The first doctoral thesis related to hair transplants was written by a medical student named Johan Dieffenbach together with his mentor, Dom Unger. Dieffenbach and Unger were the first to experiment with hair transplants, and did so on both animals and humans. They performed numerous successful transplants — including on Dieffenbach himself.The experiment on Dieffenbach consisted of moving six hairs from his head to his arm. Two fell out, two were repelled by the body, and two were successfully inserted and grew on.It was after that that it was declared that hair loss, especially male stuff, would become a part of the past. However, this was man's initial attempt at a hair transplant, and the practice would not see much progress until many years later.
Modern Hair Transplant Begins to Take Shape
A revolutionary advance was made in Japan in the 1930s when a doctor named S. Okuda managed to extract and place hair follicles with a tool he developed himself — a cylindrical, four-millimeter wide punch. A punch is an object used to make holes of the desired shape on various materials (punching). With this tool, he managed to transplant the hair of about 30 different patients, all of whom suffered from some kind of hair loss. It was the tool in question that would lay the foundation for the future of hair transplantation. Unfortunately, Okuda's studies were published in 1939 and then fell into oblivion with the Second World War. Instead, the American Dr. Norman Orentreich independently developed the same method in the 1950s. His research, on the other hand, received worldwide attention and he was named the father of modern hair transplantation. Nevertheless, Orentreich shared the credit with Okuda by naming the technique “Okuda-Orentreich” when the latter's studies came to light. Something that made Orentreich's work the key to successful hair transplants was a discovery he named “donor dominance”. The concept implies that hair extracted from an area that is not affected by alopecia (hair loss) will retain its genetic insensitivity to this. Thus, the hair will continue to grow in the place where you move it to life. If, on the other hand, you move hair from an area affected by alopecia, the hair will certainly recover, but it will also thin out over time and eventually fall out.Although the approach worked, the results were not ideal. The appearance of the new hair growth in these cases gave rise to the expression “doll hair”. With the idea of developing the technique and bringing about a more natural result, it began to be studied by many doctors and scientists around the world. The goal of developing the process resulted in what we call the FUT (Follicular Unit Transplant) /strip method. This method was introduced by Dr. Rassman and Bernstein, among others, in the 1980s. It is described as cutting off a strip (strip) of skin with hair, extracting hair follicle groups from the strip, and then placing them in the desired location. Due to the fact that the technique uses single groups of hair follicles (grafts), they can be distributed more evenly, which makes the result more natural. The down side of the FUT method is the scarring that is created when stitching the skin together after cutting out the strip.
The optimal technology is developed
A little later, around the year 1989, a researcher named Ray Woods discovered that the depth and angle of insertion of hair follicles used to vary in a transplant. He then worked out exactly how the insertion of each graft would take place in order to achieve the best possible hair growth in the patient. At the same time, another milestone was reached — namely, that with a fine, cylindrical tube, one can extract a single hair follicle group directly from the head. The combination of these procedures became known as FUE (Follicular Unit Extraction) and is the technology we use today. In the modernized FUE method, we use a micro drill to loosen grafts in donation area. We then pick these out with tweezers. At the same time, we create microchannels in the recipient area and then place the extracted hair follicle groups there.With this method we can perform hair transplants with such precision that they neither cause side effects nor leave clear scars in the donor or recipient area. A skillfully executed FUE transplant achieves a permanent, natural result in the client.
