How long have skin punches been around for…probably for as long as scalpels. Maybe a few hundred years , where doctors were punching out follicles and studying them under early microscopes. Maybe Hippocrates had one a few thousand years ago.
I heard of Dr Okuda in around 2005, and understood he was moving follicles around but not to treat baldness per se , and not micro surgically.
Dr Orentrich used punches in the late fifties to treat androgenic Alopecia , or male pattern baldness, and this led to the industrial scale destruction of donors and devastated the lives of countless men.
So along comes strip surgery, which, as traumatic as it was, allowed more cracks at the donor before it too was wiped out. Punch gave horrible large round plugs. The strip was chopped up into horrible large “square” plugs, which were jamed into large punched out holes.
Along comes Dr Bob Limmer in 1988 and he began dissecting the strip into follicular units under a stereoscopic microscope. And that is still the gold standard in strip surgery to this day and is known as FUT, of which Dr Bob Limmer is the founder. Others, especially Dr Rassman , try to take credit .
In 1989 I decided that follicular units should be removed micro surgically, directly from the donor.
I actually thought of it when I was 17 years old as I saw family members going bald. “remove them one by one, and place them one by one…that logical.”…and to be fair , many non medical people would have thought similarly. I just actually made it happen
I rang and spoke to Dr Limmer in 1993 and shared with him my work and hoped for a collaboration, as I found it incredibly slow and difficult.
Dr Bob Limmer was a thorough gentleman but felt my ideas were impractical . He wished me luck and I promised to give him updates, as I did in 1994 . Our last contact was in 1995, when he wrote to me, and I still have the letter.
To distinguish my work from Dr Orentreich (and yes, Dr Okuda, even though I didnt hear of him at the time) … I called it FOLLICULAR SINGLE UNIT EXTRACTION, or FSUE, and Micro Direct Implantation.
I decided that hair transplantation should be entirely microsurgical.
And I stated that transection rates should be under 5%, verifiable and accountable.
The industry thought this was an impossible joke. When I began presenting irrefutable consistent evidence, they got worried as it made their bloody gravy train obsolete. So a vicious campaign to discredit me and FsUE began.
They said that I was doing nothing new and it was the same as the old punch surgery, which is obviously a ridiculous lie.
And they all knew what the real "secret " was, and it was more horrific and threatening to the industry than any fancy “tool”…
It was 7 years of constant 7 days a week round the clock commitment and practice, without hurting anyone…and that’s something this corrupt industry could never condone. Most couldn’t do it, and the few who could would loose too much money…
Dr Ray Woods
Ps…15 years later, .Arvind took my FSUE, and swapped two letters around to make FUSE . He knows this will confuse people , as he calls himself the inventor, but regardless of technique, it is the removal of individual follicular units. He is positioning himself to take ultimate credit and having a Mumbai call/info center at his disposal, he may pull it off.
And others who write the history of the industry are often those I have accused of crimes against humanity…so they leave Orentrich in, and don’t mention me. Which is embarrassing for them as every HT doc in the world knows what happened, with the exception of Dr Arvind, of course
As Henry Ford said…\\" history CAN be bunk\\"