Depend­ing on your hair loss sit­u­a­tion, the cost of a hair trans­plant can vary from per­son to per­son. For some, the cost of a hair trans­plant is a major con­cern. Espe­cially is these times of eco­nomic cri­sis, spend­ing thou­sands of dol­lars on a cos­metic pro­ce­dure may seem a lit­tle extreme.

A piece of advice I would give would be to do some thor­ough research when it comes to hair trans­plant cost. Due to the pop­u­lar­ity of hair trans­plant surgery and the advances in tech­niques of fol­lic­u­lar unit graft tech­nol­ogy, the mar­ket is flooded with spe­cial low prices for hair trans­plant grafts.

Although the cost of a hair trans­plant surgery may seem extreme to many, you have to con­sider the long term invest­ment it will have on your self esteem and the results are for a life­time. If you have suf­fered from hair loss, and you are read­ing this, you know what the feel­ing is like. You may ask your­self, “where do I start?” when decid­ing on hair trans­plant cost. I real­ize cost is an issue, but you have to con­sider that what you pay now will only affect you in the short term. Sure, you want to look for the low­est price, but also keep in mind that your hair trans­plant surgery is per­ma­nent. If you try and save a few bucks and skimp a lit­tle, you may get a ‘not so impres­sive’ out­come. Most hair trans­plants are pretty good these days, so don’t get too scared. The doll-head like result is still seen at times in a town near you, but it is not so com­mon any­more. This type of surgery has really advanced in the last 10 to 15 years. The best hair trans­plant surg­eries are the pro­ce­dures that you never rec­og­nize. You don’t rec­og­nize the trans­plant because its looks so natural.

Now, sev­eral fac­tors can con­tribute to the cost of a hair trans­plant. One fac­tor would be the num­ber of ses­sions you want to have. The sec­ond fac­tor would be the type of pro­ce­dure used. Third, hair trans­plant cost may be deter­mined by where you have the pro­ce­dure. For exam­ple, the cost of a hair trans­plant may be more expen­sive if the surgery is per­formed by a hair restora­tion clinic. These clin­ics carry more of an over­head to run. Con­trar­ily, if you have the pro­ce­dure done by a doc­tor or sur­geon who is in pri­vate prac­tice, it may cost less due to the lower over­head. This will ulti­mately trans­late to a con­sid­er­able sav­ings to the client.

Over­all cost of a hair trans­plant actu­ally varies on each client’s par­tic­u­lar hair loss sit­u­a­tion. This also has to be cou­pled with real­is­tic expec­ta­tions to the client. Keep­ing the real­is­tic expec­ta­tions in mind, the cost can be as lit­tle as $2,500 all the way up to $9,000 price range. Most doc­tors’ will pitch or sell you on price per graft, which will usu­ally run between $3 to $8 price ranges. Remem­ber, each graft can con­tain 1,2,3, or 4 hairs. The aver­age price for most doc­tors is typ­i­cally $5 to $6 per graft.
Let us look at the big pic­ture of hair trans­plant cost. Many men and women spend hun­dreds of dol­lars a year on hair pre­ven­tion prod­ucts such as Rogaine and Prope­cia. These prod­ucts can be effec­tive in some peo­ple, but the results will be lost if you dis­con­tinue tak­ing these prod­ucts. Many peo­ple opt for non-surgical pro­ce­dures such as hair sys­tems, hair weaves, wigs, and other non-surgical solu­tions. The major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion sup­ports the opin­ion that, hair trans­plant surgery is the most attrac­tive option because it was the only per­ma­nent solu­tion, and it looks natural.

The fact is, if you are start­ing to lose your hair then the ear­lier you start to deal with the prob­lem the longer you will be able to keep your hair. Like most other med­ical con­di­tions, if you treat the under­ly­ing prob­lem early it is much eas­ier, and much cheaper, than if you wait till it gets out of hand. As soon as you start to see extra hairs lay­ing on your pil­low in the morn­ing, or a clump in the shower drain, you need to have a plan to buy a hair loss treat­ment and start using it.

Of course, the big ques­tion then is which prod­uct or prod­ucts should you buy. Before you can answer that ques­tion you need to under­stand what is the under­ly­ing cause of your hair loss in the first place. Over 9 out of 10 men who expe­ri­ence early hair loss do so because of a hered­i­tary med­ical con­di­tion called Andro­genic Alope­cia. The com­mon name for this is Male Pat­tern Bald­ness. This name comes from the fact that men will tend to lose their hair in one of two pat­tern areas. Either they see thin­ning on the crown of the head which is the top, or they will have a reced­ing hair line above the fore­head. If left untreated these two areas will migrate toward each other and even­tu­ally combine.

The cause of this thin­ning is what you actu­ally need your hair loss rem­edy to treat. Within your body there are many hor­mones and hor­monal sub­stances. They actu­ally are the mes­sen­gers which keep your sys­tems oper­at­ing prop­erly. One of these, the male hor­mone testos­terone has many func­tions, but for our pur­poses we are inter­ested in what hap­pens when it is metab­o­lized by the enzyme 5-alpha reduc­tase. When this hap­pens a new sub­stance is formed called Dihy­drotestos­terone. This is actu­ally the metabo­lite which is respon­si­ble for male pat­tern bald­ness. Many hair replace­ment prod­ucts focus on the scalp and the health of the hair shaft, because this is eas­ier to do, and they neglect the real cause which is DHT. Any prod­uct you choose must deal with what causes hair loss at the root.

There are two meth­ods of slow­ing or stop­ping the affect of DHT. The first is to block the pro­duc­tion of it. The FDA has approved an oral med­ica­tion, Finas­teride, which seems to work well but it has many neg­a­tive side effects. These include loss of libido, sex drive, in men and poten­tial birth defects for preg­nant women. Because of this many peo­ple shy away from this drug. Two nat­ural alter­na­tives are Saw Pal­metto extract and Stingy Net­tle Root. Both of these also seem to limit the amount of DHT produced.

The sec­ond way of deal­ing with the prob­lem is to pro­tect the hair fol­li­cles, (hair roots) from attack in the first place. Another FDA approved drug, Minox­i­dil, does a good job of this by bond­ing with the recep­tors on the hair roots that the dihy­drotestos­terone would nor­mally bond to. This drug is actu­ally used by both men and women and it is applied to the scalp top­i­cally twice a day.

Start today to deal with your hair loss and be sure you are actu­ally treat­ing the root cause and not just the sur­face issues involved.

Men and women who lose their hair, are either expe­ri­enc­ing hair thin­ning, com­plete bald­ing, or in most cases suf­fer­ing from a genetic con­di­tion known as andro­ge­netic alope­cia. This is pre­pon­der­ance for los­ing one’s hair on cer­tain areas of the scalp that is passed from one gen­er­a­tion to the next. It used to be believed that the bald­ing prob­lem was only passed down through the mother’s genes but that is no longer true. Now we know that this form of hair loss, or alope­cia, is not deter­mined by one par­ent or the other.

Andro­ge­netic alope­cia, also known as pat­tern bald­ness or pat­tern hair loss, is caused by a sit­u­a­tion that actu­ally stops the hair fol­li­cles from pro­duc­ing hair shaft mate­r­ial. The fol­li­cle can be thought of as the hair fac­to­ries in one’s body. The fol­li­cle is con­nected to the blood sup­ply which pro­vides it with oxy­gen and nutri­ents which are essen­tial for the man­u­fac­tur­ing of hair. When pat­tern bald­ness is active a hor­monal metabo­lite known as DHT is pro­duced in the body and even­tu­ally makes its way to hair fol­li­cle. The DHT bonds to the hair fol­li­cles and causes a dis­rup­tion in the pro­duc­tion of hair mate­r­ial. Nor­mally a hair fol­li­cle will pro­duce hair in a cycli­cal man­ner. It goes through growth and rest stages that can last sev­eral months. The DHT short­ens the growth phase of the fol­li­cle to the point that it can no longer pro­duce a healthy hair shaft and the shaft falls out. If not treated quickly, the pat­tern bald­ness will ren­der the fol­li­cle com­pletely ineffective.

The best hair restora­tion sys­tem involves deal­ing with the affect of DHT and also trans­plant­ing new hair fol­li­cles into the balded area. There are two hair loss treat­ment drugs that have been approved by the US FDA and have proved effec­tive at slow­ing down the loss of hair but they will not do much to re-energize the fol­li­cles that have stopped pro­duc­ing so these hair fol­li­cles must be replaced. Of the two drugs only one, Minox­i­dil, is approved for both men and females. This is a top­i­cal solu­tion that is applied to the scalp and helps to allow the hair fol­li­cles to con­tinue to pro­duce as needed. The sec­ond drug, Finas­teride, is only pre­scribed for men as it can cause birth defects. This drug actu­ally works to limit the amount of DHT that is pro­duced in the body. Hair restora­tion doc­tors will usu­ally use one or both of these drugs to keep what hair there is still grow­ing along with hair implan­ta­tion to pro­vide replace­ment hair fol­li­cles for the bald­ing that has already occurred.

The part of the sys­tem that causes the high­est hair restora­tion costs is the implan­ta­tions. Thus if a per­son can start the treat­ments early to save what hair they still have the hair restora­tion price will be much lower. As is usu­ally the case, the sooner a prob­lem is addressed the cheaper it is to deal with.  Apply­ing the cor­rect hair replace­ment sys­tems can get you the head of hair you deserve. Start today to deter­mine your path to a full head of hair.

If you’re start­ing to get wor­ried because you think you’re los­ing your hair or just won­der­ing if the amount you’re los­ing is nat­ural, take a small hand­ful of hair in your hand and tug it as hard as you can. If you have more than six strands of hair in your hand then you are los­ing hair. A nat­ural loss would be less than six strands of hair a day. The “how to tell if you are los­ing your hair” test is the best way to make the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between nor­mal shed­ding and per­me­ate hair loss.

Hair loss is a big con­cern for many men, women and chil­dren. There are many causes. You may know that you have rapid hair loss already or even a lit­tle loss and won­der what is caus­ing it. Maybe you already have a patch of hair loss. You may not be sure so here’s a good way to tell if it’s abnor­mal or not.

What do you do about it?

First of all try to deter­mine if it’s related to any cur­rent med­ical diag­no­sis you have right now. Then take a look at any med­ica­tions you may be tak­ing in case it’s tem­po­rary and related to med­ica­tions, med­i­cines or drugs.

If you’re a man then male pat­tern bald­ness could be a pos­si­bil­ity espe­cially if you notice a reced­ing hair line. Symp­toms could be related to preg­nancy if you’re preg­nant. It could be a thy­roid issue. If you are los­ing in big chunks it could be alope­cia areata. There are many causes for hair loss.

In any case you’ll want to learn how to stop or pre­vent it. There are many ways to learn through blogs, forums and dis­cus­sion groups. How­ever one must be care­ful there because there is a lot of mis­in­for­ma­tion and guess­ing going on. It’s always bet­ter to get med­ical advice from experts in the field, espe­cially if pro­gres­sion is a mat­ter of concern.

With the busy agen­das we push our­selves to accom­plish daily, we are bound to be stressed out and exhausted. We for­get to slow down and take care of our­selves, which results in other stress related con­di­tions to occur. When you get up in the morn­ing and are get­ting ready to work, if you were to run your hand through your hair, it will come away with mul­ti­ple strands, more than the usual. And again when you wash your hair, more hair loses. Such is the human body, it acts and reacts to every­thing we do and eat. There­fore, it is essen­tial to take care of our body and try keep­ing calm and relaxed to avoid hair loss con­di­tions. Some of the other causes could be hor­monal imbal­ance, thy­roid lev­els are not cor­rect, indi­ges­tion, tak­ing of cer­tain med­ica­tion or addicted to drugs. If you are under treat­ment for some other ail­ment and have been tak­ing med­ica­tion con­tin­u­ously and notice hair loss, you will also see it stops when you stop tak­ing the pills. So, this is just a tem­po­rary con­di­tion and noth­ing major. Peo­ple have today real­ized the value of using nat­ural prod­ucts since they have lit­tle or no side effects and are effective.

1.  Alter your diet

A sure shot way by which one can pro­mote hair growth is to watch their diet. Every time you eat a chip or take a drag of a cig­a­rette, you need to remem­ber you are harm­ing your body. There­fore, by keep­ing track of what you put into your mouth, you can help cleanse your sys­tem and help hair grow bet­ter. If you are over­weight, you will need to con­trol the amount of food and the kind of food you con­sume, and this will grad­u­ally reflect on your hair’s health.

2. Avoid using chem­i­cals and chang­ing brands

If there is any cer­tain sham­poo or serum that you have been using on your hair based on your hair expert’s opin­ion, do not change the brand sud­denly.  You might see mul­ti­ple adver­tise­ments and pro­mo­tions for sham­poos that pro­mote hair growth, or give you long lus­cious hair, don’t get tempted by these and fall for them. You might be sub­ject­ing your hair to stronger doses of chem­i­cals. Instead opt for aloe vera or pro­tein rich sham­poo with a good con­di­tioner to keep the nutri­ents intact and help the scalp get more blood.

There are sham­poos which are made using wal­nut bark or kelp oil that will help keep your scalp clean and stop the prob­lems of thin­ning or bald­ing. When you are done wash­ing your hair, it will not be dry, but will have cer­tain essen­tial oils remain­ing in the strands to help them grow better.

3. Hor­monal balances

Upon con­sult­ing your endocri­nol­o­gist, you will be pre­scribed med­ica­tion that will bring your hor­mones into con­trol, and curb pro­duc­tion of DHT. This will auto­mat­i­cally aid in hair growth.

When it comes to hair loss the male and female pop­u­la­tion will have expe­ri­enced it before the age 30. How­ever, the process of hair bald­ness dif­fers for each indi­vid­ual. For a num­ber of peo­ple, bald­ness is a genetic con­di­tion like andro­genic alope­cia or pro­gres­sive hair thin­ning, which is a com­mon type of hair loss.

Hair­line in women will not recede as com­pared to men; how­ever, the hair becomes thin­ner all over the head and it may lead to total bald­ness. While men at age 20 or even less get reced­ing hair­lines that look like a let­ter M, wherein hair thin­ning will start at the crown and around the sides of the head.

Another con­di­tion or type that causes hair loss is the alope­cia areata; it is often called spot hair bald­ness and occurs in all areas of the body caus­ing loss of hair, espe­cially on the scalp. There are two types of alope­cia: while alope­cia totalis is a total hair loss on the scalp, the alope­cia uni­ver­salis is a total loss of all body hair.

What­ever term suits the descrip­tion or dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of hair loss, hair bald­ness, or hair bald­ing, the fact still lies that at some point in an individual’s life the process of going bald may occur. Dev­as­tat­ing as it may seem there are solu­tions and var­i­ous options for hair loss suf­fer­ers and if prop­erly treated in the early stages the pro­gres­sion can be put to a halt.

Make sure to pick up NEWSWEEK dou­ble issue: MAY 24 & 31, 2010

John Kahen, M.D the founder and med­ical direc­tor of Bev­erly Hills Hair Restora­tion is cur­rently fea­tured in NEWSWEEK mag­a­zine, an exclu­sive issue fea­tur­ing BEST DOCTORS IN THE GREATER LOS ANGELES.

With today’s advances in cos­metic surgery hair loss suf­fer­ers can regrow the hair they lost with a hair trans­plant pro­ce­dure, but the harsh real­ity is not every­one is a can­di­date. To be a pos­si­ble can­di­date you must have a suf­fi­cient amount of donor hair. The most com­mon donor site for hair trans­plant surgery is on the head.  If the sides and back of your head have full lus­trous hair, you are in luck.  This hair can be used as donor hair to replace hair you have lost on your bald­ing spots.  If your hair in these areas is not healthy, you face a dif­fi­cult problem.

If you have lost your hair due to genet­ics, or a fam­ily his­tory, you will likely be a good can­di­date for hair trans­plant surgery.  Men who have hair loss in their fam­i­lies usu­ally have a good idea of the way the bald­ness pat­tern will play out.

Your rel­a­tives may have had hair that went bald into a horse­shoe pat­tern and held at that stage.  If this is the case, your sur­geon will know what to expect.  Then, he can take hair from the sides and back of your head as donor hair and per­form the hair transplant.

If you have lost your hair because of some kind of trauma or burns, you will also make a good can­di­date for hair trans­plant surgery.  This is because the hair you still have will prob­a­bly still be healthy.  It will pro­vide good donor hair for your hair trans­plant.  The most likely sit­u­a­tion is that you will have enough hair to make this pos­si­ble.  How­ever, if you have lost too much hair, a hair trans­plant may not be possible.

Hair loss suf­fers can ben­e­fit greatly from hair trans­plant surgery. The first step towards find­ing out if you’re a good can­di­date is sched­ul­ing a con­sul­ta­tion with at hair restora­tion sur­geon. At the time of the con­sult the Doc­tor will make a com­plete assess­ment and dis­cuss the options best to fit your indi­vid­ual needs.

Hair restora­tion pro­ce­dures have changed in the decades since they were first done. The ear­lier meth­ods of using hair plugs were not accept­able to soci­ety. Hair trans­plant patients appeared to have doll like hair. Now hair trans­plants are more nat­ural look­ing due to the inno­v­a­tive meth­ods being used, such as micro grafting.

In gen­eral, most hair trans­plant surg­eries today involve micro graft­ing. Micro grafts hold about 1–3 or four hair fol­li­cles. Older style hair grafts often held on aver­age a dozen hair fol­li­cles. These new micro grafts are only pos­si­ble because skilled sur­geons have refined their method of extract­ing them.

Micro grafts are use­ful in hair trans­plant surgery because they can give the hair a quite nat­ural appear­ance. The hair emerges from the scalp in the most nat­ural way, with the same num­ber of hairs that nature intended. If the pro­ce­dure is done cor­rectly, no one can tell the difference.

Pre­vi­ously, when hair plugs were used, doc­tors did the hair trans­plant surg­eries much dif­fer­ently. They used an instru­ment called a trephine to cut cir­cu­lar grafts from 2mm to 5mm in diam­e­ter. These plugs were inserted into the bald­ing area.

Finally, the micro grafts will be fin­ished by being divided into indi­vid­ual grafts by using a stere­omi­cro­scope. The sur­gi­cal team will make a vari­ety of grafts from eight-shaft mini grafts to one or two shaft micro grafts. These will be moved dur­ing hair trans­plant to the recip­i­ent sites so that the hair will have a nat­ural hair­line with full­ness on top.

There are sev­eral vari­a­tions avail­able and the most pop­u­lar and effec­tive of which include:

Hair Trans­plant Surgery

Hair trans­plan­ta­tion is a pro­ce­dure in which the sur­geon removes areas of hair-bearing scalp from the back or sides of the head and inserts the grafts  to the bald­ing areas. The rec­og­niz­able term for this tech­nique is ‘graft­ing’. The newly relo­cated hairs grows in the trans­planted areas that were pre­vi­ously bald. Once the hairs are trans­planted they are per­ma­nent and can be treated such as you would normally.

Hair flap surgery

Best choice for men with severe bald­ness. It involves a large flap of skin, on which hair is alive and grow­ing, to be pulled from the back and sides over the top sur­face area of the bald spot. It is then sur­gi­cally attached into place. The hair re-roots and begins to grow from its new loca­tion, ulti­mately elim­i­nat­ing any hair­less area.

Scalp tis­sue expansion

A balloon-type mech­a­nism is care­fully inserted under the scalp through an inci­sion. A salt-water con­coc­tion is added to slowly fill this bal­loon over time even­tu­ally caus­ing a swelling and stretch­ing of the scalp. The loose­ness actu­ally causes new skin cells to grow. After about two months this skin can be relo­cated to the area of bald­ness effec­tively mov­ing the hair to cover the spot.

Scalp reduc­tion surgery

 Also known as ‘advanced flap surgery’ since it is sim­i­lar in prin­ci­ple except a sec­tion of the bald scalp is actu­ally removed; rather than just pulling the skin over the hair­less spot. With the reduc­tion the sur­round­ing areas are actu­ally pulled up and con­nected in place of the absent scalp.