J
John Morrison
member
Hi everyone,
This forum and the people who share their experiences here has been a priceless resource and source of hope for me during a very difficult time, so I'd like to pay that back by documenting my experience and hopefully provide people reading this with some useful information.
I'm 30 (31 in less than two weeks, so essentially 31). I've been dealing with hair loss since my early to mid-20s. I currently take Propecia to treat my condition. I have been taking it for over six months and have had a good experience with it, no side effects and some modest regrowth (mostly pigment returning to some hairs and reversal of miniaturisation)
Pre-Consultation
Mark Tam offers an online pre-consultation service for free to all prospective patients. This just involved sending pictures and getting an estimate on number of grafts, hairline design, cost and whether or not he would recommend the procedure and take you on as a patient. I found this helpful because his consultation fee is £180, so at the very least it was good to have a rough idea of whether or not I would be suitable for the procedure and whether he would be suitable for my goals before paying that.
Consultation
The consultation was incredibly detailed. It lasted quite a long time and the end result was a thorough plan for surgery. The consultation started with the usual patient history questions (health issues, are you on preventative medication, family hair loss history etc.). We then moved onto scalp microscopy where the native density of the donor area was measured, this allowed the doctor to calculate a target density for the treatment area. The suitable range in my case was 50-60 follicular units per cm2. I chose to go with 50 as this was my first surgery. We then moved onto hairline design, with each part of the treatment area split into sections. Each section was then digitally mapped to give a precise area, and this allowed Mark to plan how many grafts to implant in each area to give the desired density. I will attach pictures from the consultation to illustrate what I mean. In the end the treatment area worked out at 56.7 cm2 with a density of 50 grafts per cm2 to give a graft number of 2835. As I said the process was very detailed but in my opinion the success and failure of the majority of these procedures comes down to the planning and the smart distribution of grafts.
Surgery
I had the consultation in September 2021 and booked surgery for July 26th 2022, so I had a long wait! The reason was that as I'm a teacher I get a six week break to recover and at least have some chance of looking normal (probably wishful thinking) before going back to work! I'll say now that in my estimation and from the research I've done the work that Mark Tam and his team do on surgery day is the absolute best practice. On surgery day you are the only patient in the clinic (Mark Tam is fairly low output, he only sees a couple of patients a week), so the entire day is dedicated to you. Mark does all of the excisions himself as well as making the recipient sites. Grafts are analysed under microscopes by his team who he has worked with for years. Implantation is performed by the technicians. I was made to feel comfortable the entire time, during the making of the recipient sites and the implantation I was free to watch TV or listen to podcasts. The surgery was a very long day (I'll go through the structure of the day below), I was there from 7 in the morning to around 8 at night. It was long and tedious but the team were very patient and took as long as the job required, they were happy to do the work the way it needed to be done. At the end of the day a car service is provided to take you straight home free of charge. Honestly I think this is fairly important as it minimised any disruption to the grafts.
The structure of the day was as follows (I'm kind of guessing the timings tbh):
7:00 Hairline design and haircut
9:00 extractions
13:00 Lunch (from Cote Brasserie, I had smoked salmon to start, fillet steak for main and chocolate fondant for dessert)
14:00 recipient sites
16:00 Implantation
19:30 Final checks and debrief
20:00 home time
Post - Procedure
Healing has been very smooth. I didn't have much bleeding at all either from the treatment or donor area. Scabs have healed pretty quickly and are nearly all gone now. I was very lucky to avoid any swelling and have not really felt any pain, maybe some mild discomfort at most. The worst aspects have been the itchiness that set in around day 3 of recovery, but that improved very quickly. I've made sure to wash my hair regularly and sleep upright.
Yesterday (day 10 post-op) I had a check up with Mark. He was very happy with how things have progressed. We looked at the donor area with microscopes and it looks almost untouched, it's been very well preserved. We also looked at samples of the treatment area and counted the follicles and it was good to see that 50 grafts per cm2 was achieved.
I could not recommend Mark Tam highly enough. I chose him because I wanted a surgeon who only takes one patient on a given day, who performs the extractions and makes the recipient sites themselves, who works with a highly qualified team, who takes the utmost care to properly manage the most precious resource of all (more precious than money!): your donor hair and has a long track record of consistently good results. If these are characteristics that are important to you then you will find them with Dr. Mark Tam.
Before signing off I'll give some stats from the surgery:
Graft count:
Singles: 451
Doubles: 1,331
Triples: 1,069
For a total of 2,851 follicular units and 6,320 hairs.
Consultation Photos:
Pre-Op:
Day 1 Post-Op (Recipient Area)
Day 1 Post Op (Donor Area)
Day 11 Post-Op (Recipient Area)
Day 11 Post-Op (Donor Area)
I hope this was a useful post and I'll make sure to keep you all updated on my progress!
This forum and the people who share their experiences here has been a priceless resource and source of hope for me during a very difficult time, so I'd like to pay that back by documenting my experience and hopefully provide people reading this with some useful information.
I'm 30 (31 in less than two weeks, so essentially 31). I've been dealing with hair loss since my early to mid-20s. I currently take Propecia to treat my condition. I have been taking it for over six months and have had a good experience with it, no side effects and some modest regrowth (mostly pigment returning to some hairs and reversal of miniaturisation)
Pre-Consultation
Mark Tam offers an online pre-consultation service for free to all prospective patients. This just involved sending pictures and getting an estimate on number of grafts, hairline design, cost and whether or not he would recommend the procedure and take you on as a patient. I found this helpful because his consultation fee is £180, so at the very least it was good to have a rough idea of whether or not I would be suitable for the procedure and whether he would be suitable for my goals before paying that.
Consultation
The consultation was incredibly detailed. It lasted quite a long time and the end result was a thorough plan for surgery. The consultation started with the usual patient history questions (health issues, are you on preventative medication, family hair loss history etc.). We then moved onto scalp microscopy where the native density of the donor area was measured, this allowed the doctor to calculate a target density for the treatment area. The suitable range in my case was 50-60 follicular units per cm2. I chose to go with 50 as this was my first surgery. We then moved onto hairline design, with each part of the treatment area split into sections. Each section was then digitally mapped to give a precise area, and this allowed Mark to plan how many grafts to implant in each area to give the desired density. I will attach pictures from the consultation to illustrate what I mean. In the end the treatment area worked out at 56.7 cm2 with a density of 50 grafts per cm2 to give a graft number of 2835. As I said the process was very detailed but in my opinion the success and failure of the majority of these procedures comes down to the planning and the smart distribution of grafts.
Surgery
I had the consultation in September 2021 and booked surgery for July 26th 2022, so I had a long wait! The reason was that as I'm a teacher I get a six week break to recover and at least have some chance of looking normal (probably wishful thinking) before going back to work! I'll say now that in my estimation and from the research I've done the work that Mark Tam and his team do on surgery day is the absolute best practice. On surgery day you are the only patient in the clinic (Mark Tam is fairly low output, he only sees a couple of patients a week), so the entire day is dedicated to you. Mark does all of the excisions himself as well as making the recipient sites. Grafts are analysed under microscopes by his team who he has worked with for years. Implantation is performed by the technicians. I was made to feel comfortable the entire time, during the making of the recipient sites and the implantation I was free to watch TV or listen to podcasts. The surgery was a very long day (I'll go through the structure of the day below), I was there from 7 in the morning to around 8 at night. It was long and tedious but the team were very patient and took as long as the job required, they were happy to do the work the way it needed to be done. At the end of the day a car service is provided to take you straight home free of charge. Honestly I think this is fairly important as it minimised any disruption to the grafts.
The structure of the day was as follows (I'm kind of guessing the timings tbh):
7:00 Hairline design and haircut
9:00 extractions
13:00 Lunch (from Cote Brasserie, I had smoked salmon to start, fillet steak for main and chocolate fondant for dessert)
14:00 recipient sites
16:00 Implantation
19:30 Final checks and debrief
20:00 home time
Post - Procedure
Healing has been very smooth. I didn't have much bleeding at all either from the treatment or donor area. Scabs have healed pretty quickly and are nearly all gone now. I was very lucky to avoid any swelling and have not really felt any pain, maybe some mild discomfort at most. The worst aspects have been the itchiness that set in around day 3 of recovery, but that improved very quickly. I've made sure to wash my hair regularly and sleep upright.
Yesterday (day 10 post-op) I had a check up with Mark. He was very happy with how things have progressed. We looked at the donor area with microscopes and it looks almost untouched, it's been very well preserved. We also looked at samples of the treatment area and counted the follicles and it was good to see that 50 grafts per cm2 was achieved.
I could not recommend Mark Tam highly enough. I chose him because I wanted a surgeon who only takes one patient on a given day, who performs the extractions and makes the recipient sites themselves, who works with a highly qualified team, who takes the utmost care to properly manage the most precious resource of all (more precious than money!): your donor hair and has a long track record of consistently good results. If these are characteristics that are important to you then you will find them with Dr. Mark Tam.
Before signing off I'll give some stats from the surgery:
Graft count:
Singles: 451
Doubles: 1,331
Triples: 1,069
For a total of 2,851 follicular units and 6,320 hairs.
Consultation Photos:
Pre-Op:
Day 1 Post-Op (Recipient Area)
Day 1 Post Op (Donor Area)
Day 11 Post-Op (Recipient Area)
Day 11 Post-Op (Donor Area)
I hope this was a useful post and I'll make sure to keep you all updated on my progress!
