Thank you for your time in answering these questions. It is hard to find anything on-line about hair transplants that isn’t a biased sales pitch.

How does a person know he is getting all the grafts that he is paying for? I am going in to get 900 grafts. This alone concerns me because I was originally going to get 800 but they are “throwing in” another 100 grafts because I was made to wait two hours to meet the doctor. So how do I know if I am getting 900, or 850, or for that matter 600. I have a hair-line like Bill Murray and I am trying to take some of the edge off of it.

Thank you in advance.

Honestly, you really don’t have anyway to know! Aside from having a good rapport with your doctor and being comfortable with the reputation of the medical group, the accounting process of dissecting grafts is highly variable. You may start by asking the medical group or your doctor on how the counting of the grafts are done and if you can see the sheets of paper which has the numbers of grafts cut by each technician.

Also, be aware of “graft splitting”. Sometimes a doctor may require making single hair grafts by splitting a two hair graft so that he/she can transplant it to the frontal hairline. But there should be no need to split a 4-hair graft into two 2-hair grafts or a 2-hair graft into 1-hair graft just to push up the total number of grafts. That would be like double charging you and I do believe that this is sadly quite a common practice! It may seem a bit complicated, however, your doctor should be able to produce and explain the exact number of cut grafts and how the numbers were totaled.

Bottom line, you need to have an honest doctor who you trust.

For more information, please see:

• Dishonest Doctors Are Still Out There
• More Important to Your Doctor — Patient’s Welfare or Patient’s Money?
• What Happens When a Doctor’s Car and Mansion Payment Is More Important Than You?
• The Truth About Cheap Hair Transplants
• Doctor Availability
• Dishonest Doctors and FUE

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