Revolutionize Your Look with SmartGraft Hair Restoration by Dr. Robert Whitfield

Hi, it's Dr. Robert Whitfield. I'm a board certified plastic surgeon. I'm here today to talk to you about smart graft. Smart graft is essentially. We use smart graft, perform minimally invasive hair restoration. Here's the example. We bring mine in New Jersey. Dr. DiBernardo has done this hair restoration instrument using the FUE technique and smart graft as the device to perform that FUE technique.

So I mean we see all the.

Time people are actually having hair transplantation, whether or not we take it into consideration when we're looking at them. This is due law, famous actor. He clearly had receiving the hairline widow's peak. And in this after photo you can see obviously they filled in those areas. His hair is much, he's wearing it much longer.

Obviously here see Kevin Costner.

He clearly had a very receding hairline and had a lot of rafting done to restore that hairline, give him a more natural, youthful appearance.

It's not combined to.

There's actresses either.

We see the ball players.

I mean someone as high, highly visible.

As LeBron James has had hair restoration.

He's actually had more than one procedure. We'll talk about that later. Deion Sanders, Brian Urlacher, they've all had hair restoration. Deion Sanders plugged this on ESPN before he got it done. So all these people have had it done. Well, does it work? Does it hurt? What's the downtime? What's the cost? How do I maintain my new hair? These are all questions I get asked all the time. Does it work? I've showed you already. Does it work? Does it hurt? We did this other local office downtime, scrumptable base. The cost vary depending on how many grafts we're doing and maintenance. We'll talk about a new maintenance program with blocker. Let's get down to it. About 80 million people have hair loss in the United States. More women than men. We know that this is a significant alteration in lifestyle, how they view their quality of life. People who are more shy and introverted, when they're experiencing hair loss, they wear hats a lot. They may not go out as much. So we want to do our best to correct this. Obviously, always a plastic surgery. We're striving to do things in a minimally invasive, safe.

Approach.

I choose smart graft for many of those reasons and others. Graph for me is it fits in my armamentary, my minimally invasive office procedures. There's no scalp or suturing. There's no line like there used to be. We do it under vocal. I also have Pronox in my office, which is nitrous like we did at the dentist's office. The use of smart grass has reduced the amount of time it takes for us to do the procedure. There's less fatigue in the patients because we're doing it quicker. Recovery time like we talked about is a couple of days get up and leave. But I have a bandage on a couple days. We don't have to shave at all. Here's the old fashioned technique I was taught in training back in 2000. A line. You have to incise the scalp, take out a piece of scalp and then take the follicles out underneath there. Problem with this is it heals and leaves a linear scar that's visible. Can't really wear your hair short with this. Using the fee automated technique with smart graft, you don't have to shave the whole head down. You can create a donor site with 1 to 2 millimeter punches that just biopsy the area it fills in very quickly. Here's the device. Big tower got a handpiece on it. And everything's collected in a closed system. What does that mean? The piece out, exposing to the environment, letting it dry out, letting it get hot. We have everything contained within the system. The grafts themselves can't dry out. They can't get warm. That allows for better graft survival. And then they're kept moist like through a little misting system, essentially.

So just like at the grocery store.

They glow some, mist all the vegetables, keep them cool, prevent them from drying out even in a closed system. All the same things that we do in any medical transplant, we're doing in smart graft transplant. This is my device in my office. And I always want to point out to everybody, every client, I let them know that, hey, we're keeping these cool, moist. They're not going to dry out. You're going to have better graft survival. So like I said, there's no linear scar with smart graph. These graphs are just moved from one place to another recovery like we talked about a couple days. A lot of times I just do these on the weekends. I have a lot of busy clients. They can't take off time for work. This allows them to get through their work week, get it done on a Saturday at their leisure. When we get done, they take their bandage off and go back to work or work from home. Home like we all are experiencing. That's becoming very doable. Zoom calls webinars, like we're doing right now. And obviously the smart graph we're just doing these. Like I said, 1 millimeter extractions. This allows us to take 1, 2 and 3 follicles out at the same time. It's really a revolutionary technique compared to the linear scar you got from a standard strip excision. We're going to go over case. This is my hair guy, Ray. Known Ray forever since I moved to Austin 2012. Did my first haircut here and he's become hair ever since. He's experiencing hair loss. He wanted to know what we could do about it when I got smart graft. Well we lined him right up as my first client. He just wanted to try it. So we did about 500 graphs in his crown. Here's the front, the back and where we had planned on drafting. So like I said, you know, we take. I do this under local in the office. I'm just numbing right up after shaving the back. He likes to wear his hair short. So essentially he, he fits this in and evens it out and takes care of all my clients pre op with a haircut as well. Once again, that's our smart graft device. Apologize for a little bit of clutter there around the device. We sit down and get started.

We're going to do 1 millimeter extractions.

You know under local. We just got a lay there. He didn't want to have nitrous or any other medication so he just did the gun to straight local. Had no trouble. Well, here's the graphs, here's what they look like. You can see that some of them have two, some of them have wonder if you have three. There's a lot of hair density which is going to be great in terms of transplantation. Here's what hair grafts look like when they're transferred. They look like little tiny potted plants. You go get at the in front of the store and then put in a bigger or a different pot. You get how exchange them. So they got a little bit of tissue around there that's all going to heal down. These are all raised photos. That's shaved him. That's what he looked like after extracted and then that's him in about two weeks because I went and got another haircut and I figured ah, we'll just get a follow up photo at that time. So a lot of times I'll just check on Ray and see how he's doing in a couple weeks. So he wanted to come back later on and get some more grand. So these will all pop up now there was this before and his crown about two weeks. You know after and then he's about six months in that top right. And then here's his anterior hairline, his donor side. We revisited this donor side, no problem doing that. And there's this anterior hairline. He's got hair now. So no, I'm like Ray's ecstatic. He wants to know how to maintain how we use locrx. Locrx is a drug free treatment system that helps pre and post treatment, step one, reduce inflammation, boost the immune system and helps balance everything out.

Step two, we want to limit factors.

That will lead to more hair loss as part of the defense. And three, we're going to start incorporating this more and more in our office when we're able to treat folks up close and in the office again. And it's a combination of a small growth factor system we use with a microneedling system to instill it into the scalp.

So that being said, you know, we.

Went over kind of in terms of candidacy, you can't have a scalp condition that needs to be treated medically until it's completed treatment or therapy to have an infected scalp or something like that that's going to prevent hair loss. We don't want anything where there's areas of significant scarring, where blood supply be compromised. We don't want somebody with a metabolic condition that's causing hair loss or medications causing hair loss. So once those criteria have been met, we can perform smart graft safely, efficiently in the office of a local. Depending on how many graphs you need will dictate the length of the session and then once the session is complete, you know, we'll put you on locker accident. So let's go over a few more examples here. We're going to draw an anterior hairline for this gentleman and then fill in, you know, his receding hairline and then.

Be careful not to extend too far.

Beyond that because it'll look unnatural. He may have hair loss behind it. So here he is right after the procedure's done and then when you look at timeline photos, hair cycle essentially is over a year long. So you can fill in an anterior hairline, look at it at a week and then look at this final photo in here and it's a very natural appearing result. The orientation of the follicle is correct, there's hair in the proper directions, it's filled in the receding areas. Here's another example. So you know when you have to do more grafting, you have to expose more of the scalp and use more of a donor site. And so the length of the Time of procedure can increase in any procedure where we have over a couple thousand grafts will get additional help. Time always present for the procedure. Participate in both extraction and placement, depending on what elements are needed at that time. But we can always put hair in at the same time. If we have hands around your scalp, we'll do that as expeditiously as possible because it can become a prolonged procedure. We do break up procedures, like I said, especially over a couple thousand grafts if it goes too long of a day for our clients. And once again, this is good for males and females. We're going to go over a female before and after. Now this is from Dr. Ban, so a friend of mine in San Francisco. This is a very good photo to show and I show because it's both female and ethnic. And this works on ethnic types of hair as well. Female hair pattern, female hair loss does. The pattern's different. It's usually down the middle. And once again, you have to go through a metabolic workup for each of our female clients. We don't want to miss a metabolic problem, so we go through that workup. If that's all negative, then we can go ahead and proceed with smart graft hair transplantation. And here you can see how diffuse hair loss kind of down the middle was happening. Almost as if she was parting hair without trying. And then it just expanded on both sides from there. And now in the follow up, after a year, that's really, it's filled in nicely. She's not hiding any. I've had female clients, especially a slightly older clientele, tell me one in particular. She told me her grandson was making fun of her because she was using her hairs. We transported her because she was receding in the, in the middle and it.

Was making her self conscious.

She didn't want her grandson noticing that. Another example of more kind of not diffused, but more down the middle almost. You know, you always want to treat female hair loss down the middle if you can't. Diffuse female hair losses is not easily treated and, and I tend to use other options like neutropol, shampoos, different things to help them when they're experiencing diffuse hair loss because I don't feel it's appropriate to treat that. Whereas down the middle we can treat that and get a very, very nice response. Just a few more examples and we'll finish up so we can answer some question.

Finally.

So kind of, if you're trying to rebuild the anterior hairline, we'll reiterate again, you don't want the anterior Hairline too far away from the existing hairline for fear of problems with hair loss behind that point or having step offs or transitions that don't look natural. So we always want the transitions to look natural. Here we've added more hair. This is Dr. Vance Tool. Again, he's got more hair interiorly and there's thickening and greater density when you're looking at hair. Also.

I like this one because I.

Have a lot of young clients who like to get the recession points anterior taken care of. Even though their peak is fine, they're receding on the sides. And that's something that's really concerning to them. So younger clients, I find this is a very commonly requested area to be treated. And then, you know, like this points out again in this photo by Dr. Dibernardo, you don't want to build the hairline too far ahead. You can see where he has four headlines and he's recessed quite a bit. So if he had started sooner in life, we probably could have preserved a more anterior hairline. But now we just walk it out and mark it slightly in front of where the hair is receding so we don't get ourselves into an unnatural appearance. Same with this photo as well. And in this set of images too, this is a client where you can definitely get a really unnatural appearance of you walk the hairline out too far. So just in those last several examples that this one included, we're trying to show that you just treat where you can see the existing follicles and fill in and get greater density there. So that when you look through the hair follicles, you're not seeing a wide distribution of hair follicles. They're screened or density. Density looks more natural. And here especially the density improvement here looks very natural. This before and after. And some more options of that, that recession on the side that really is bothersome to patients. The. Sockets there, you can really fill in nicely and create a really natural appearance. Yeah. Another before and after where we're filling in nicely the areas that are becoming less dense. Time has passed and this patient's.

Beginning.

To have, you know, more hair loss. And it's, you know, all over the scalp. Is interested in doing the anterior portion here. Dr. Kakaway clearly did a great job filling in the anterior. And here's a pretty stark example of, you know, you've got recession on the sides, you've got anterior hair loss, you build out around and fill in the density and that gives you, you know, this is a great result and that's all we're looking for, you know. You know, does smart graft work? Yes, it works. Does smart grafts, you know, it's accomplished with minimal discomfort on your local office with or without nitrous. The downtack that he said is, you know, a couple days with advantage loom. That's it. Cost, you know, for us, we charge normally $6 a graph for the first thousand, $5 a graph for the second thousand. That's a very competitive price price in the United States. And then how do I maintain here? I give you the option regarding lock. I think that's a very valuable tool we're trying to obtain.

You know, the results.

I know that we're going to have hopefully some more minimally invasive options moving forward in the office in this kind of new setting, we've got to be extremely cautious in protection of our clients. But we feel like hair loss doesn't.

Need to be.

A forever solution. We have smart grafts Lockerrex now to help improve those. All right, I'm going to take some questions.

All right, I'm back. Can everybody hear me? I'll take some questions. I apologize for all the technical difficulties, but go ahead. Let's have some questions. Okay, I'll go ahead and start answering the questions now that everybody can hear me. Sorry about all the technical difficulties. I think it's too many zoom calls over the past two weeks. So how far do we take the hairline fire? It's really. We want to be within a few millimeters of the existing hairline. If you walk it too far, far forward, then if you have hair loss behind that, it'll become noticeable. So we try to stay relatively close to that hairline within a few millimeters or rows of follicles. Do we have multiple sessions of surgery? Then how do we continue minimizing hair loss? We try to make our benchmark 2000 grafts in a single session. And that will take better part of four to six hours, depending on how easy it is to extract and how easy it is to replant the follicles. Then if patients have severe hair loss, the entire crown recession from anterior to posterior. We didn't go over the normal classifications, but if you need more than one session, more than 2,000 grafts, we break those up and we use locrx as our supporting pre and post hair transplant maintenance. And question regarding cost again. So costs are per graft, costs of $6 per graft for the first thousand grafts and then $5 per graph for the next thousand. So when you looked at.

Our Hair.

Transplants. The one I showed with my hair guy Ray, he was only really treated with 500. He should have probably done additional. There was financial restraints at the time. So you would look at the area and roughly $5 and $6 are. The graph costs $6 per graph for the first thousand and five dollars per graph for the second thousand. Smartcraft is available in Europe. I was asked that, Was asked the question, what's the typical number of graphs we do traditionally between 1500 and 2000. By the time typically males seek hair loss, that's pretty significant amount of hair loss. And if it's just to look thicker than it may just take 1000. We'll be able to do a virtual and help decide that for you. Yeah, most of our treatments have been done essentially in one treatment setting out of the last. 24, 25 or so. We haven't done second session. We've just done 1500-2000 graphs. Oh, I see. This was a specific question to a region in the Netherlands. We will have to email you Jackie and let you know. I'll pose that to Smart Graft and see if there's a specific. Position in the Netherlands or the uk. I've already got a response and they said yes, they have somebody in a couple people in Belgium and Denmark. Is there a risk of hair not returning to the donor site? No, it's the density of the donor site that's the issue. If there's poor hair density then you don't do the transplant. I use the example of my hairstylist Ray. He has significant density on the back of the hair or alternatively if the hair is receding past the level of the crown posteriorly, you don't want to risk doing the transplant there. So you want to proceed and have people assess the earlier before they've had that amount of hair loss so that they're not in that position. And I got another question about downtime. Yeah. So if we did this on a Saturday, you'd return to work on Monday. The vantage usually comes off on Tuesday. You can work from home that day or choose to stay home. I use the 48 hour rule for the downtime and then we just use the cup water technique for hair washing.

The first two weeks in my practice.

Use baby shampoo and cup of water. No vigorous shampooing. In terms of consultations, if you all contact Brett via email@brettrrobert whitfield.com anyone's available to schedule a virtual consultation. And then we'll have to reward those who registered the first several are going to get free LockRx kits. We just have to identify those who registered and get those sent out. The virtuals can be done for free. For those who attended this webinar, I gotta ask is this a faster surgical method compared to others such as like the strip? For us it works very quickly. Strips took a great deal of time almost all day in training to do a couple thousand grafts. We can get a couple thousand done in four to six hours using a team approach. Locrx products are not included with the costs associated with the Smart Graft procedure. I have clients who use LokRx who don't qualify for Smart Graft or who are just looking for hair supplementation. This is a good question. I was asked are there any risks of infection in the initial 48 hours? I haven't experienced anyone getting the infection or that's a risk. These are all small, you know, 1 millimeter biopsies and then essentially a needle stick for reinsertion. So the opportunity for infection is incredibly limited. Although it still has to be looked at. If anybody calls you concerned about that. I don't use oral antibiotics post treatment anymore. Antibiotic usage in this setting I've avoided and have had very good results with no either incidents and increased infection or problems afterwards. There's a question regarding women with traction alopecia. Yes, this can be used. I've treated males similarly with traction alopecia from dreadlocks and have done their hair transplants and then of course recommending that they don't ever do dreadlocks again. Waiting for more questions. I think there's some in process. I'm going to go back to some of our other items, make sure we covered everything. Again, I apologize for all the technical issues. I was having this problem on a zoom call earlier today so should have known better. For those who are interested in consultations, we'll be doing the free virtual consultations and then for those who are registered to attend the webinar, there'll be discounts of 5 to 1500 applied. To those who are candidates for Smart graft, we'll be giving some freelockrx hair restoration kits away to those registrants as well. Do I have any more questions? Oh, I had a good question about smart grafts and hair color. Yes, I've performed smart graft and all hair colors. I haven't had any issues.

The.

The hair once it's grown in, obviously maybe slightly different depending on aging but can be adjusted so I haven't had any problems. It's just really the density and identification from the denture site. And what, if anything, is causing hair loss or any limitations, scalp additions, a genetic predisposition to hair loss or medications that are causing hair loss. So color has not been an issue for us. Oh, this is a good question too. Can the donor site be used again? Yes, it can. In my example where I was showing my hair stylist, same donor site was harvested again. And you can't even tell it was harvested when you look at him closely.

For.

Use of the same donor site. And you can also widen your donor.

Site and carry it up on the.

Temporal parietal scalp as needed, provided they're not having hair loss in those areas. All right, we have time for a couple more questions. We have a question about financing. Yeah, we have a financing arm that we use. It's called PatientFi. Brett, Brett, within the office will discuss PatientFi with you. It's done in a way that doesn't give you a notification on your credit report. So it's a soft credit check. And they have excellent terms right now in terms of interest free for certain periods of time. Six months, 12 months. So we use patient phi. Yeah, typically I just got to ask a question about the hair color. So typically the denorci in the back will have the darker, more original hair color. But whatever that color that follicle is transferred, that's typically what it ends up as. Question about ethnic hair. Translate. Yes. That is, as I discussed the example of I had an African American with dreadlocks and traction alopecia. You do have to be cognizant of that and make sure you get the orientation of the follicle in the proper position.

But other than that, we haven't had any issues.

All right, so in conclusion, we are going to contact those who registered again for this via email. BrettrRobert Whitfield will be in contact with you. Those who registered in attendance are going to get a free virtual consultation. And then if you appropriate candidacy is determined, then you'll be able to get a discount of 5 to $1500 off the procedure. As we discussed, we use patient 5 if there's a need for financing, and then we'll also determine some lock RX winners. All right, thank you all very much. Have a great.