topccat29
29 year HT veteran
Below is an article that appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 1991. Take the time to read it as it is a PR piece. No different than much of what you see today. Regardless of if the topic is tattooing, Acell, robotics or the celebrity hair transplant. It's less news and more promotion and there is a big difference. I found it to be an interesting read. Have any of you tried the cutting edge "plug and graft method" what about the "hats off technique" or the "Chambers dovetail closure"
I love that line..............who do you call when you need a little upholstery up on top................I would have guess the upholstery busters..............lol..............
How come we didn't see any PR pieces on Bobby Limmer back in the early 90's? Someone who was doing cutting edge work in the field of hair transplantation.
Observation................as I read most of the PR pieces put out there, newspapers, internet, etc they all seem to have one thing in common. These are not the guys doing the cutting edge work. I find this to be almost incredible but I do believe this to be true. It's almost if those that are doing the right thing and are incredibly skilled all seem to share the same common trait for the most part.............they seem to be humble and don't personally seek the spotlight.
PR pieces are usually a poor way to research or make a decision. Some of you may not have even been born when this article appeared but history repeats itself.
Hairs Apparent
The Desperate, The Blue, The Fed Up Flock To A Growing Medical Field For A Little Crop Rotation And Self-confidence
May 24, 1991|By Barbara Mahany.
o
There are many reasons patients call on the services of David P. Kelsey, M.D. Sometimes they call in desperation. Sometimes they cannot live under the lie for one more day. Sometimes the whole thing simply gets away from them.
Take the New York real estate mogul who was in Florida making the moves on a couple of babes he`d met on the sand. Things were moving along well. Quite well, he told himself. The three slipped into the water.
So did his hairpiece.
``He lost it,`` says Kelsey, pushing away an examining light at his LaSalle Street clinic earlier this week. ``He swam underwater to the next hotel. He left his shoes, clothes, everything on the beach. He flew straight home to New York, where his brother, a lawyer, filed suit for faulty attachment. They ended up settling.``
The real estate man ended up calling on Kelsey.
So did Norman, another New York lawyer, who was taking his girlfriend home the other night when she started fingering her way toward his hair. He stopped her. Cold. He said he`d had an, um, accident and there were sutures up there she shouldn`t touch. He told her how he`d been up on the roof during the Mike Tyson fight, fixing the satellite dish, when the dish fell on his head.
``He used that story half a dozen times. He`d go into all this incredible detail. And the fight wasn`t even on cable in Brooklyn,`` says Kelsey. ``He has another version, where he was up on the roof, when he slipped and was left dangling from the ledge.
``Tomorrow`s his first surgery. He came in and said, `I`m so sick of that hairpiece. I can`t date the same woman more than a few times. They start to wonder, ``Well, when are those stitches gonna come out?`` `
``And he has to remember which story he tells to which woman-whether it was the satellite dish falling on him, or the hanging from the ledge.``
Kelsey, or his partner, Dr. Constantine P. Chambers, based in Clearwater, Fla., say they are the men to call when you`re in need of a little upholstery on top.
As they like to joke around the office-they have 12 in the United States and one in Greece-they`re the purveyors of The Amazing Chia Head.
That is, they plant hair in people`s heads-and, on request, armpits, eyebrows, sideburns and mustaches-and watch it grow.
``Guaranteed till four days after death,`` says Kelsey, offering the chilling fact that hair and cuticles continue to grow for four days after the human body dies.
He also offers the chilling fact that 10 to 15 percent of the men who come seeking transplants are sent home empty-headed. If you`ve been mistaken for Yul Brynner, you`ve got a problem: Guys with that little hair have nothing to work with. You`re a skinhead for life, and nothing, says Kelsey, will make you sprout. ``This field is filled with charlatans,`` he warns. Beware of folks wielding age-old remedies: sheep dung, snake oil, or overblown promises. The sexiness issue
They have seeded 50,000 pates and a few other body parts since 1969, when Chambers, an osteopath working with a plastic surgeon near Atlanta, got hooked on the idea of transplanting hair.
Chambers is a pioneer in harvesting hair grafts from one part of the head (usually the back), and replanting them in scalp gone fallow. To the scores who now look into the bathroom mirror each morning, sliding comb through locks, he is the Hero of Hair.
- He devised the ``Chambers Hats Off Technique,`` and ``Chambers Dovetail Closure,`` bandage-free surgical methods that save patients from ``wandering around like Egyptians, their heads wrapped in turbans,`` Kelsey says.
- He wrote ``Are Bald Men Sexier? A Physician`s Report on Baldness,`` a 147-page book that illustrates its subject with color photos of women spilling out of bikinis and filmy undergarments. Above the caption, ``Dreaded moments in the life of a toupee-wearer,`` there is this photograph: a woman in a lacy nightgown fingering the naked scalp of a man whose fallen hairpiece lies limp on a pillow.
Chambers waits no longer than the book`s third paragraph to answer the title question: ``Yes. Bald men are sexier.`` He explains in the second paragraph how high levels of the male sex hormone have been tied to the leading cause of baldness, a genetic condition known as male pattern baldness, in which a waxy hormonal buildup in the follicles causes them to die, and hair to fall out.
- Using a Japanese dental drill, he developed a small electric surgical blade ``affectionately called `the cookie cutter,` `` Kelsey says. It eliminates the telltale sign of a shoddy planting: the ``picket fence`` or
``corn row`` effect, the doctors call it, also known as the ``Barbie doll head,`` in which sprouts of hair seem to pop in artifical clusters out of a shiny scalp.
- At a hardware store he once picked up a hand punch that is now part of the Chambers method of punching 4 mm circles of scalp, each graft containing 12 to 16 hairs, which are then lifted and planted in the bald part, sutured into place and left to grow.
He is the founder of the Chambers Hair Institute, with international headquarters in Clearwater, Fla. The institute modestly claims to be the nation`s leading hair transplanter east of the San Andreas Fault with offices throughout Florida, and in Atlanta; Secaucus, N.J.; Providence, R.I.;
Nashville; Detroit; Chicago; Minneapolis; and soon in Scottsdale, Ariz.
It leaves the Pacific fringe to a Los Angeles-based rival, Bosley Medical Group, which says it services enough heads in Beverly Hills, La Jolla and parts north to wear the national transplant crown. It would be splitting hairs to pick the leader in the campaign to rid America of its ``chrome domes,`` its ``trailer hitch heads,`` its ``genetic skinheads.``
``We`re already cutting it kind of thin, doing what we do,`` says Kelsey, who each month flies 12,000 miles and performs 200 to 400 transplants as national medical director of the Chambers Hair Institute, and chief of surgery at the Chambers offices in Secaucus, Nashville, Chicago and Minneapolis.
A spokesman for the American Academy of Dermatology, based in Evanston, said hair transplants are ``definitely a legitimate procedure.`` The ``plug-and-graft`` method is a relatively simple procedure and it ``lasts
forever,`` if done correctly. The spokesman was not familiar with the Chambers clinics, but said there are several such franchises around the country.
Like making violins
Until 1986, Kelsey was a family doctor in the north woods of Frederic, Wis. He practiced small-town medicine-delivered babies, diagnosed chicken pox, signed an occasional death certificate.
``As I got to be middle-aged, I grew disenchanted with medicine,`` says Kelsey, 42, who had been one of two doctors in the town of 9,000. ``A friend of mine was balding. He told me about this hair transplant surgeon. Dr. Chambers. I met him. The most charismatic guy in the world.``
Kelsey put down his stethoscope and picked up his comb, hair clips, cookie cutter and hardware-store hand punch. He was soon up to his eyebrows in patients seeking shelter for their scalps.
``It`s like making violins; they don`t teach this in med school,`` says the man who says he made it through the University of Michigan and its medical school with honors. ``It`s not serious enough for real doctors. But we are real doctors.``
``I used to save lives on Christmas Eve and they`d stiff me for the bill. Now I put hair on people`s heads, they thank me, they give me gifts, they embarrass me with praise.``
Before changing into his surgical scrubs for the day`s patients, Kelsey sits at a glass table large enough to serve dinner for eight. Spread before him are color photos showing scalps before, during and after transplants. Kelsey, it must be noted, has a thick head of hair. (``Yes, it`s mine. Guys always hope their hair will turn out like mine.``)
He makes clear that 75 percent of their patients are ``Ten-dollar, 15-dollar-an-hour guys. It`s so important to them, they scrape together their nickels and dimes. I`ve had guys use their retirement plan. It`s not the six- figure procedure everybody thinks it is.``
It is the $5,000 to $15,000 procedure, depending on how bald you are, and how many treatments (two hours each) you`ll need. ``We ask people to give us a year to a year and a half of their lives.``
The top transplant seekers, by trade: policemen, salesmen, construction workers and contractors. Bodybuilders are high on the list, too.
``Not just because they`re using steroids,`` says Kelsey, who explains that, as in male pattern baldness, these hormones clog and kill the hair follicles. ``But they`re into pumping up, controlling everything about their bodies-except what`s on their head.`` Former Mr. Universe John Hnatyschak is on the list of patients now in treatment.
``These guys lift cars, but in here they`re nervous as could be,`` says Kelsey. ``It`s the unknown. It`s nerve-racking.``
Vials of lidocaine, stacked in boxes beside the barber chair, promise pain relief, injected around the transplant sites. To further numb the patients, a small TV squawks all day in each treatment room: Oprah, Geraldo, Phil and all the soaps, the anesthesia of choice. A box of smelling salts waits atop the paper towel rack in each treatment room. They are cracked open at least once a month.
Confidentially theirs
Tom, a 32-year-old advertising executive who is brought in as an audio-visual aid, sporting a full head of blond hair (and a wedding ring) after 1 1/2 years in and out of the barber chair, swears it really doesn`t hurt.
``It`s like two pinches, that`s all.`` Still, the 6-foot-9-inch man can`t stand to look at pictures taken during his treatment. ``I`m not one for doctors or needles,`` he confesses.
o
Like most patients, Tom prefers to keep his transplant top secret. At 6-9, he has an advantage. Not many people have occasion to gaze down on him. And when he wore a Cubs cap to work-and to client meetings-every day for three weeks during treatment, everyone just figured he`d lost some bet. No one asked a question.
Confidentiality is a big part of the hair transplant business .
``When we`re looking for offices, we almost never look at medical complexes or strip malls,`` says GT Varney, chief executive officer of five Chambers clinics, including the one in Chicago. ``We want a big building where you walk in, push a button and almost no one knows where you`re going.``
Patients sometimes make up names and refuse to leave a phone number where they can be reached. ``We were treating a country and western singer in Nashville for two years before he finally told us who he was,`` Kelsey says.
``I don`t know anything about country and western, so it didn`t mean anything to me anyway.``
``We have people whose wives, girlfriends, mothers don`t even know what they`re going through,`` Varney says.
Excuse me, says someone taking notes, but how can you not notice the sudden sprouting of hair?
``Either it`s not a good marriage or relationship,`` says Kelsey, ``or maybe they travel a lot. If you can keep them from running their fingers through your hair, you can hide it.``
``Some guys say their wives think they`re having an affair, or wonder where the money is being siphoned to,`` Varney says.
``Spouses who don`t know are the exception,`` Kelsey says. ``But it`s our goal to make this acceptable to the general public, so people can go out without everyone who sees them whipping their necks off.``
The average patient is now in his early 20s to mid-30s, Kelsey said. Often, it`s the wife, girlfriend, fiance or mother who makes the first call. Divorce decrees often prompt phone calls from suddenly eligible middle-aged males.
``We`ve got some guys so depressed they won`t take off their baseball hat in their own house , or at a friend`s wedding.``
Since he has been in the business, Kelsey says he has changed. ``It`s a real disappointment to me. I used to look at nice-looking women in airports. Now I look at bald men .``
I love that line..............who do you call when you need a little upholstery up on top................I would have guess the upholstery busters..............lol..............
How come we didn't see any PR pieces on Bobby Limmer back in the early 90's? Someone who was doing cutting edge work in the field of hair transplantation.
Observation................as I read most of the PR pieces put out there, newspapers, internet, etc they all seem to have one thing in common. These are not the guys doing the cutting edge work. I find this to be almost incredible but I do believe this to be true. It's almost if those that are doing the right thing and are incredibly skilled all seem to share the same common trait for the most part.............they seem to be humble and don't personally seek the spotlight.
PR pieces are usually a poor way to research or make a decision. Some of you may not have even been born when this article appeared but history repeats itself.
Hairs Apparent
The Desperate, The Blue, The Fed Up Flock To A Growing Medical Field For A Little Crop Rotation And Self-confidence
May 24, 1991|By Barbara Mahany.
o
There are many reasons patients call on the services of David P. Kelsey, M.D. Sometimes they call in desperation. Sometimes they cannot live under the lie for one more day. Sometimes the whole thing simply gets away from them.
Take the New York real estate mogul who was in Florida making the moves on a couple of babes he`d met on the sand. Things were moving along well. Quite well, he told himself. The three slipped into the water.
So did his hairpiece.
``He lost it,`` says Kelsey, pushing away an examining light at his LaSalle Street clinic earlier this week. ``He swam underwater to the next hotel. He left his shoes, clothes, everything on the beach. He flew straight home to New York, where his brother, a lawyer, filed suit for faulty attachment. They ended up settling.``
The real estate man ended up calling on Kelsey.
So did Norman, another New York lawyer, who was taking his girlfriend home the other night when she started fingering her way toward his hair. He stopped her. Cold. He said he`d had an, um, accident and there were sutures up there she shouldn`t touch. He told her how he`d been up on the roof during the Mike Tyson fight, fixing the satellite dish, when the dish fell on his head.
``He used that story half a dozen times. He`d go into all this incredible detail. And the fight wasn`t even on cable in Brooklyn,`` says Kelsey. ``He has another version, where he was up on the roof, when he slipped and was left dangling from the ledge.
``Tomorrow`s his first surgery. He came in and said, `I`m so sick of that hairpiece. I can`t date the same woman more than a few times. They start to wonder, ``Well, when are those stitches gonna come out?`` `
``And he has to remember which story he tells to which woman-whether it was the satellite dish falling on him, or the hanging from the ledge.``
Kelsey, or his partner, Dr. Constantine P. Chambers, based in Clearwater, Fla., say they are the men to call when you`re in need of a little upholstery on top.
As they like to joke around the office-they have 12 in the United States and one in Greece-they`re the purveyors of The Amazing Chia Head.
That is, they plant hair in people`s heads-and, on request, armpits, eyebrows, sideburns and mustaches-and watch it grow.
``Guaranteed till four days after death,`` says Kelsey, offering the chilling fact that hair and cuticles continue to grow for four days after the human body dies.
He also offers the chilling fact that 10 to 15 percent of the men who come seeking transplants are sent home empty-headed. If you`ve been mistaken for Yul Brynner, you`ve got a problem: Guys with that little hair have nothing to work with. You`re a skinhead for life, and nothing, says Kelsey, will make you sprout. ``This field is filled with charlatans,`` he warns. Beware of folks wielding age-old remedies: sheep dung, snake oil, or overblown promises. The sexiness issue
They have seeded 50,000 pates and a few other body parts since 1969, when Chambers, an osteopath working with a plastic surgeon near Atlanta, got hooked on the idea of transplanting hair.
Chambers is a pioneer in harvesting hair grafts from one part of the head (usually the back), and replanting them in scalp gone fallow. To the scores who now look into the bathroom mirror each morning, sliding comb through locks, he is the Hero of Hair.
- He devised the ``Chambers Hats Off Technique,`` and ``Chambers Dovetail Closure,`` bandage-free surgical methods that save patients from ``wandering around like Egyptians, their heads wrapped in turbans,`` Kelsey says.
- He wrote ``Are Bald Men Sexier? A Physician`s Report on Baldness,`` a 147-page book that illustrates its subject with color photos of women spilling out of bikinis and filmy undergarments. Above the caption, ``Dreaded moments in the life of a toupee-wearer,`` there is this photograph: a woman in a lacy nightgown fingering the naked scalp of a man whose fallen hairpiece lies limp on a pillow.
Chambers waits no longer than the book`s third paragraph to answer the title question: ``Yes. Bald men are sexier.`` He explains in the second paragraph how high levels of the male sex hormone have been tied to the leading cause of baldness, a genetic condition known as male pattern baldness, in which a waxy hormonal buildup in the follicles causes them to die, and hair to fall out.
- Using a Japanese dental drill, he developed a small electric surgical blade ``affectionately called `the cookie cutter,` `` Kelsey says. It eliminates the telltale sign of a shoddy planting: the ``picket fence`` or
``corn row`` effect, the doctors call it, also known as the ``Barbie doll head,`` in which sprouts of hair seem to pop in artifical clusters out of a shiny scalp.
- At a hardware store he once picked up a hand punch that is now part of the Chambers method of punching 4 mm circles of scalp, each graft containing 12 to 16 hairs, which are then lifted and planted in the bald part, sutured into place and left to grow.
He is the founder of the Chambers Hair Institute, with international headquarters in Clearwater, Fla. The institute modestly claims to be the nation`s leading hair transplanter east of the San Andreas Fault with offices throughout Florida, and in Atlanta; Secaucus, N.J.; Providence, R.I.;
Nashville; Detroit; Chicago; Minneapolis; and soon in Scottsdale, Ariz.
It leaves the Pacific fringe to a Los Angeles-based rival, Bosley Medical Group, which says it services enough heads in Beverly Hills, La Jolla and parts north to wear the national transplant crown. It would be splitting hairs to pick the leader in the campaign to rid America of its ``chrome domes,`` its ``trailer hitch heads,`` its ``genetic skinheads.``
``We`re already cutting it kind of thin, doing what we do,`` says Kelsey, who each month flies 12,000 miles and performs 200 to 400 transplants as national medical director of the Chambers Hair Institute, and chief of surgery at the Chambers offices in Secaucus, Nashville, Chicago and Minneapolis.
A spokesman for the American Academy of Dermatology, based in Evanston, said hair transplants are ``definitely a legitimate procedure.`` The ``plug-and-graft`` method is a relatively simple procedure and it ``lasts
forever,`` if done correctly. The spokesman was not familiar with the Chambers clinics, but said there are several such franchises around the country.
Like making violins
Until 1986, Kelsey was a family doctor in the north woods of Frederic, Wis. He practiced small-town medicine-delivered babies, diagnosed chicken pox, signed an occasional death certificate.
``As I got to be middle-aged, I grew disenchanted with medicine,`` says Kelsey, 42, who had been one of two doctors in the town of 9,000. ``A friend of mine was balding. He told me about this hair transplant surgeon. Dr. Chambers. I met him. The most charismatic guy in the world.``
Kelsey put down his stethoscope and picked up his comb, hair clips, cookie cutter and hardware-store hand punch. He was soon up to his eyebrows in patients seeking shelter for their scalps.
``It`s like making violins; they don`t teach this in med school,`` says the man who says he made it through the University of Michigan and its medical school with honors. ``It`s not serious enough for real doctors. But we are real doctors.``
``I used to save lives on Christmas Eve and they`d stiff me for the bill. Now I put hair on people`s heads, they thank me, they give me gifts, they embarrass me with praise.``
Before changing into his surgical scrubs for the day`s patients, Kelsey sits at a glass table large enough to serve dinner for eight. Spread before him are color photos showing scalps before, during and after transplants. Kelsey, it must be noted, has a thick head of hair. (``Yes, it`s mine. Guys always hope their hair will turn out like mine.``)
He makes clear that 75 percent of their patients are ``Ten-dollar, 15-dollar-an-hour guys. It`s so important to them, they scrape together their nickels and dimes. I`ve had guys use their retirement plan. It`s not the six- figure procedure everybody thinks it is.``
It is the $5,000 to $15,000 procedure, depending on how bald you are, and how many treatments (two hours each) you`ll need. ``We ask people to give us a year to a year and a half of their lives.``
The top transplant seekers, by trade: policemen, salesmen, construction workers and contractors. Bodybuilders are high on the list, too.
``Not just because they`re using steroids,`` says Kelsey, who explains that, as in male pattern baldness, these hormones clog and kill the hair follicles. ``But they`re into pumping up, controlling everything about their bodies-except what`s on their head.`` Former Mr. Universe John Hnatyschak is on the list of patients now in treatment.
``These guys lift cars, but in here they`re nervous as could be,`` says Kelsey. ``It`s the unknown. It`s nerve-racking.``
Vials of lidocaine, stacked in boxes beside the barber chair, promise pain relief, injected around the transplant sites. To further numb the patients, a small TV squawks all day in each treatment room: Oprah, Geraldo, Phil and all the soaps, the anesthesia of choice. A box of smelling salts waits atop the paper towel rack in each treatment room. They are cracked open at least once a month.
Confidentially theirs
Tom, a 32-year-old advertising executive who is brought in as an audio-visual aid, sporting a full head of blond hair (and a wedding ring) after 1 1/2 years in and out of the barber chair, swears it really doesn`t hurt.
``It`s like two pinches, that`s all.`` Still, the 6-foot-9-inch man can`t stand to look at pictures taken during his treatment. ``I`m not one for doctors or needles,`` he confesses.
o
Like most patients, Tom prefers to keep his transplant top secret. At 6-9, he has an advantage. Not many people have occasion to gaze down on him. And when he wore a Cubs cap to work-and to client meetings-every day for three weeks during treatment, everyone just figured he`d lost some bet. No one asked a question.
Confidentiality is a big part of the hair transplant business .
``When we`re looking for offices, we almost never look at medical complexes or strip malls,`` says GT Varney, chief executive officer of five Chambers clinics, including the one in Chicago. ``We want a big building where you walk in, push a button and almost no one knows where you`re going.``
Patients sometimes make up names and refuse to leave a phone number where they can be reached. ``We were treating a country and western singer in Nashville for two years before he finally told us who he was,`` Kelsey says.
``I don`t know anything about country and western, so it didn`t mean anything to me anyway.``
``We have people whose wives, girlfriends, mothers don`t even know what they`re going through,`` Varney says.
Excuse me, says someone taking notes, but how can you not notice the sudden sprouting of hair?
``Either it`s not a good marriage or relationship,`` says Kelsey, ``or maybe they travel a lot. If you can keep them from running their fingers through your hair, you can hide it.``
``Some guys say their wives think they`re having an affair, or wonder where the money is being siphoned to,`` Varney says.
``Spouses who don`t know are the exception,`` Kelsey says. ``But it`s our goal to make this acceptable to the general public, so people can go out without everyone who sees them whipping their necks off.``
The average patient is now in his early 20s to mid-30s, Kelsey said. Often, it`s the wife, girlfriend, fiance or mother who makes the first call. Divorce decrees often prompt phone calls from suddenly eligible middle-aged males.
``We`ve got some guys so depressed they won`t take off their baseball hat in their own house , or at a friend`s wedding.``
Since he has been in the business, Kelsey says he has changed. ``It`s a real disappointment to me. I used to look at nice-looking women in airports. Now I look at bald men .``
