Hair Restoration, Hair Transplant, Hair Loss Treatment Clinic

My Experience with Preview Long Hair Transplantation

By Marcelo Pitchon, MD. Belo Horizonte, M.G., Brazil

Dr. Marcelo Pitchon’s initial objective when he started doing Preview Long-Hair Follicular Unit Transplantation in 2004 was to provide to patients and himself a hair transplantation procedure with a same-day, immediate vision of the final result. Obviously this result would be temporary since the transplanted long hair would shed in the first month after the procedure and then start to re-grow two to three months after that.

The patients' emotional response to Preview Long-Hair Follicular Unit Transplantation as well as his personal impression was so positive and intense that he thought that just the immediate-vision-of-the-result element itself was enough and worth doing the technique in every case and developing it as much as possible.

According to the author, what he did not know was that this positive reaction from the patients to the vision of hair immediately after surgery and in the following month “was only the beginning.” Preview Long-Hair Follicular Unit Transplantation generated many other technical, behavioral, and communication changes that, a door to a whole new universe in hair transplantation was now opened.

These changes included: immediate confirmation of naturalness for the surgeon and patient; radical social downtime reduction; post operative period which is not identified or recognized by others in opposition to visible crusts; more precise compared macro evaluation of the final percentage of growth; more precise communication to the patients of their real possible expectations; more precise definition by the surgeon of the ideal density X coverage relation; enhanced interactivity between patient and the construction of his own result during surgery; more understanding by the patients about the poor growth possibilities and real poor growth situations; interactive definition of the ideal density by using the satisfaction-density concept; more understanding by patients of the importance of preservation of the donor resources and the valorization of the techniques necessary to maximize its use, among many others.

“In my four years of experience with Preview Long-Hair Follicular Unit Transplantation I did all my cases with this technique and in only two patients I had to limit the hair length to 2cm, in the middle of the surgery, in order to facilitate the procedure, which would be very hard to finish with the patient's natural hair length, because of the hair type,” writes Dr. Pitchon.

The author states that his “experience with teaching the procedure is that Preview Long-Hair Follicular Unit Transplantation requires very advanced general hair transplantation technique and very skilled surgeons to perform it. In these cases it was easily learnt and even easier if started with short lengths like 2cm and then gradually increased to longer lengths.”

“After this time doing exclusively Preview Long-Hair Follicular Unit Transplantation my impression is that, beyond the important emotional advantages, there are also technical ones generated by this method. The use of long hair is very important for the maximization of the use of the donor area, through the precise visualization and, then, definition of the ideal hair-density X area-of-hair-coverage relation.”