Hair Transplant Horror Stories, Exosomes, Stem Cells & Female Hair Transplants | Dr. Matt + Dr. Kevin DSH #296

Hair transplant surgeons aren't trained the same way as say a plastic surgeon would be or a urologist would be.

So there's specific residency programs that you have to sort of get through before you're allowed to do certain things in medicine.

Like Matt said, there's nothing like that.

You can, the day after you graduate medical school, you can open up a shop and call yourself a hair transplant.

Says the guy that got a free hair transplant.

Welcome back, guys.

Got a special episode for you guys today.

I got hair transplant experts, Dr.

Kevin and Dr.

Matt here today.

How's it going, gentlemen?

Pleasure to be here, man.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm excited to dive into this world.

I don't know much about it, so I'd love to hear how you guys got involved and how you got started.

Yeah.

Well, I guess I'll start.

I started my company about 10 years ago.

Prior to this, we were both not in

hair transplants.

So I was an emergency medicine doctor and he was a urologist.

We actually went to medical school together.

So we each kind of had our own careers.

I loved the the emergency room.

It was great, but after a while, it just kind of started wearing on you.

It's a very stressful environment.

So I just wanted to get into something different.

And cosmetics was, at the time, hair transplants were kind of up and coming.

And I had a friend that got me into it.

I trained with him.

And I said, I'm in 100%.

Started the company, natural transplants.

And then we just started growing.

I was fortunate enough to be on some national programs.

And we ended up hiring Kevin and two other doctors starting another clinic in.

We're in Miami currently, but out of in Washington, D.C.

And couldn't be happier, man.

And the field has really grown.

It's so much better than it used to be.

And yeah, I love to talk about some of the innovations that are out there right now.

But yeah, it's exciting.

And for you, I guess you were.

Yeah, so I was the urologist, as Matt was saying.

And I loved doing what I did, but it just sort of the daily wear and tear and the things other than the urology part really started wearing on me.

And the taking call, call, the weekends, the nights, the insurance companies.

I felt like I was working on the computer more than the people.

And I recall just every day when I got to work, I'd just sit in my car and I'd say, I wish it was 10 hours from now so I could go home.

And I was what, you know, 40 years old.

I was like, that's not how I want to spend the rest of my life.

Yeah.

So Matt saved my life, man.

And so, you know,

we still kept in touch.

He's like, come check this out.

So I did.

And it was awesome.

I loved it.

sort of got my life back and uh and i love doing this i wish i'd done it 10 years prior but wow yeah you guys both changed your careers basically.

Complete 180 man.

And now we have time for our family.

We have time for you know for us

travel, just the things that are important.

I mean time for our patients.

That's another big one.

Yeah, so how has the industry evolved?

Like what are the latest changes?

Like how was a transplant back in the day and how is it now?

Yeah, so your, you know, your grandparents, your grandfather's transplant back in like the 80s and late 80s, early 90s, they would literally take plugs.

So you may have seen, I don't know if you still see these walking around sometimes, but they would take a pencil eraser size plug from the back of your head and they would put them in almost straight up and perfectly straight line.

And, you know, you can pick it out a mile away.

I mean, it's pretty easy to kind of spot.

And we actually, a big part of our business is fixing those old-style transplants.

Once they got to the single hair piece, that changed the game.

So kind of mid-90s, late 90s, they started doing single hair pieces.

And that really was hard to tell from real hair.

And then as more accountability with the internet, YouTube, reviews, you know, all of that sort of made this, you know, if you're not doing it right, you're not going to survive in this, in this industry.

People talk, you know.

So it really changed a lot of things about.

So now they have different ways, the strip technique, of course, they have FUE where they're doing the individual extractions.

They've got some really cool technology where they're going to hopefully at some point maybe even start cloning hair.

So you could take like literally a piece of a little graph from the back of your head and in a laboratory setting, make as many copies as you want outside the body, and then get as many copies as you need, and then implant them on top of your head.

So,

when that happens, there's no other way to do a hair transplant.

I mean, you basically have a scarless way

without losing any hair.

It's amazing.

And we're close.

I think in the next five to 10 years,

there'll be something to talk about in terms of that.

So,

you know, a lot of stuff in terms of the bio stuff, you know, biologists you talk about some of the bioengineering, not bioengineering, the bioenhancements.

Yeah, yeah.

So, there's more of the kind of on the stem cell

categories where there's exosomes and PRP therapy, where you can take your own blood and sort of spin it down and inject the stem cell type, you know, stem cell type growth factors into the hairs and help them grow.

And I actually had the procedure done myself.

Wow.

Matt did mine, so

I can speak from experience.

Yeah, both your hairs are like incredible.

His is natural.

He never had one.

I never had one.

He doesn't know what the pain's like.

I know what the pain's like.

I wish this was a transplant.

Easy-to-sell hair transplants, man honestly but uh yeah he kevin i said you know if you're gonna do this you got to believe in the process i can't you don't want a bald guy doing your transplant right you gotta it's like a fat trainer skinny chef you just don't believe in him uh that so you know the confidence and you know we have two of our doctors actually uh got a hair transplant both kevin and dr uh dr segal in uh

that's a good point that was always a pet peeve of mine when my doctor looked unhealthy i'm like why am i even having one time they told me to eat ice cream when i had like a sore tooth or something i was like this is weird right

He's on smoke breaks as you're sitting there waiting for him.

Yeah.

Do you guys feel like there's a lack of regulation in the space?

I know sometimes they regulate spaces too much, but with this space, it's kind of the opposite, right?

Absolutely, man.

I mean, this is the wild, wild west of medicine.

So people don't realize hair transplant surgeons aren't trained the same way as, say, a plastic surgeon would be or a urologist would be.

So there's specific residency programs that you have to sort of get through before you're allowed to do certain things in medicine.

Hair transplants are not that.

So you literally, all you have, you could literally graduate medical school and the next day legally do a hair transplant.

No one will stop you.

So for instance, Matt went to three years of

ER

after medical school.

So you go to college, four years of medical school, and then depending on what your specialty is, you have to do another certain amount of years for residency training specific to that specification.

So Matt going into ER, he spent three years doing emergency medicine.

I was in urology.

That was a six-year program.

So after four years of medical school, I spent another six years doing urology and surgery.

So but like Matt said, there's nothing like that.

The day after you graduate medical school, you can open up a shop and call yourself a hair transplant.

Geez.

So there's possible.

You got to do your due diligence and really do your homework and see who's good and who's not good.

Right.

So there's no certification?

There's no certification.

Now, there is a official sort of hair transplant board certification, but that was literally just started by doctors in the practice.

So it's kind of an unofficial,

you don't have to be certified to do a hair transplant, right?

But you have to have a plastic surgery residency to do a breast augmentation in the U.S., right?

So it's very, very different.

And a lot of people don't know and they'll see a little thing, oh, that guy's board certified.

It just means you went to some meetings.

Granted, this is really good to have the meetings and have the research behind it.

So we're not bashing it at all, but it's not an official one.

It's regulated as such.

So you got to be really careful in terms of your research.

You really got to research this.

And

it's hard enough to get a hair transplant that's good in the US.

And now if you go to, let's say, a foreign country, it's even harder to sort of vet those clinics in your research.

Yeah, I see people flying out to like Colombia and stuff.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Colombia, Turturkey, Pakistan, everywhere.

Yeah, it's big business, man.

Wow.

And the main reason to go to those other countries is usually price.

So

it's maybe half the cost it would be in the US.

But when you factor in that, you know, you may have to go back.

You may have work that needs to be corrected.

A lot of people spend more money at the end of the day.

Right.

Because the flights, the hotels.

Everything, right?

And actually, I mean, some of these people.

They'll pay for.

Yeah.

Some of that they'll pay for you to fly out, pay for you to stay.

That's like a red flag to me, though.

Yeah.

They'll pick you up in a limbo.

So, you know, as you know, from a lot of things, you know, sometimes if it's too good to be true, it's usually too good to be true.

And, you know,

you just got to be really careful about that.

Now, maybe, you know, maybe it's the one time where you really get lucky.

And there's some good work from overseas, but there's also, we've seen some, a lot of bad work from overseas.

And that's, you can say the same thing for the states as well.

But if

they're, if they're off in a really good price at a really low discount

for real cheap, there may be a reason.

You know, it may be cheap work.

So you just, you know.

You don't have a lot of shots at this.

You want to make sure this is done correctly and done well the first time.

There's certain things in life you don't cheap out on.

No.

I saw Lacex surgery on Groupon once.

I'm like, how?

I've gone through the cheap way through, you know, fixing your house up or, you know, replacement, you know, microwave microwave or something like that.

That's replaceable.

You only got one or two, maybe three shots at this at the most.

You know, this is on your head.

This is a big deal.

You don't want to pay a couple extra bucks to get it done right.

Absolutely.

Says the guy that got a free hair transplant.

He's in his.

So say someone's like fully bald.

Is it possible for them to get hair back?

Absolutely.

I don't know if you want to speak to that.

So yeah, I mean, every case is individual.

And you really, and that's sort of, you really have to talk with the patient, meet with the patient, discuss what risk-benefit ratio is.

And they have to understand if they have, you can't do an entire, you know, entire someone's head in one procedure.

It's just too large an area to cover.

And so you have to talk to them and say, listen, this is going to be multiple procedures.

If you're willing to do it, I'm willing to do it.

But if someone's not willing to pay that money for two, three procedures,

multiple years

that you're going to be going through this, you have to go through the procedure a few times, the recovery, that you got to be really patient for this.

Some guys are not willing to do that, but they need to know that up front.

You know, you can't do the first procedure first and say, oh, by the way, you got to do a second or a third one to finish this off.

In order to

practice good medicine, you really have to be honest with patients up front.

And I'll turn patients away sometimes,

or I'll educate them enough that they decide they don't want to do it.

And that's great, and that's fine.

Say, listen, you have to know the reality of the situation.

This is a big deal.

This is a surgery.

This is not Botox injections.

This is the real deal.

You're going to be left with scars no matter what.

It's going to be multiple procedures.

Is that something you're willing to get into?

I'd rather you know now because once you do that first procedure, you're burning bridges.

You can't go back and just erase it.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I like what you said about being up front because when I got my braces off as a kid, they were like, you got to wear a retainer the rest of your life.

I'm like, what?

Yeah.

Why wouldn't you tell me earlier?

That's annoying.

That wasn't in the pamphlet at the beginning.

Yeah, seriously?

Yeah.

Have you guys heard of any horror stories?

Yes.

We see our fair share of horror stories.

And a lot of it is,

like we talked about before, patients not realizing what they're getting into,

kind of going down the rabbit hole of a cheap surgery here, cheap surgery there.

There's a great marketing out there from places that maybe not have the best quality.

So we'll see patients with really bad scarring in the back of the head and from FUE procedures, which sounds like, you know, and a lot of times I'll have patients, so many patients come to me and say, I want the scarless procedure.

Well, there is no such thing.

Well, the other guys said it was scarless, the whole punch technique, the FUE.

That's not scarless, believe me, we see it all the time.

So no matter what, you're getting a scar.

And so, you know, a lot of places aren't upfront about it, but you'll come back and they'll have, you know, patients will have really large scars or they'll be what we call over-harvesting.

You know, if you do the FUE, you know, some places, especially overseas, they'll come back and their back of their head looks like Swiss cheese.

And it is, and you can't do anything with that.

You can't help them because there's no hair left to take.

Wow.

And

I feel really bad for these patients.

And they get tricked.

They get tricked out of their money.

And

the physicians may or may not care, but they're halfway across the world.

So they got your money.

Yeah, that's awful.

So we see that a lot, unfortunately.

Now, you're mentioning these scars.

How painful is actual surgery?

Are people screaming during this?

No, so the nice thing about this surgery is you don't have general anesthesia.

You would think you'd be put out for this surgery, but you don't have to be.

So at the very beginning of the day, we do about five to ten minutes of little sort of shots around the head.

Okay, it's lidocaine, novocaine like you would do to the dentist.

Yeah, literally, after that, there's zero pain.

So, we have a 70-inch screen TV, they're watching Netflix, Amazon.

We give them some value if they want to just chill and take a nap.

For those shots, we also have nitrous oxide.

So, if you want some laughing gas or just get high for that part, it's all good.

So, it's really, I mean, most people say it's enjoyable.

Like, they really, I've had patients that are like, can I just finish the movie?

I don't want to leave.

I'm having such a great time.

So,

before I did my procedure, I had many patients, at least half, say at the end of the day, that really wasn't that bad.

And I'd think to myself, are you crazy?

You know, what we did to you?

And then after I did my procedure, I remember at the end when I was in sort of the, you know, afterwards with Matt and I said, that actually was kind of fun.

It was almost a fun day.

Wow.

You're just sitting there, people are like, you know, paying attention to you.

You're having snacks.

You know, you doze off for a while.

It was actually fun.

So

the worst part of the whole day, speaking from experience, the worst part of the whole day is the shots.

And that part, you know, it's not fun.

And I have a, believe it or not, I'm a good good doctor.

I'm not a very good patient.

I hate needles.

I got everybody gets through it.

You sort of just suck it up.

And I found my Zen happy place.

And then, you know, it takes about five, eight minutes.

And then after that, the rest of the day is fun.

You're just sitting there chilling, watching Netflix all day.

Nice.

So how long does it take on average?

Anywhere from maybe four to seven hours, depending on the size you do.

Yeah.

We keep it rolling because we want to get these grafts back in you.

But we stop for lunch and bathroom breaks and stuff.

Got it.

We typically do one patient a day.

Okay.

So, yeah.

So it's very personal.

Oh, yeah.

And I think people deserve that.

Yeah.

If you're paying that much money to do a surgery and it, I mean, it's your hairline, man.

It's something you look at every single day.

Yeah.

And this hair is permanent, right?

So

whatever hairline we put on there is the same hairline you're going to have when you're 90 years old.

Like it never goes away.

Really?

So in that same way, you don't want to look at your high school yearbook picture and say, oh, my hairline used to come down to that mole.

You know, it used to be a two-finger forehead.

That's not going to make sense when you're older.

So

a lot of this is sort of planning the right, the appropriate hairline for someone.

So

you want it to look natural.

It has to look natural.

It can't just be a straight line.

It has to have a little bit of recession in it.

So a lot of it is, you know, I personally spend about an hour before the surgery drawing different hairlines.

It's an art.

This is an art.

And there's no right or wrong here.

There's no sort of cookie-cutter way to do this.

Interesting.

It should take

longer than 20 minutes to

draw the hairline.

You really got to work with the patient.

and find out what they want.

Remind them that what I tell patients is you want it to look natural now, but also 10, 20, 30 years from now.

You know, you want it to look age-appropriate and you want it to look natural.

And you guys do mostly men?

So we're actually pretty unique in that way.

So most clinics are probably about 80% men, 20% women.

We actually are about 50-50.

Wow.

And one of the reasons is our clinic, some of this is because I was on the Dr.

Oz show.

So we had, at that point, we were talking about women hair transplants.

We have a large segment, about 50% of our clientele is African-American women that have what's called traction alopecia.

So they have, back in the 90s, it was very, very cool to do very, very tight hairstyles, tight braids, box braids, weaves, glues, adhesives, all that stuff eventually just rips out your frontal edges.

So these women are wearing, you wouldn't even know it.

They're like master disguisers.

They're wearing wigs every day.

So a large part of our practice is sort of doing that.

And it's very difficult to do.

You have to have a lot of experience to do that type of hair.

But when it's done correctly, it gives you amazing results.

So that's kind of unique with our clinic.

So we get people flying from all over the world because a lot of doctors just don't do a lot of ethnic hair, curly hair, coily hair.

So, you know, that's, we're, you know, blessed to have that sort of segment as well.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Man, I didn't know you could do curly hair and all these different stuff.

Oh, yeah.

I thought it was just straight hair.

Yeah.

Did you know you can put body hair on your head?

Really?

Yeah.

So there's something called body hair transplant.

So now they're doing neck hair, beard hair, chest hair.

Yeah.

So sometimes when people run out of donor hair, they will do that.

So it's, it's, I mean, technology, it's just exponentially getting better.

It doesn't always look like the hair hair so you got to be careful with it But if it's all you got it's better than nothing right until the cloning happens then then you're in business.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm excited for the cloning.

It seems like I'm growing up at the right time, right?

Yeah, yeah.

There's a new study.

I just read about a study last week.

There's a guy, you ever have those moles that just grow hair like overnight?

You know, they're like, they'll just, there's some.

I get one on my neck, just one single hair.

Okay, yeah.

And you pluck it, and then three days later, it's an inch long, right?

So they figured out there's a, they've isolated the molecule that's responsible for turning that hair on.

And they think that that's going to, if they can figure that out, they're going to be able to sort of adapt, you know, they could basically save your hair or make your hair grow faster that way.

So it's really cool stuff.

Yeah.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Because it grow so fast.

Yeah.

I'm like, I just pulled this out right here every time, every two, three days.

Yeah.

So you give that to a bald guy and he's, you know, basically a big mole.

Wow.

How many people are actually bald, do you think?

Like percentage-wise?

So about 50% of the population has some significant hair loss that it bothers them by age 50.

By age 50.

Holy crap.

So I wouldn't say bald, but they have.

No, no, no, not bald, but they have enough that it bothers them.

So there's enough hair loss that it bothers them by age 50, about 50%.

Yeah.

My grandfather had the circle baldness, so I'm scared that inherited.

So there's a whole scale.

It's called the Norwood scale, right?

So if you have just a little bit in the front, it's called Norwit 3.

If you have the circle in the back, you're Norwood 4, and it keeps going on until you have basically the guy that has a little, you know, one-finger band or, you know, horseshoe in the back.

So Norwitz 7.

So, you know, it's interesting and and um you know the treatment that you would do is gonna vary vary based on how much hair you need too you know so you get a lot of people with widow's peak coming in yeah yeah yeah so you know and a lot of women will you know depending on whether they want to keep it or not some women like the widow's peak so we'll incorporate it and sort of you know incorporate it into the new hairline other women or men hate it and they want to get rid of it and so we'll sort of you know incorporate it without and sort of blend it in right with the rest of the hair yeah they did studies on it uh most people find it unattractive Unattractive.

A lot of villains in movies, like Dracula and stuff, they have widows beak.

It's interesting.

Interesting.

Scars on their face too, I heard.

Scars?

Yeah.

If you have a scar, that's also a villain, too.

Oh, interesting.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

So why do you guys think hair transplants get such a bad reputation?

They deserve a bad reputation, right?

So when hair transplants first came out, they were very unnatural.

There's also a lot of dishonesty in this field.

I hate to say it, but it's true.

Even with just some of the marketing that we see, especially in some of these foreign countries, we've had multiple clinics that are using our pictures.

So we find that almost every week a new clinic that's using other people's pictures.

So

people have the right to be distrustful of this.

And then also look at the regulation.

There's basically no regulation, right?

So you could literally graduate med school, do it the next day.

People go into these clinics.

A lot of times they don't even meet the doctor.

They'll meet a sales guy that's really pushy.

They feel like they're in sort of a used car sales lot.

So

it is kind of this unregulated sort of seedy field, you know, and we're trying to make it better.

And there's some great docs out there.

There's some wonderful doctors out there.

But unfortunately, there's a lot of sort of these puppy mill black marketplaces that

do not do, you know, don't give the,

don't give a good reputation for the field.

And so, you know, they'll cut corners or not be up front with patients.

They may not even have doctors in the building when they do their surgeries, just technicians, or there may be a doctor just signing charts and not doing anything

and very little follow-up or care afterwards.

So

like Matt said, there's a reason why people kind of look at you and

sort of skeptically.

There's a lot of reason for that.

You guys get people judging you without even knowing it.

Sure.

100%.

I like skeptics.

I like proving them wrong.

So a lot of times we'll have like a couple in there and the guy's going to hair transplant and a woman's like, I can't believe you're doing this.

Why are you doing this?

And a year later, they're like,

so I'm so happy you got it done.

Holy fuck.

And you can see them turn as the day goes on.

They'll start smiling and talking with you.

It's pretty cool, yeah.

It's amazing how important hair is for every facet of your life.

Like these, you see these guys that just have so much more confidence in their business.

They have that extra edge with their relationship.

A lot of guys just are newly single, and this is like what they're doing.

And it's like, it makes such a difference to have hair.

I've had guys living in their parents' bedroom, or

in their basement and you know he

was too embarrassed to get his own place he'd you know he he didn't want a job where he would go out he wouldn't date um it changes their life i mean it changes i know from experience it's changed my life dramatically wants more confidence you know you wear your hair anyway i'm not afraid to get into the water anymore i'm not afraid of the wind blowing you know i don't have to wear hats all the time i mean it's awesome wow so you used to be scared just to jump in a pool yeah i mean once i realized that i had i had some really bad recession i'll show you a picture earlier but um i had really bad recession my hairline was really high.

I didn't know it until I saw a picture of myself on my 20th high school reunion.

I didn't even recognize myself.

I thought, I was like, who is that old guy?

And I was like, oh my God, that's me.

And then, you know, once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it.

And so

now, you know, I look at, I have a picture.

My daughter has a picture in her bedroom of me from that time in her room.

Every time I walk in there, I cringe.

I can't even look at it anymore.

It looks like a different person.

Yeah, because I guess when you look at yourself every day, you don't notice over time.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And it's great.

You see these patients a year afterwards, a couple of years afterwards, they'll send you pictures.

They're always smiling, always smiling.

It just gives you such confidence to be able to wear what you want, do what you want.

I mean, it gives people a new lease on life.

It's pretty incredible.

That's awesome.

So if people watching this are interested, how much does it cost on average?

Well, he paid zero.

So

make friends with.

Anywhere from zero to...

So, I mean, average in the U.S.

is probably anywhere from maybe $5 to $15, depending on how much hair you need.

And And like we talked about before, you can pay as little as three to four elsewhere, but

that's red flag to me.

If you want to buy a Porsche, you got to pay a four Porsche.

You're not going to pay for a Honda and get a Porsche coming out the dealership.

So

that's sort of what I tell patients.

Be mindful.

Be careful.

It's a really good investment in yourself, though.

And how many things can you buy for yourself that are there for the rest of your life?

This is something that is just,

I think, such a good investment that way.

So what happens when you get older and your real hair starts to gray?

Yeah, so I mean, gray hair is not dead hair, right?

So, so, and actually gray, we're seeing, even with women,

particularly African-American women, like it's almost like cool now to be gray, right?

It used to be like every woman was dying their hair with any gray hair they font, but but now it's like cool.

So

gray, you know, we don't just transplant the dark hairs and not the gray hairs.

So you want to blend it in.

But certainly with this new hair, you can dye it.

You can color it if you choose to.

It's just regular hair.

It grows to any length you want.

I mean, if you want to rock a ponytail, you want to rock hair down to your ankles, you can do it.

It's your own hair.

It's just coming from the back of the head, so you can treat it any way you treat non-commercial hair.

Oh, interesting.

So it grows like normal hair.

Yeah.

You can do whatever you want with it.

Oh, yeah.

It's your own hair.

I thought it was fake hair.

No.

So it's the hair that we take from the back.

And so we're actually removing from the back of the head.

Got it.

Separate the hair into tiny little pieces, and then we just deploy those wherever you need them up front.

Got it.

Yeah, so it's your own hair.

And that's the beautiful thing.

There are kits out there and systems where it's fake hair that you can get in, not implanted, but get glued or replaced.

But you have to get those replaced periodically.

And it's not real hair, or it's not your own hair.

This is your own real hair that grows, and you can style it any way you want.

You can grow it at any length that you want.

You can get it wet.

The wind blows.

You can do whatever you want with it.

It's your own hair.

Wow.

So you're transplanting the root.

So it's basically like planting a garden.

We're taking the roots, we're putting them in other places, and then three or four months after the surgery, it will start producing its own hair permanently.

That's cool.

Yeah.

So age, what factor does age play in all this?

Yeah.

So, I mean, we like to, you know, we don't operate on kids, you know.

But, you know, we've had anywhere from, you know, I like to say 21 was probably, you know, youngest adult.

I had an 83-year-old in a chair the other day.

83.

83.

You would think at 83, you would stop caring about your hair.

You know, you never stop caring about your hair.

It's one of those things that you're always affected by.

So a lot of guys come in and say, ah, you know, I just want to get hair now.

I'm not going to care when I'm like 60.

You actually care more when you're 60 because, you know what I mean?

Like, especially nowadays, people are

living longer.

They want to be healthier longer.

They're paying much more attention to

the inside health as well as the outside health.

But the factor I actually find more important than age is sort of their maturity and how much research they've done.

I would do a 20-year-old guy, and I've done plenty of 20-year-old guys, but they've researched it for two, three years.

They know the risks and the benefits.

They know they're probably going to need another surgery or two in the future.

They know they're going to lose more hair.

They're very knowledgeable about the situation.

Wow.

At the same time, I would not do a 50-year-old who thought about it yesterday and was like, oh, you know, I just thought it was cool.

And maybe if it doesn't work, I'll get it reversed.

Well, obviously, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

And so, you know, instead of age, I think much more about sort of maturity and knowledge level and how much research they've done about it.

That makes sense.

What are some outrageous things or myths you guys have seen about hair loss?

Oh my God, so many.

So the

myth.

Yeah, it's you will not lose your hair the more you

really go.

You can all you want.

Those may cause other problems, but it's not proof.

You're not going to lose your hair.

How is that correlated at all?

I don't get it.

So testosterone, right?

So testosterone,

so actually it's true.

A lot of people got these bodybuilders will do testosterone or any guy, really.

It will accelerate your genetic hair loss to do testosterone.

So guys think sometimes if they're

increasing their testosterone or affecting their testosterone, that will affect your hair.

The biggest myth I see is, yeah, I used to wear a hat all the time, you know, which is completely false, right?

It has nothing to do with, I wore a hat every day as a kid, and I don't think I've lost a hair in my life.

If that were true, you would lose hair in the back where the hair rubs, right?

So, so, yeah.

And every baseball player would be bald.

Every golfer would be bald.

Right, right.

What other myths?

So, you know, you know,

there's a myth that it's only from your mom's side.

That's not true.

It could come from either your mom's side or your dad's side.

And it varies.

It can skip generations.

There's some patients with their brother who has a full set of hair and they don't and vice versa.

So

there's 60 some odd genes that control hair growth and most of them are not on the gene coming from your mom.

So

it can be a factor from your mom, but it also, there can be other factors as well too.

Yeah.

How much of hair loss is genes and genetics versus environment?

So I would, if I had to guess, I would say it's probably 95% genetic.

Yeah.

And there's probably about a 5%.

That accounts for maybe the testosterone.

That accounts for maybe stress.

Stress can definitely, I think, accelerate your hair loss.

We've seen also lately with

almost a quarter of people that contract

have some type of hair loss.

Usually it's temporary, but it can accelerate like sort of that natural progression of the genetic hair loss too.

Whoa.

So, you know, that's kind of a new thing.

What I hear a lot is guys saying, Yeah, I do have an uncle or a grandfather or father that people on my mom's side or my dad's side that were bald, but they didn't lose their hair till 40, 50 years old.

I'm 20.

I'm 25.

I'm 30.

So it's shifted, and from what I see, it shifted a lot younger.

And I do think that is some environmental factor.

Again, maybe there's some related, but I also think it's all the

testosterone or hormones we're putting in our food,

antibiotics and hormones and all that sort of stuff.

So I do think there is definitely an environmental factor that may, again, maybe you were going to go bald anyway or lose your hair anyway, but I think it's it's you're you're seeing it at a younger age.

Yeah, absolutely.

What are you guys working on next and where could people learn more about this?

Yeah, so, I mean,

we're always looking into the new technologies as well.

So, you know, we have a lot of bioenhancements that we're working on now and looking into.

NaturalTransplants.com, man.

Natural Transplants is named our clinic.

What a domain name.

That's a good one.

Yeah.

It should be natural, man.

I mean, this is, you know, that's the whole deal.

And then Instagram, Dr.

underscore Kevin Blumenthal, and then Dr.

Kevin Blumenthal on TikTok.

Cool.

Getting into that space more.

We have about a thousand videos on our website.

You can check out out our YouTube page you've done a thousand transplants I've done a couple thousand transplants

we have about a thousand documented ones on our that people have been willing to put on the YouTube so

three weeks ago we did we did Timberlands here actually a few weeks ago yeah so we have a lot of you know have a lot of celebrity pool now and yeah we're this is this is part of the journey man it's it's awesome we have some amazing people in this very cool yeah that's incredible it makes me feel comfortable knowing you have all that experience honestly yeah yeah absolutely absolutely thanks for coming on guys absolutely appreciate it man great yeah thanks for watching guys i'll see you next time.