Hair Transplant, Sir?

There are many reasons for hair loss but 95% of all cases in men are due to a condition called "androgenetic alopecia." This is commonly referred to as "male pattern baldness."

Most cases of hair loss in women are due to inherited female pattern balding, but medical conditions such as low thyroid levels, hormonal imbalances (elevated testosterone), binge dieting, and pregnancy can contribute to the condition. Women tend to experience a subtle thinning all over the scalp and loss of volume at the top.

You may loose 10 to 200 strands of hair per day. But this hair is not dead as all the hair that falls gets replaced with new growing hair. The hair goes through a generation, growth and fall cycle which continues again with generation of new hair. You do not become bald because you are loosing more hair, you will become bald when the lost hair is not replaced with new hair.

CANDIDATES FOR HAIR RESTORATION:

Hair transplantation involves transferring hairs from the back and side of the head (the "donor area") to those areas undergoing hair loss or thinning. The hairs from the donor area are genetically programmed to be permanent. Once transplanted, these hairs will continue to grow for a lifetime, they can be groomed, shampooed and require haircuts like normal hair.


The only permanent remedy for hair loss is surgical hair restoration, or hair transplantation.

Most men in good general health are candidates for hair transplantation. if:

* You've lost hair due to an inherited trait
* You've lost hair due to trauma or burns
* You have healthy hair growth at the back and side of your head

CONSULTATION & PREPARATION:

You should arrange to have a private consultation with us. During your consultation, to develop a plan for your hair restoration ,we will determine:

* Grade of hair loss (Grade I - VII)
* Density of donor hair
* Color of hair
* Texture of hair
* Future hair loss projections
* Scalp laxity
* Number of grafts required to meet your expectations.

We recommend the pre-treatment/pre-conditioning of hair with our medicinal treatment protocol which stops hair fall, induces new hair growth and strengthens the hair roots in the recipient area prior to the transplant.
This protocol of medication uses medicines once in 3 days, reduces cost of medication and guarantees no side effects. It stops hair loss in 2 months, and thinning of hair in men and women will get corrected by 60 – 70% with cyclical medicines within 4 months. Moreover, pre conditioning the hair roots ensures a predictable and guaranteed result following the hair transplant.

Who needs a hair transplant?
Anybody below age of 23 years or not having hair loss beyond Grade III is not considered for hair transplant surgery. Patients with grade 3 hair loss respond with medicines alone; unless the patient desires to change the hairline or bring forward the temporal receding on either sides. Patients with grade 4 hair loss and more require medicines and surgery to achieve a desirable result. (HT packages)

HOSPITAL STAY/OUT-PATIENT:

Hair transplant is done as a day care procedure, and you will be discharged on the same day.

ANAESTHESIA:

It, is performed using local anaesthesia along with sedation (if required) to make you relaxed and comfortable.

FOLLICULAR UNIT MICROGRAFTING (FUT):

Today, the state of the art procedure is Follicular Unit Grafting. A follicular unit is the naturally occurring grouping of hairs containing from 1 - 3, occasionally 4 hairs. As many as 2500 grafts can be transplanted in a single procedure lasting 6 - 10 hours.




The grafts can be inserted into tiny needle- sized sites in the recipient area. A combination of these different sized grafts is used in the hair restoration, with the one-hair grafts in an irregular pattern along the hairline, and the two-, three- and four-hair grafts placed further behind to create more density. By transplanting
follicular units, the way hair grows naturally, the results of the hair transplantation are virtually undetectable.

The front and top of your head will receive transplanted hair first, because these are the areas that frame your face & make the most impact on your appearance. The crown is usually the last area to receive hair (in later procedures), unless it’s your only balding area.

THE RECOVERY PERIOD:

Antibiotics & mild pain pills to reduce the chance of pain & swelling are taken the first three days after the procedure. You can shampoo your hair with a mild shampoo on day 3 following surgery and can return to work and most regular activities. You will have to return to the clinic on Day 10 to remove the sutures from the donor area at the back of your head. If you are from out of town you can get it removed from a qualified practitioner close to your place.

Weight-lifting, heavy exercise, and swimming can be resumed after one week, once the stitches used to close the donor site have been removed.

Patients find that their “new” hair falls out within 3-6 weeks after surgery. This condition is normal and almost always temporary. After hair falls out, it will take another 5-6 weeks before hair growth resumes. To help accelerate the growth of the transplants, we recommend the patient to start the medicinal treatment protocol again following the removal of the sutures as it reverses or halts the miniaturization process in many individuals and is thus the logical way to decrease the risk of shedding following a transplant. You can expect about a 2-3cm of growth per month after 3 months of the operation.

FOLLOW-UP PROCEDURES:

You may need a "touch-up" procedure to create more natural-looking results or to increase the density if required, after your incisions have healed. This is carried out approx. 4-6 months following the first surgery.
The results of hair replacement surgery can enhance your appearance, self-confidence and change your persona.

Mexican medicine

Dorthea, 72, a retired bank teller, lives in Harlingen, Texas, a city of about 67,000 in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley. Like a lot of Texans, she's crossed the border to Mexico a few times to buy cheap medication. But she'd never considered undergoing complicated medical procedures there—at least, not until she was quoted the prohibitive price of $30,000 for a gastric-band procedure, a treatment for obesity in which a band is placed around the stomach to limit food intake. It wasn't covered by her insurance, so Dorthea, who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, opted to drive south and pay less than $10,000 for the outpatient operation at an American-owned hospital in Reynosa, Mexico, 10 minutes over the border and about an hour from her home. The outpatient surgery was a success, and she's planning on returning for follow-up care. "It was very good treatment," she says.

Medical tourism, which used to be mainly for elective surgery, and aimed at people who could afford weeklong trips to Brazil, is becoming an increasingly viable source of more basic health care for some of those sidelined by the insurance system in America, where 47 million people are uninsured and many millions are underinsured. Now, Americans like Dorthea who live along the Mexican border are driving and even walking south in search of treatment that can cost half or less of what it does in the United States. In response, American hospital chains are starting to buy into Mexico; Dallas-based CHRISTUS Health has built six hospitals in Mexico, including the Reynosa facility Dorthea visited, through its partnership with a Mexican chain. Most of its doctors are Mexican with Mexican medical degrees.


Comment: Just remember the saying (which holds true here) "You get what you pay for."
Maybe you should talk to those individuals, who have developed complications and unable to get the necessary follow-up care in Mexico. Just ask this same group how much money they had to pay out of pocket (100% that is) to correct the complication.
Maybe you should talk to those individuals horrified to find out the "nurse," who really was NOT a nurse, took "care" of them.

Sleepwalk? Try Sleepsex!

It's Called 'Sexsomnia'

People with this rare disorder engage in sexual activity while asleep, but don't remember it later. Yes some actually snored while the sex act was steaming full ahead.

When Jan Luedecke of Toronto was arrested and tried for sexual assault, he had an unusual defense—he did it in his sleep. Ha-ha.
Really.
It may sound farfetched, but Luedecke, who was 33 at his 2005 trial, had a history of sleepwalking. On the night in question, he'd been drinking at a party and found himself sacked out on the couch with a woman he'd met there. Hours later, she jolted him awake and demanded to know what he was doing. Luedecke claimed he was unaware he was having sex with her. "Under the law, if there's no intent to commit a crime, you haven't committed a crime," says Dr. Colin Shapiro, director of the Youthdale Child and Adolescent Sleep Center in Toronto, who testified for the defense. Luedecke was acquitted (to the outrage of women's organizations in Canada), and the case is now on appeal.

Add sex to the roster of unlikely sleep behaviors known as parasomnias, which range from sleep driving to sleep eating. Psychiatrist Carlos Schenck and neurologist Mark Mahowald of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center published a review article in the journal Sleep on what they call "sleepsex," or "sexsomnia." Think of it as a more advanced form of sleepwalking. It covers the full gamut of sexual activity, from fondling to intercourse, with one crucial difference. The patients apparently have no conscious awareness of what they're doing and, when wakened, have no recollection of it.

Is this for real?
Reported cases are still rare—Schenck and Mahowald found only 31 in the medical literature. But they say that's partly because of the embarrassing nature of the problem and partly because there's so little public awareness of it. Sexsomnia was not even recognized by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine until 2005. Psychologist Michael Mangan at the University of New Hampshire, author of the 2001 book "Sleepsex: Uncovered," believes there are far more cases than the literature would indicate. He maintains a Web site on sleepsex that has registered comments from more than 1,000 sufferers.

Sleepsex is far different from your average sexual dream. Dreams occur during REM sleep, when the body is largely paralyzed. Sleepsex takes place during partial arousal from deep sleep, when one is free to move. Dreams can be remembered later, under the right circumstances. But sleepsex appears to belong to a mental netherworld in which brain regions devoted to higher thought, judgment and reasoning are shut down, while areas governing more primitive functions (such as locomotion, eating and sex) are still active. Put them together, and it can be a bad combination for someone who is already predisposed to sleepwalking or other parasomnias. For such a person, anything that induces more deep sleep—such as excessive alcohol consumption or persistent sleep deprivation—only increases the risk.

Granted, sleepsex sounds amusing—and some of the cases have their comical aspects. "One man had been initiating intercourse on almost a nightly basis," says Mangan. That was apparently fine with his wife, until "one night he started snoring." In another case, a female sexsomniac routinely groped her husband. Whenever he responded, says Schenck, "she would wake up and accuse him of forcing sex on her while she slept."

But doctors emphasize that sleepsex can lead to both physical and psychological damage. Bed partners have been known to suffer lacerations. (It's not uncommon, Schenck explains, for male sexsomniacs to display much rougher behavior during sleepsex than waking sex.) One man masturbated in his sleep with such energy that he suffered "repeated bruising of the penis" and avoided sexual intercourse for more than eight years. A man in Singapore masturbated in his sleep every night, leaving his wife feeling "cheated." "People experience real problems in relationships because of it," says Mangan.

Schenck and Mahowald hope that publicizing the existence of sexsomnia will cause more people to seek help. The condition is highly treatable with the generic anti-anxiety drug clonazepam. Seeking help can only work to a sufferer's advantage. After all, if you're going to have sex, you might as well enjoy it.

Cost of medical procedures: not the only consideration

Cost is very important to payors, but when you are talking about patients and medical procedures, that is not the only consideration. Travelling a great distance, what the evidence shows in terms of outcomes, and the “overall” patient experience, all play into the decision. This gives a qualitatively unique analysis, which will help patients make the right decision for their healthcare. It will give them the opportunity to adopt a locus of responsibility for determining good value for money. Where they or their employers must freight the cost of travel, now the patients and payors will know what value is being offered on the other end, and at what price relative to newly proposed standards.

A coalition of aggregated data is clearly one step to solving the “which hospital is best” guessing game. Analysing that data in a meaningful way that combines hospital and patient-reported outcomes is the hard part. We deal with the case-mix problem every day in the pharmaceutical world. We solve this problem the same way when we compare hospitals based on objective measures of cost and quality.
The end-user is the patient and it is really patient satisfaction that needs to be compared accurately across procedures, hospitals, languages and international borders. If a hospital is willing to stack up against others with long-standing reputations for excellence, that hospital must collect reliable outcome measures and report them in a manner that can be trusted. Even if procedures are different, patient satisfaction can be measured and compared across settings. We do this already in the pharmaceutical world and it is an easy step for us to measure treatment satisfaction in this world.

Why are American companies willing to send their personnel abroad for healthcare? One reason would be if the quality of care is really better than we would otherwise see at home. Another would be if the care given is better value for money. A third but essential reason would be if our personnel report high satisfaction with medical tourism. Ultimately, resources are going to flow into procedures and regions where patients report the highest satisfaction. Those hospitals which are not on that short-list may struggle.

Healthcare, and more specifically, hospital costs in the US are rising at double-digit rates. Payors have hit a wall in terms of their ability to increase premiums. Insurers have become very motivated to look at ways of reducing costs, yet maintaining excellence. Additionally, self-insured employer groups are searching for ways to control costs. These pressures point to an increased opportunity for travel outside of the US for certain procedures. Ultimately, we live in a global world market, markets are efficient so long as patients can make a fair assessment based on robust information. The tipping point rests in making sure this information is accurate. That is in turn one step in the direction of ensuring that, when push comes to shove, every employer can adequately insure their personnel to a high standard and without breaking the budget. The secret rests in the accuracy of information.