Great video, even though it does not include all the brands that are on the market today, but that is fine.
My personal opinion :
Motorized devices have really hit main stream about 5-8 years ago.
I believe that overall motorized (the specialized types) have made very good progress, but in my opinion for a different reason.
When FUE became popular, around 2002-2004 there were just a handful of practitioners worldwide that performed FUE.
They had to work with non FUE designed tools and sometimes had to improvise. Some of them have used their expertise to startup company’s that have developed some of the most successful FUE machines currently available.
In the early days, the amount of grafts where relatively low compared to today’s amounts.
So we had ‘primitive’ tools and lower amount of grafts performed in the early days, often in the range of 500-1000 grafts per day.
Yet, the early FUE adaptors like dr. Jones, dr Cole, dr. Feller, ourselves (I may have forgotten some and please feel free to add to the list) where eventually able to extract all kind of different style grafts manually (short, long, curly, splayed ….). Indeed, the hard manual FUE school was tough for the first wave of FUE practitioners, but they really paved the way for all what would come next.
FUE results in the early days were good and in the right hands matched or exceeded the survival rates of FUT procedures. However, FUT was still producing a lot more grafts on a daily basis and thus the overall results took a lot longer using FUE since it would require multiple treatment days.
Using manual tools, being pushed to produce higher and higher amount of grafts would proof to become a physical problem in such that the high level of concentration required for FUE procedures were getting harder and harder as the FUE sessions became larger and larger.
Fatigue is an issue since it has a direct impact on the quality of the work.
In my opinion this gives motorized FUE the advantage since it removes to a certain degree the fatigue issue. Therefore, today, large FUE session can be performed without loosing quality to fatigue.
A new problem solved, but a new potential problem created
We now have entered a new phase that potentially cause quality problems by using motorized FUE devices, unintended.
Direct competition is forcing low budget FUE clinics to produce extremely high number of grafts during a single day.
This time around the motorized machines are used in such way that the sheer speed of usage is causing potential graft and or donor area damage. It is not a fatigue issue, but rather a speed issue.
When using motorized FUE for the main purpose of working faster, it will likely cause problems, especially when placed in the hands of no experience practitioners.
When I read that patient X has had a 5000 grafts FUE session performed in a 8 hours session (and often less) I can only imagine the outcome and the lack of understanding of the patient and the practitioner.
FUE hair transplants are not a race against the clock. It is the ability to provide consistent result in a safe manner, day after day.
That is the main reason why the top clinics are not offering more than 2500-3000 grafts in a single day.
