What I have been dealing with and why I have been away so long... Dr Woods

It has been a long time since I posted . Since being at it since 1989 and fighting the entire industry for so long I thought things would turn out for the better.

But my fear was that the pure art of FUE would be hijacked , morphed and basterdised into what it is now. Sure, on the whole it is better than strip and alll the other abominations of HT, but you cannot stop production line technology, greed and the new way that doctors need only show the tip of the ice burgh, and carefully conceal the rest from public view.

When I first started I was told it is impossible to harvest individual follicular units because they bend, go to varying depths, and move with the slightest pressure on the scalp. This would cause even greater transection that strip.

It was assumed that I was using a punch attached to a drill, which goes straight , hence there is no depth or angulation perception. . purely hit and miss.

I made it clear that it was a surgical art form where after years of practice, certain doctors with committment and patience could develop micro proprioception…that is, immediately feeling which way the follicle is going and how deep to go to remove it safely.

It became a phenomenon and went world wide. Everyone wanted FUE. So, the doctors ditched the scalpel blades and gave their techs drills and began doing exactly what they were accusing me of back in the early 1990s.

So now I am stuck with massive repair work after FUE Mega sessions . In many cases the entire donor, chest and beard wiped out for a hairline.

In many cases I have to send patients away as there is absolutely nothing I can do for them. There is simply not enough donor left and that is heat breaking and depressing for the patient and me.

What many clinic prey on is patient insecurity, and the promise of outrageous numbers of follicles at a cheap price.
It is not uncommon for clinics to offer several thousand grafts in one session.
I recently had a patient who went to an an overseas clinic and was told he received 4000 grafts in one session. The result is disastrous, unnatural and there is little I can do as all donor areas were hit hard and decimated.

To safely remove and place that many grafts without massive trauma is physically impossible .
But patients flock to these clinics , seduced by high numbers at a low price.

And over 90 percent of the work is done by techs,

I cannot stop this tsunami of substandard work, but what I have done is trained, over several years, my son, Michael Woods to implant grafts under the same strict protocol of high power monitoring and accountability for each and every graft.

This will make the procedure cheaper and slow down the destruction we are currently seeing.
There will be disclaimers etc, but I know it is the best tech procedure in the world.

Other patients will want to have me do the entire procedure exclusively, and this is more expensive and still subject to the list of patient rights formulated in the early 1990s.

This means there will be a 2 tier approach.

From what I have seen going on over the last few years, this is inevitable and I must offer patients on tighter budgets a safe, monitored , accountable and supervised procedure.

Dr Ray Woods

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I don’t have your Email any longer. Are you interested in attending the FUE Manchester meeting June 6-8, 2019?