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.

World Hospital Monitor for Medical Tourists?

The World Hospital Monitor

The World Hospital Monitor

World Hospital Monitor is a unique database that will provide reliable and authoritative performance information for international hospitals that are looking to attract patients from other countries.

Specifically in the US, there are three drivers of whether or not a patient will travel abroad for medical care: lack of information or trust in the information that is being provided, fear and motivation.

First, there is a lack of information available to patients (and payors) about procedures being performed in “foreign” hospitals. The World Hospital Monitor will provide standardised information on a variety of key elements that are important to patients and payors.

Secondly, there is fear. Patients are fearful to travel for medical procedures. It is something outside of their comfort zone. The World Hospital Monitor should have a Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO) tool, which will help new patients overcome the fear of the unknown by accessing qualitative information from former patients who have every reason to report their experiences accurately.

Finally, there is motivation. Right now, a major motivator is the cost of an alternative procedure. As payors have increasing financial pressures brought upon them, there will be new and innovative ways that they will seek to have patients travel abroad for specific treatments.

Aggregated outcomes data should be collected, analysed, translated and compared and statistics remains proprietary. Trusting relationships with hospitals which understand the importance of transparency and objective comparisons must be developed. A coalition of accurately compared outcomes data will benefit both hospitals and patients because it offers a level-playing field to shop for other aspects, such as price and proximity.

Data from specific hospitals based outside of the US that have an interest in bringing patients in from the US, or for that matter any market outside of their home market will be collected. The World Hospital Monitor must have a standardised data collection procedure and further a standardised PRO tool which are all used in the development of this unique database.

The World Hospital Monitor is able to provide an index of hospitals by any number of criteria to determine the appropriate value for the patient, relative to other hospitals and procedures in their home region or country.

US Healthcare: Very Expensive

A number of key factors are driving up the expenses of US retail healthcare, for example, the costs of technology, pharmaceuticals, litigation and supporting an aging population.

Technology and pharmaceuticals have improved and become more expensive. The huge influx of Insurance funds into the US healthcare system over the past 50 years has meant that hospitals are able to afford ever-increasingly expensive medical and imaging technology. This has rapidly advanced the development of medical science and the efficacy of care, but these technologies are often supported by the highly inflated prices that can be charged in the US for research, development and manufacturing. But once total initial marginal costs are met, these products may be sold to hospitals in other countries, often at a fraction of the US cost.
Similarly, the US pharmaceutical industry tends to charge two to three times more for branded drugs in the US than it does elsewhere. This is the reason for protectionist legislation passed in the US, which attempts to stop the distribution of pharmaceuticals from Canada, Mexico and other countries across US borders.

In a recent paper published as part of a new textbook in International Finance, it is noted that the top 10 pharmaceutical companies on the US stock market grossed more combined profits in 2005 than the entire remaining Fortune 500. The gap has been widening for more than 20 years.

Another main reason for higher costs in the US is the extremely litigious nature of the healthcare market compared to other countries. High malpractice insurance costs have dramatically driven up the cost to practise medicine in the US. In certain specialties such as obstetrics, neurosurgery, orthopaedics and some general surgical subspecialties, malpractice insurance premiums are so high, and reimbursement rates are dropping, that many physicians can no longer afford to practice. In obstetrics, for example, the physician is not only responsible for the mother, but also for the newborn until age 18, creating an 18-year “tail” for insurance liability.

This doesn’t appear to be as significant a problem in other countries offering quality healthcare. However, with no form of recourse or jurisdiction in foreign countries for potentially unexpected outcomes of surgery, US-based carriers and employers have been somewhat hesitant to sponsor international insured health plans. But the cost savings are so significant, that this may change as international insurers may start to develop medical-travel policies to support the growth in this market. .
Price transparency is another vital factor when looking at health costs. American hospitals base their retail charges on an intricate budgeting process, which results in each hospital’s revenue and costs being different, as are their prices for services. That is why the price of a simple blood test can easily vary dramatically among hospitals for the same test, using the same machines. This differs from the cost structures in Asia, India and the Latin American hospitals which often post prices on the wall and collect the cash at the door.
As more US residents begin to check websites for prices by procedure and look for quality measurement tools to make their purchasing decisions, US hospitals may eventually have to compete with foreign hospitals on a price transparent basis. Some more innovative hospital systems, such as Alegent Health (Omaha, Nebraska), are starting to post prices on their websites.
As the market for foreign healthcare solutions to the US’s domestic pricing problems begins to grow, one can probably expect to see more pricing transparency before price and service competition begins in earnest.
Ultimately, market forces will drive US hospitals to compete for patients by diagnosis, offering price-competitive packages of services including travel for both the patient and a companion.
This will not only occur internationally, but domestically, as patients gain control of their ever greater healthcare dollars.
For the past 40 years, consumers have been excluded from the complete healthcare buying equation, so with more control of the healthcare dollar, consumers will demand more information and more choices among providers.
What happened with the deregulation of the travel industry a number of years ago, to create more user-friendly websites and booking systems, is now poised to occur in the US healthcare industry. This is not new. Hospitals and providers in India, Asia and around the world have been on a cash basis for many years. Prices are posted in each lobby as they are in hotel rooms and healthcare is treated as a consumer good.
Secretary Leavitt, secretary of health and human services who oversees Medicare, summed up the issue succinctly: “Why can’t we buy healthcare in the US like we buy a car? Medicare paid for 251,000 coronary artery bypass surgeries last year and 91,000 hip replacements. Medicare knows what they cost, why shouldn’t the consumer? Our system of financing healthcare is broken.”
While no one solution will solve the unchecked healthcare inflation, the institution of rapidly developing globally competitive healthcare markets will have a small but meaningful impact on US healthcare. If US hospitals start losing market share to foreign hospitals, they may have to implement competitive travel packages and transparent pricing to compete.

medical tourism information to patients. contact at sgerst@medicaview.com or 1 954 701 9505

US healthcare in crisis:

Will tens of thousands of Americans become medical tourists?

The driving force behind the globalisation of healthcare is economics. At US$2.4 trillion in annual expenditures, the US healthcare industry is, by far, the largest industry in the world, significantly outpacing US national defence spending, and projected to reach US$4.1 trillion by 2016.
Viewing healthcare as a huge potential export, the US should be trying to capitalise on the quality healthcare offered by its hospitals and physicians. But instead, the domestic system is getting so expensive that the US has effectively started to price itself out of world markets. This not only affects healthcare as an exportable product of the US, but US manufacturers and service providers in industries offering health insurance to their employees must then add this cost to the price of their exports and labour costs, making the US less globally price competitive.
By 2010, the cost of healthcare per US citizen is projected to rise from its current average of US$7,110 to US$9,216 per person. At that point, Americans will spend approximately US$1 trillion more per year on healthcare than in 2000 – a 58 percent increase in 10 years. By 2015, healthcare is expected to rise from 16 to 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product.
Whereas, in the past, patients from around the world used to seek high-quality care from US providers, Modern Healthcare reported in May that the number of patients leaving the US for medical treatment is growing at a faster rate than the number of patients coming in for treatment. It follows that by outsourcing healthcare to other countries, the US is furthering its trade imbalance.
There are large retail price differences between the US and other countries for certain surgical procedures, so it is no wonder US residents in control of their healthcare dollars are seeking care abroad. These include those who are uninsured, underinsured or have health plans that reward cost savings for international travel.
But while Insurance pays rates comparable to some of the Asia and Latin American countries for similar procedures, the US uninsured and underinsured do not have access to this same-rate structure and suffer from retail pricing and cost shifting. Both 60 Minutes and BusinessWeek have reported on this economic phenomenon in recent years, creating increased awareness for patients in need of care who can’t afford US prices.