Dr. Thomas Mantse - 1500 FUE – Budapest, Hungary

[Bigmac]

out of interest, for a repair job, can they use the newly transplanted hair as donor hair? (so take out the grafts that were placed and use them again in a different position)

Yes, grafts can be used again.

 

[Bigmac]

Contact a few clinics to see what they think is the best repair option for you.
Some of the grafts may need punched out or a doctor may be able to work around them. Either way, you’re going to need one of possibly two surgeries to fix this.

 

[William]

out of interest, for a repair job, can they use the newly transplanted hair as donor hair? (so take out the grafts that were placed and use them again in a different position)

That's a good question. From what I understand, they can't do this, as the hair's DNA is damaged; that's why it's coming out curly.

Update: I saw a hair surgeon in London who suggested that I have the hairs removed via electrolysis. He estimated that there were only about 600 grafts, even though I paid Thomas Mantse for 1500. He said that my donor area is good enough for another surgery but some hair loss at the back would be visible. However, it will cost me £5500.

What I've learnt from all these is that, when it comes to hair transplants, you get what you pay for!

 

[William]

@Bigmac Thanks, I'll give that a try. I can't believe how much damage they did to me, but I still need to save a bit more because I can afford to fix it.

 

[Bigmac]

That's a good question. From what I understand, they can't do this, as the hair's DNA is damaged; that's why it's coming out curly.

Update: I saw a hair surgeon in London who suggested that I have the hairs removed via electrolysis. He estimated that there were only about 600 grafts, even though I paid Thomas Mantse for 1500. He said that my donor area is good enough for another surgery but some hair loss at the back would be visible. However, it will cost me £5500.

What I've learnt from all these is that, when it comes to hair transplants, you get what you pay for!

Which clinic advised to have them removed this way?

 

[William]

Which clinic advised to have them removed this way?

Westminster Hair Centre (Harley Street). I thought it was a rather odd suggestion. I would prefer to have them taken out, since they still hurt a bit.

 

[Bigmac]

Maybe they feel there is a higher risk of scarring if they were punched out. You could ask them why they feel laser is the better option. I`d want to save my grafts for redistribution if possible.

 

[samuel123]

Hi guys,

I'm also looking to go to Hungary for a hair transplant but this post has put me off a bit.

What are the top 2/3 hair transplant Dr's or clinics in Hungary?

Thank you

 

[samuel123]

I'm looking at a hair transplant in Hungary do you know if any other clinics to Dr's who are trustworthy?
Thank you

 

[Bigmac]

I'm looking at a hair transplant in Hungary do you know if any other clinics to Dr's who are trustworthy?
Thank you

Have a look at Dr Sikos. I believe he does decent work.

 

[samuel123]

Have a look at Dr Sikos. I believe he does decent work.

Do you know any others as Dr Sikos is fully booked. Are there any other well known clinics in Hungary?
Thank you very much

 

[Bigmac]

None that I know of. Would you be prepared to travel to another country?

 

[Bigmac]

Hi William. Have you moved forward with a treatment plan? I hope you get this sorted.

 

[Jimbo]

Hi William, I registered with this forum specifically to comment on this thread. On April 22-23 I got 1,600 graft HT with Dr Mantse. Your account of your experience with him was very similar to mine and now after seeing how poor your results are, I'm starting to freak out. I am just hitting the 4 month mark. I think I'm seeing progress as is expected at 4 months and lots of hairs are sprouting now and starting to grow, but after reading about how things went for you I'm now wondering if they will turn out not to have the thickness and final result we see from many others clinics.
What confuses me is how many good reviews he has. On Whatclinic.com he has a 9.4 Outstanding rating. In Google he has 4.5 stars. In Trustpilot he has 4.5 stars but there are also those who have been very disappointed with him, and those reviews ring more true than the positive ones. Also in quite a few cases the positive reviews were written after only a few days of the surgery and say things like "Dr Mantse is a master of his craft!" or "he works so meticulously", but how the hell do they know that when you can't see him when you're getting operated on? And it's too bloody early to know how good he is anyway. So in hindsight I'm starting to really question whether this guy is a legit HT surgeon or just a con artist. The next couple of months I think will answer that question. As far as the experience in dealing with him, everything you said echoed my experience. As far as the results are concerned, I think already my HT appears to be looking better than yours did at the 4 months stage, but my confidence has now taken a huge knock and these are going to be a stressful few months to come. I hope you still check this thread because I'd be interested to hear back from you. I'm happy to post how things go for me.

 

[Jimbo]

I wrote my own account of my HT with Dr Mantse and to help someone in Reddit who was also going to get an HT from him. So I'll paste it here too...


Ok, I'll share with you my experience and hope it will be helpful in some ways...
I needed my hairline doing so I chose him because he had the best reviews on the whatclinic website. I'm from England and I didn't want to go to Turkey as Hungary just seemed more straightforward what with all the travel complications these days. And Hungary didn't have overly stringent covid measures in place so it was a very easy and cheap trip.
Prior to the visit we spoke on the phone and I sent him pictures and he said I need around 1600 grafts he could do the job over 2 days. Sounded good enough. And he has very reasonable prices too, which I was also happy about. So all went well enough in the initial consultation.
So on the day of op, the 1st issue was I didn't want a shaved head, and he had said on the phone he could do a "no-look" method which sounded good. Thing is you need about 4 inches of hair at the back and I had nowhere near long enough. So when I got there he said your hair's not long enough for no-look, do you want me to shave your head? I didn't quite understand what he meant, and I still didn't want a fully shaved head, so I said "no". So he did the extractions according to the "no-look" method but that was to shave 2 bands of hair at the back and extract the grafts from only those zones. I didn't realise it because I couldn't see but this ended up looking bloody ridiculous. But I only got to see that once I got home 3 days later. If I knew I was walking around with 2 long strips of shaved hair, now with lots of wounds in them, I would have told him to shave the back of my head but leave the top longer which was obviously the best option. I thought it was pretty ridiculous of him to not explain this properly and let me take the really silly option.
The added problem to this "no-look" method which I am now finding out, is that 2 bands used to extract hair creates a more conspicuous looking effect later on. So rather than having hair extracted randomly over a bigger area, the smaller area runs the risk of being overharvested and now after 3 months, and despite having let my hair grow a bit longer, I still have 2 visible strips of less dense hair on the back of my head, which I have to keep longer to disguise, but this defeats the purpose of an FUE, I should have gone with FUT if that's how it's gonna end up. Again, I'm pissed off at him for being so unprofessional in performing that "no-look" method on someone who didn't need it and wants to keep his hair shaved at the back and sides.
Another issue was that we only talked about my hairline during lunch on the first day after the extraction part. By then I was feeling a bit weary and not in the mood to pay too much attention. I said I'd like a jagged hairline for realism with a bit of a peak at the front as is natural for men. He drew a dead straight hairline and said, "something like this should look good". I just thought because I told him I wanted a jagged hairline he'd have done it despite drawing a straight line. But no, he proceeds to go and implant a dead straight hairline with no peak at the front. I can only hope that I am happy with how it finally looks, and in fairness I've seen videos of other guys with straight hairlines that look half decent anyway.
Then other issues were with his general performance. He's quite stressed and if you get uncomfortable and want to adjust position he gets a bit wound up. When he was extracting my hair from the back I had to lie face down with my head in the hole of the operation chair. He put a neck pillow as a cushion for my face. Problem is after some time (extraction takes about 3 hours) the stuffing from the neck pillow got pushed to the sides and so my face was being pushed into the chair. I said my face is hurting and he dismissed me saying "yeah well that's how it goes". After a while I said I really have to lift up my face because it's really hurting and that's when he realised the problem. But his lack of care and interest really pissed me off.
Another issue was that he seems to want to do EVERYTHING himself, which means even during the procedure if his phone goes off he checks it, even answers the phone and talks for a while. I found that really unprofessional. I said sort of lightheartedly "you need to get yourself a secretary", and he replied that he had one before but it didn't work out, he prefers to do everything himself. I have to wonder what's wrong with a guy that can't employ basic clerical staff?
So all in all the experience wasn't a pleasant one. He did the job over 2 long days and I didn't feel particularly comfortable. He's ok and wasn't horrible or anything, he just seems to lack general people skills, doesn't listen well and generally makes poor assessments of situations. But like I said, all that matters is the final product. The job looked ok, despite having a dead straight hairline. Now at month 3 things are starting to take shape, but I think in one more month I'll have an idea as to how the finish result will look. So, I can only sit tight and hope for the best.
I hope that info is helpful for you.

 

[Kevboy]

Westminster Hair Centre (Harley Street). I thought it was a rather odd suggestion. I would prefer to have them taken out, since they still hurt a bit.

An update William on your repair?

 

[Kevboy]

I wrote my own account of my HT with Dr Mantse and to help someone in Reddit who was also going to get an HT from him. So I'll paste it here too....

Better to have your own post with pictures.

 

[Jimbo]

Better to have your own post with pictures.

I might do that. My first aim is to connect with William

 

[loui]

Damn this is really tragic to read, as it is with all these clinics doing poor work and in this case it seemed really weird the whole experience and obviously with your results the guy which I will not call a Dr does not know how to do a hair transplant properly.

Good that you had the courage to share this with others, I am sure others will find this when researching him.

Hopefully you found a solution to this, a easy solution if you would like to go back to pre op stage would be to electrolysis away the transplanted grafts and start over. Your donor area looks good still.

 

[loui]

I wrote my own account of my HT with Dr Mantse and to help someone in Reddit who was also going to get an HT from him. So I'll paste it here too...


Ok, I'll share with you my experience and hope it will be helpful in some ways...
I needed my hairline doing so I chose him because he had the best reviews on the whatclinic website. I'm from England and I didn't want to go to Turkey as Hungary just seemed more straightforward what with all the travel complications these days. And Hungary didn't have overly stringent covid measures in place so it was a very easy and cheap trip.
Prior to the visit we spoke on the phone and I sent him pictures and he said I need around 1600 grafts he could do the job over 2 days. Sounded good enough. And he has very reasonable prices too, which I was also happy about. So all went well enough in the initial consultation.
So on the day of op, the 1st issue was I didn't want a shaved head, and he had said on the phone he could do a "no-look" method which sounded good. Thing is you need about 4 inches of hair at the back and I had nowhere near long enough. So when I got there he said your hair's not long enough for no-look, do you want me to shave your head? I didn't quite understand what he meant, and I still didn't want a fully shaved head, so I said "no". So he did the extractions according to the "no-look" method but that was to shave 2 bands of hair at the back and extract the grafts from only those zones. I didn't realise it because I couldn't see but this ended up looking bloody ridiculous. But I only got to see that once I got home 3 days later. If I knew I was walking around with 2 long strips of shaved hair, now with lots of wounds in them, I would have told him to shave the back of my head but leave the top longer which was obviously the best option. I thought it was pretty ridiculous of him to not explain this properly and let me take the really silly option.
The added problem to this "no-look" method which I am now finding out, is that 2 bands used to extract hair creates a more conspicuous looking effect later on. So rather than having hair extracted randomly over a bigger area, the smaller area runs the risk of being overharvested and now after 3 months, and despite having let my hair grow a bit longer, I still have 2 visible strips of less dense hair on the back of my head, which I have to keep longer to disguise, but this defeats the purpose of an FUE, I should have gone with FUT if that's how it's gonna end up. Again, I'm pissed off at him for being so unprofessional in performing that "no-look" method on someone who didn't need it and wants to keep his hair shaved at the back and sides.
Another issue was that we only talked about my hairline during lunch on the first day after the extraction part. By then I was feeling a bit weary and not in the mood to pay too much attention. I said I'd like a jagged hairline for realism with a bit of a peak at the front as is natural for men. He drew a dead straight hairline and said, "something like this should look good". I just thought because I told him I wanted a jagged hairline he'd have done it despite drawing a straight line. But no, he proceeds to go and implant a dead straight hairline with no peak at the front. I can only hope that I am happy with how it finally looks, and in fairness I've seen videos of other guys with straight hairlines that look half decent anyway.
Then other issues were with his general performance. He's quite stressed and if you get uncomfortable and want to adjust position he gets a bit wound up. When he was extracting my hair from the back I had to lie face down with my head in the hole of the operation chair. He put a neck pillow as a cushion for my face. Problem is after some time (extraction takes about 3 hours) the stuffing from the neck pillow got pushed to the sides and so my face was being pushed into the chair. I said my face is hurting and he dismissed me saying "yeah well that's how it goes". After a while I said I really have to lift up my face because it's really hurting and that's when he realised the problem. But his lack of care and interest really pissed me off.
Another issue was that he seems to want to do EVERYTHING himself, which means even during the procedure if his phone goes off he checks it, even answers the phone and talks for a while. I found that really unprofessional. I said sort of lightheartedly "you need to get yourself a secretary", and he replied that he had one before but it didn't work out, he prefers to do everything himself. I have to wonder what's wrong with a guy that can't employ basic clerical staff?
So all in all the experience wasn't a pleasant one. He did the job over 2 long days and I didn't feel particularly comfortable. He's ok and wasn't horrible or anything, he just seems to lack general people skills, doesn't listen well and generally makes poor assessments of situations. But like I said, all that matters is the final product. The job looked ok, despite having a dead straight hairline. Now at month 3 things are starting to take shape, but I think in one more month I'll have an idea as to how the finish result will look. So, I can only sit tight and hope for the best.
I hope that info is helpful for you.

You should post some photos and not just text.

Eh. "It is hurting" Dr: Thats how it goes....

He seems to be doing FUE like a strip kind of extraction which is terribly wrong. Everything about your experience sounds wrong and weird.

Hopefully you will look just fine.