit clinic.2
This is a case of overharvesting by a black market clinic3
Before Hair Transplant
3 Weeks After
5 Months After
Five months after surgery, the right side is completely over harvested.
Our advice at Luxxera is for patients to do their research and to go only to reputable, registered doctors overseas, ideally ISHRS or FUE members.
The truth is that highly skilled plastic surgeons and doctors can be found at prices that are competitive with cut-cost hair mills if the patient is willing to travel far enough. Low cost-of-living countries such as Pakistan, India and Turkey offer complete hair surgeries by top doctors within the same price range as countries where air mills are abundant. You just have to know where to look and who to trust.
Keep in mind that if things go wrong, only a small percentage of hair transplant doctors can perform quality revision surgeries. Revision is much more specialized and expensive than a normal hair transplant and results are not guaranteed. Prices for revision surgeries typically start in the $10,000 plus range.
Potential patients need to be aware of the risks and decide what solution best fits their own risk profile.