The most common hair transplantation is FUT or strip method as it also known. FUT is a method practiced by the majority of hair transplant clinics. The method has many proponents in various forums and among hair transplant doctor.
Advantages of FUT
Strip method is cheaper than the FUE and gives a good result if it is a good clinic.Since removing the skin so it is possible to place the hair follicles from the surface in another area.
With the Strip, you can harvest up to 4000 hair follicles at the first operation compared with FUE, which gives 3000 follicles most at the first operation. You can also harvest additional 4000 hair follicles at a second operation which make a total of 8000 hair follicles * 2.2 (average of 2.2 hairs per follicle) = 17,600 hairs. From this figure one should count out the transaction rate ie hair follicles that are destroyed when making the incision, which is a lot.
It should go six months between the first and second strip surgery as the skin needs to heal and it is also possible to combine the strip with a FUE during the waiting period.
Disadvantages FUT
FUT transplantation is a major procedure. Some clinicians use local anesthesia and sedatives. There are clinics using drugs like Dormicum which is given intravenously. This allows you to doze off for 20 minutes, loses all sense of time (8 hours seems like two hours) and you get temporary memory loss. You get the same amount of local anesthetic as FUE in the recipient area but obviously not in the donor area ie the area where the surgeontakes out the strip.
A person undergoing a FUT transplantation sometimes need anesthetized during surgery because it is a rather large operation. The method has certain consequences for the patient – because the surgeon removes a large strip of skin on the back of the head means that patients get a linear scar in the back of the head. The strip removed is 30 cm in length and 1 to 1.5 cm in height. Many of the more advanced clinicsu use Tricophytic closure so that the scar will not be as prominent, and it looks better.
With FUT you can max have 2 surgeries because of skin elasticity after that the skin is too tight. There are doctors who warned of the risk of air embolism when using strip operations ie that air gets in the brain when making the incision in dermis layer which could be life threatening. Although the majority of all hair transplants are done with strip method, and of it would be usual with air embolism, we would probably have heard of far more incidents.
