The History Of Hair Transplant Surgery
Posted by Owen Jones in Uncategorized, tags: aging, alternative medicine, attraction, beauty, diseases, hair loss, health, men's issues, nutrition, other, skin care, supplements, Uncategorized, women's issuesAs with all forms of surgery, hair transplanting has improved much since it was first practiced. However, hair transplanting is not that old, in fact it is one of the newest forms of surgery. It falls into the category of cosmetic surgery because it is not essential and is done merely to improve someone’s appearance, although for some people, losing one’s hair means a loss of self-confidence as well.
This is the reason why hair transplanting was pioneered. Dr. Okuda of Japan was searching for a way to replace the eyebrows of people who have lost them in an accident. This was before the Second World War and after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the practice was forgotten amidst all the other problems the Japanese were experiencing.
However, this was not the first instance of hair transplantation. Astonishingly, hair transplantation was pioneered in the late Nineteenth Century. Doctors tried to graft skin complete with hair onto bald spots, but they were unsuccessful, maybe because they did not have a good understanding of graphing.
Dr. Okuda’s work was resurrected 20 years later in the late Fifties by Dr. Norman Orentreich, who was searching for ways to hide balding. His concept was to transplant hair from fields of the head that are not subject to balding to patches that are. For men, this involves taking hairs from the side and back of the head and transplanting them to the top and front of the head.
The hairs on the side and back of the head are falling out and regrowing all the time, so they will regrow. The theory was true that hair follicles from different areas of the head behave differently. This was known as Donor Dominance.
By the Sixties and early Seventies there was an established ‘best procedure’ for transplanting hair, However, it was defective and not aesthetically pleasing, because hairs were transplanted in classes of 15-25 and they looked unnatural. It had not been realized that hairs grow in clumps of four.
In the Eighties and Nineties the size of these plugs of hair was reduced in size, so that a full transplant might involve thousands of grafts with 800-1,000 grafts being carried out in one sitting. Ubel in Brazil and Rassman in the United States were prominent in this field.
In fact, Rassman was later able to manage thousands of micro-grafts in a single sitting under local anaesthetic and it just took around a week to recover between sittings instead of the two weeks previously needed.
Nowadays, up to 50 grafts can be put into one square centimetre of skin and in the early 2000’s surgeons invented the lateral incision, which involves that a group of four hairs can be rooted in at different angles so that they lay flatter instead of sticking up in clumps like dolls’ hair. The lateral incision also provides better coverage with not so many hairs.
There is at present hot debate on the use of different variations of incisions for different purposes and the best hair transplant surgeons use a blend of techniques to cover the recipient’s head more naturally.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on numerous subjects, but is at present involved with hair treatment for dry hair. If you have an interest in hair loss, please visit our web site now at What is the Best Hair Regrowth Product?
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