New Trends in Hair Restoration by John DeVree

If you have a particularly persistent or severe case of hair loss, you may have been considering hair regrowth treatment through medical hair restoration. While vitamins, shampoos, and topical creams may stimulate hair regrowth in milder cases, when things get severe, it is time to consider medical hair restoration.

While it sounds like no big deal, hair restoration is in fact a surgical procedure, and should be conducted by or under the extremely close supervision of a medical doctor. While complications are fairly rare, you nonetheless do not want to be taking any chances. After all, the procedure does involve making some incisions into your scalp, and often some suturing. A properly done medical hair restoration treatment should be conducted in sterile conditions to achieve the best result and minimize the chances of complications.

Your options for this type of hair regrowth are several. The one most people have heard about is hair transplant surgery, in which small "plugs" of hair and follicles from a healthy area of your own scalp are removed, and sutured into an unhealthy scalp area. This type of procedure has been done for quite a few years now, and the techniques have become quite refined. Newer methods include micro-surgical techniques for hair transplantation involving only hair follicles.

Another possibility is scalp reduction surgery. In this procedure, unhealthy scalp is removed, and the remaining areas of healthy scalp are stretched and pulled over the areas that have been debrided (had the skin removed).

Obviously, the larger your bald area, the less likely you are as a candidate for this procedure, which is not really hair regrowth or hair transplantation. Instead, it is more like a "face lift" for your scalp.

Laser hair treatments have gotten a lot of publicity lately, also. These involve radiating the scalp with a laser, which is thought to "clean out" hair follicles, encourage scalp and hair follicle cell metabolism, and encourage damaged (not dead) hair follicles to resume normal activity. This type of treatment seems to work best when used in conjunction with topical methods, since it seems to potentiate their effectiveness, in some cases quite dramatically.

The newest method of medical hair restoration now being investigated is hair multiplication, which involves removing healthy hair follicles, removing the stem cells, and cloning them in the laboratory to literally grow new hair follicles from your own DNA, and then micro-surgically implanting them in the areas of unhealthy scalp. Early results are encouraging, showing up to 70% of patients benefitting, and this treatment is expected to be publicly available by 2009 or 2010.

Whatever you choose, when considering any type of surgical or medical hair restoration procedure, carefully investigate your options, and be sure that you are dealing with a credible, experienced, and well-educated health care provider. That said, take heart - many men can achieve great results through medical hair restoration techniques!