How turkey hacked the hair-transplant industry

I did it a few years ago when I was living in Istanbul. One evening, a friend of mine wouldn't shut up about the procedure. I ended up booking it almost on a whim, mostly just to prove him wrong. I did the transplant the next day. In the end, I was very happy with the results. I think it cost around 1500$.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/olalonde/olalonde.github.c...

As a guy that started experiencing moderate hair loss in his 20s, I spent countless hours researching the Turkish hair transplant industry.

It's a case of having the right people at the right place, at the right time. Turkey have some of the leading doctors and clinics in this field, and have had for years. They were also located in a place which was close to both customers from Europe and the Middle-East, and could offer FUE (Follicular Unit Extraction) procedures at a very nice price.

Even the very top doctors there were charging a relatively modest price, compared to their (more) western colleagues. And I guess with the sheer volume they'd go through, they discovering new best practices, techniques, etc. along the way.

Back when I did research on this, now 15 years ago, the industry was starting to really take off. This was reflected in the prices that the best clinics charged. Some of them jumped up 50% in a short time, when photo-driven social media like Instagram started blowing up.

And then a whole industry sprung out of it. Many excellent clinics, tons more mediocre (to horrendous) ones that are only trying to compete on price.

Guess this also goes for the dental industry there.

My grandmother used to say, "the Americans are going to space while we're just growing butt-hair". She was so close!

It is a huge unspoken reality how much one's physical appearance affects the way they are treated, their life outcomes, and ultimate success in social/romantic relationships. Hair transplants, leg lengthening, plastic surgery, etc. will all explode over the next decade as AI erodes humans' ability to be successful via their industry and intellect.

I did one in Thessaloniki, Greece eight years ago. Here's a photo album of me before, during, after, and recently:

https://immich.home.stavros.io/s/transplant

Why is "turkey" lowercased? For that matter the country's official name is Türkiye as of 2022.

So I spent time living in Istanbul a few years ago. It really was wild. In the touristy areas (near where I lived), you really would see loads and loads of bald guys walking around with stitches on their heads.

If I were bald, I would totally go there and do the same.

The title just goes to show that

1. the turkish government had reasons for trying to get people to use "Türkiye" instead.

2. It's still not working.

I 100% thought this was about birds until clicking

Words are truly losing their meaning if its a hack to develop a business.

I had mine done in Rio de Janeiro, not in Turkey, but I understand the costs are similar for both. I had 2 sessions performed 6 months apart, total cost of about USD $5,000. In the US it might have been $20,000 or more. Each session was about 10+ hours, but with the local anesthesia it went by surprisingly quickly. I take dutasteride and apply topical minoxidil daily.

This was in 2023, and I'm largely happy with the results since then. If I had my 20s to do over again, I would have tried to go just the medication route and avoid the procedure. I do think that would have resulted in a more natural appearance vs. what I have now.

What I think is surprising about this article is that I would expect the top HN comment to call out that it's an advertorial for the Turkish hair replacement industry. It's like something you'd usually find on the Yahoo News page - the only reason it seems to have survived on the front page of HN is because it's in Wired and it's got the word hack used inappropriately in both title and body. If I can't rely on HN to sniff out the paid BS, what do I have to do, figure it out myself?

Why are so many people brainwashed to think baldness==bad? My hair really started to go down around 30 years old and am going to have to shave my head at some point, but who cares? Why does it matter?

Has there been any progress on cloning hair follicles? I don’t want to move the hair around. I simply want more hair.

This concept in known as medical tourism. [1]

I was business admin student in college and my concentration was in entrepreneurship. Part of the program was a class were I had write a business plan and I chose medical tourism. This was back in 2006-ish. Even back then, there was trend where Americans would travel abroad for surgery, but cosmetic surgery was not that popular. Mostly people would go to India, bc the quality of care was high and orders of magnitude cheaper.

Good to know my entrepreneurial instinct was somewhat accurate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism

This article is just an advert disguised as journalism.

" Most experts agree that Turkey’s strategy for success in hair transplantation no longer relies on low prices or volume; instead, it hinges on creating an unshakable brand value through innovation, purpose-built technological equipment, and medical expertise that has proven itself on a global scale. "

Some related research (in mice) from the news this morning (mainly in the last couple of sections of the article) - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg7p8n9g2klo

I don't understand how can you trust these foreigners-oriented clinics in counties with otherwise miserable healthcare. These clinics are not an exception from dysfunctional healthcare system, they are the very result and fruit of it.

Walking thru the streets of Istanbul, it seems that female nosejobs are even more common than male hair transplants.

I think Turkish factory style dentists accumulate something like 100 times more experience?

If you're considering this, what I learned during my hair transplant journey may be useful. There are a variety of surgical techniques to address hair loss including different kinds and degrees of transplants and scalp reductions. Most hair loss progresses over many years until it eventually reaches a stable state. A big part of getting optimal results is identifying your kind of hair loss, where you are in the progression and correctly estimating how it will continue - then matching the proper technique or combination of techniques.

Some less-than-ideal outcomes are from mismatching the procedure(s) to the patient or doing too much too early in the loss period. If the progression occurs differently than expected after the procedure the outcome can become unbalanced. A few patients can be one-and-done but for many patients multiple steps over time can increase the odds of optimal outcomes. Generally, you should NOT push for one-and-done unless you're that rare candidate. Figuring out the pattern, progression and matching the correct plan of attack is where the experience and diligence of the practitioner matter most.

While a lot of hair loss clinics market the 'artistry' of their doctors, the reality is that performing the procedures tends to be fairly rote. My eventual outcome was great, but I totally lucked into it. It was still the late 90s when my hair loss progressed from "just some thinning" to the early stages of "have you considered a comb-over?" I went to a clinic and was told I was most likely early in a 'full loss' progression and that I'd probably need more than one scalp reduction before even starting transplants. They also advised waiting more than a year between scalp reductions for optimal results.

I was disappointed because I'd been hoping to walk in and walk out a few hours later with "Brad Pitt hair." But just having turned 30, I was feeling insecure about my hair, still dating and looking for "The One." So I signed up and insisted the surgeon "go big" on the first scalp reduction. The procedure itself was fine but the week-long recovery kicked my ass and for several months afterward my scalp felt stretched to the limit. To be fair, they did fully warn me on all this, I just hadn't taken it seriously enough. As I recovered, I decided it just wasn't worth it and gave up on the hair thing.

After it had settled for a year, the one big scalp reduction did improve things back to "just thinning" but eventually the loss progressed (as I was warned it would). But I'd already decided "it is what it is". Fortunately, it turns out when I met "The One" a couple years later she didn't care about my hair (despite being, according to my friends, waaaay out of my league) :-). Jump forward another ~20 years and my now-wife is seeing a plastic surgeon for C-section scar removal and mentions "If you still care, they do hair transplants."

Thanks to the now-ancient mega-scalp reduction, my hair never reached "full loss" but it'd stopped somewhere deep in comb-over territory. I didn't care that much but decided to do a consult anyway. Based on my unique history, the doc asked for year-by-year photos to gauge how things had progressed since the scalp reduction (photos from kid birthday parties worked well). Turns out that doing the mother-of-all scalp reductions and waiting ~20 years to reach full progression was, accidentally, the perfect plan. Now the target was clear, unmoving and reduced enough they could nail it in a one-and-done transplant by taking ALL the donor hair - which is rare. Most procedures are done on patients still in progression, but each patient only has a limited amount of donor hair, so they don't 'harvest' all of it because some will be needed later in the progression. They just don't know exactly where yet.

So I did it and ~5 years later, it still looks perfect. The procedure took most of a day but was pretty easy. The interesting part was the top-notch, deeply experienced plastic surgeon didn't do the procedure herself. It was done by two sub-contractor technicians who travel from clinic to clinic over a multi-state area doing nothing but transplants all day, every day. The doc explained its really best because they can do it very well and fast (apparently speed in parts of the procedure can improve the follicle survival rate). Of course, she checked in during the day and was on-hand in case anything went wrong. You don't need Sully Sullenberger in the cockpit on every milk run, as long as he's there on the rare flight that ends in the Hudson River.

tl;dr In my experience, once you have a skilled assessment, correctly matched procedure(s) and plan of attack, then using lower cost technicians to do the actual procedure should be fine - as long as there's an experienced back-stop available in the event of an "unscheduled water landing" (do 737s have scheduled water landings)? My only other concern would be ensuring they don't harvest too much, too early from some patients. Doing so would probably lift their 90-day customer satisfaction but at the expense of nefing 10-year C-Sat. To be fair, that could happen at pricier U.S. clinics too (my technicians had both started in those places and we got to gossiping over that long day).

Wayne Rooney lost his strength, motivation and creativity directly after his hair transplant. Some speculate the pills you need to take forever afterwards mess up your hormones. It's not worth it just to look good for women and "impressing" other people. His body turned into a fat womens body.