Hair transplant surgery starts, after anesthesia is practiced, with removing donor tissue. Follicular units are then taken away from the tissue using a stereomicroscope. Skilled nurses and technicians do all this. The insertion of the hair into the receptor sites comes afterward.
When the follicular units for the hair transplant are dismembered out of the donor tissue, technicians set them to one side in a saline solution. The temperature must be perfect or the small grafts will not survive the procedure. This is done with care in order to guarantee a good result.
The general practitioner will make small incisions into the scalp where the hair transplant grafts are to go. These are called the receptor sites. They are made with a very slim surgical needle. The surgeon must have an eye for detail to suitably set the receptor sites. He must also be very artistic to accomplish a natural look, particularly at the hairline.
The direction the hair grows, both on the front of the head and at the crown, are very important, too. The doctor must make the condition of the newly placed hair look like the patient's own natural scalp hair. The angle that the hair is put in ascertains how much it will stand up from the head.
Once the surgeon has made all the hair transplant incisions that lay out the design he has created, the specially trained surgical team takes over. They use his plan to realize his goals, and in turn the goals of the patient. The surgeon does the groundwork for them when he does his incisions.
The surgical team takes care to get every hair transplant graft into the receptor sites as they have been laid out. They waste no time, though, because the small grafts are vulnerable when their follicles are outside of the skin. The goal is to get the grafts in as quickly as possible while staying true to the design.
Next, the doctor looks over the hair transplant for quality control. He may take a good deal of time tweaking the placement of grafts before he is satisfied that they are all set properly into their receptor sites in a pleasing fashion. When he gives the ok, the surgical technicians again take over the patient's care.
The grafts will be more permanently set into place when the technicians dry them by blowing a cool blow dryer across them. This makes them adhere in their place so that no bandages are necessary. The patient will be asked to bring, or will be given, a baseball cap for the ride home from the hair transplant procedure.
The doctor will want to see how the grafts are doing the day following the hair transplant. The patient will go in for a check-up so that any problems can be corrected quickly. If that is not possible, at least plans can be made to correct them at a future time.
At this point, the doctor will have done his job with the hair transplant procedure. All that remains are periodic checkups. If the hair loss is ample, there may be more procedures, but all the hair transplant surgeries will be done with the same measure of care.
