At Nashville Hair Doctor, we take patient education seriously. Over the years we have covered a plethora of hair transplant topics on our widely-read blog, always with the goal of making sure our patients are fully-informed about the procedure and, most importantly, the recovery. You will find a series of useful tips on our website, from “How to wash your hair after a hair transplant” to “The stages of hair growth after NeoGraft” that apply to anyone seeking to undergo hair restoration surgery.
Today we’d like to focus on questions specific to the Hair Doctor clinic. Our answers are put together from commonly asked questions by prospective patients going through the decision making process.
10 Questions and Answers About Hair Transplants
Question #1: How far ahead do I have to schedule my surgery date?
Depending on your flexibility, we usually have 3-4 openings within about four weeks. After one month out, the following month is typically about 50% booked, allowing you a greater variety of dates to choose from. Some patients like to schedule further ahead to coincide with their planned vacation days, which we can also accommodate as our teams work full time with us every day of the week, Monday through Friday.
Question #2: Do I need to pay a deposit at time of booking, and how much?
Yes, we process half of your procedure cost at the time of scheduling. This will either go towards your financing account or any debit/credit card down you are using. The remaining balance is due 14 days before your procedure date. If you are financing, it would be applied to your account, and your payments would begin about a month later.
Question #3: If I use a lender for financing, can I still pay a portion in cash?
Yes, you can split up financing and self-pay in any increment you’d like. Our lenders PatientFi and CareCredit offer approval starting with a credit score of 650 for their 12 months 0% interest option. They also have interested based financing for 24, 36, 48, and 60 months. Please visit our Hair Transplant Financing page for more information on our lenders as well as a link to a free credit score check.
Question #4: When traveling from out-of-town, which of your locations should I book at?
The Hair Doctor offers hair restoration services at its three locations: Nashville and Memphis in Tennessee, and Louisville in Kentucky. However, we also have a large portion of our patient base visit from all over the United States. Naturally, out-of-town visitors want to know if any one of our locations is better than the other, both in terms of staff training and availability.
The answer is yes and no – Our hair restoration team is the same and travels from our Nashville office to Memphis or Louisville as procedures are scheduled there. You are in equally good hands everywhere, and we will schedule you around your availability. However, we typically receive all out-of-town patients at our Nashville location, simply because it’s easier to fly into and performs the largest number of hair transplants, meaning our staff is at our home base in Nashville more often than elsewhere. If you fly in the night before (as most procedures start very early in the morning), you’ll also have an opportunity to visit Music Row or another one of Nashville’s many attractions.
Question #5: How far is your office from the airport? Can you recommend a nearby hotel?
The Nashville office is actually located in Brentwood, which is exactly 15 miles from the airport to the South of Nashville. Our patients enjoy staying at the Hilton Garden Inn Nashville Brentwood out of several options that are closest to our location.
Question #6: What is the recommended time to stay at the hotel before being able to go on a flight back home?
The time you stay depends on your level of comfort with appearance after your procedure. There is no reason you can’t leave the next morning to fly home. Some patients choose to depart on the 3rd day after their procedure so that the rectangular piece of gauze is no longer covering their donor area. You can also wear a very loose ball cap on day 3 going forward.
Question #7: How much of my hair needs to be shaved prior to the procedure?
This is a question we are asked a lot – particularly because this is a sensitive point with patients who want to keep their hair procedure quiet without being asked a lot of questions about their look. Some providers insist that your entire head has to be shaved before a hair transplant. While this certainly make it easier for the technician, it is Hair Doctor policy that patients can keep their hair on top if they so wish, and that it will not negatively affect the outcome. We will not pressure you to shave your entire head.
What has to be shaved to enable us to successfully extract grafts is the donor area along the back and sides. We encourage our patients to get a haircut prior to their procedure, with the back and sides shaved and faded into about an inch on top like the example below. We always run the clippers over the donor areas prior to starting the transplant, so that even if your haircut was given a few days back, everything is ready to go.
Question #8: Does it matter that the procedure is done by a master technician and not a board-certified plastic surgeon?
This is another often-asked question. We understand why it is asked. All of us, when given a choice, want the “expert” to do the work, whether it’s on our houses or cars or body. The question however is, who is the expert? In the field of hair restoration, the expert is the one with the experience. Hands down. And in almost all cases of hair restoration, the technicians and master technicians with years, even decades of experience are the true experts at their craft. There are surgeons and board-certified surgeons with far less experience than what you’d want in the person painstakingly extracting and placing your hair follicles over an 8-hour time span to get the best aesthetic outcome. No amount of education or degree is comparable to experience combined with incredible results.
Most hair clinics that do advertise a board-certified plastic surgeon very rarely have that surgeon actually do your hair transplant. The surgeon will do more of a meet and greet, perhaps even get started, and then the technicians you have never met or heard anything about will take over. They are typically hired on a contract basis to fly in for several days, and your provider might be hard pressed to tell you at the time of booking who they even are. Especially the larger providers with a national presence like Bosley operate this way.
We have a very different approach. While we do have a board-certified plastic surgeon present in our practice at all times a hair transplant is underway (in the case of our Nashville practice it’s even a Double-Board Certified Plastic Surgeon), we do not advertise him to our hair transplant patients. We have a set team of hair transplant techs and their assistants that we’ve worked hard to build up over the years. Their track record of results as well as patient care is excellent, and we wouldn’t trade them for anything. They each have decades of experience in the hair restoration field and in addition have engaging and fun personalities to make that long day of togetherness go by much faster than you’d expect. Please meet our team here to learn more about Jessica, Daryl, and Carolyn.
Question #9: Are the FUE units extracted by hand or by a robot?
This is a good question. You may have heard of the ARTAS hair transplant method. It is a machine that extracts your hair. Please note that it is always a human who will place your grafts into the recipient area, so the robot, if used, only does the extraction phase. At our Hair Doctor clinics, we do not use the robotic hair transplant method. Instead, the follicular units are extracted with a hand-held device in our control. When ready to select a graft, the tech presses the NeoGraft hand piece over the graft, presess the pedal that creates the circular punch around it, then the next pedal that creates the gentle suction to pull it out, from where it goes through a tube and into a canister. We personally select each of your grafts, ensuring they are healthy in appearance, and extract them with the assistance of the NeoGraft handpiece.
Question #10: How does NeoGraft compare to other FUE (Follicular Unit Extraction) procedures?
A prospective patient recently told us he had read negative things about NeoGraft. He was particularly concerned about the punch size – essentially the tiny hole that gets punched into the scalp to extract the hair. There are indeed different sized punch sizes for all FUE procedures, and the trick is to find the happy medium – too small and you might damage the follicle by slicing through it, or too large and you get visible scarring on the scalp as the puncture wounds heal.
However, the punch size has nothing to do with the method. You’ll find an argument for or against any FUE brand over the next, but in reality they are almost the same. The greatest difference is the expertise in using the machine. We have incredible results with NeoGraft and have practiced it for many years. We have looked at many other brands and techniques to make sure we feel we are offering the superior option, and we are.
Some clinics or technicians indeed use too large of a punch size. We use 0.9 which is perfect, not too big, or too small. The holes heal very well, and men go back to their short, faded sides after healing. As you can see in the image below, the donor hair recovery is very swift.
Ready to get started? Request your FREE quote now!
We hope that our questions have helped you gain a better understanding of what it means to have a hair transplant at Nashville Hair Doctor, Memphis Hair Doctor, or Louisville Hair Doctor (or as an out-of-town guest). The next step for you to take is to find out if you’re a candidate and to request a quote. Both can be easily accomplished by uploading a few photos and answer a few easy questions. Shauna, our NeoGraft consultant, will prepare a quote for you within one day. Should you have any more questions about the process, feel free to use the same form and put your question in the comments field. We will answer all your questions to our best ability.
We also promise to never pressure you to “buy now while this discount lasts.” We offer very competitive prices and are confident in our service. We are committed to patiently answer all your questions and let you choose the right moment when you are ready to book your NeoGraft procedure. We look forward to hearing from you!
