Article by Nilofer Farjo, MBChB, FISHRS, ISHRS President
ISHRS World Hair Transplant Repair Day – A Way Of Giving Back
The ISHRS has designated November 11th every year as “World Hair Transplant Repair Day” as a way of giving back to patients who have had a botched hair transplant surgery by black market clinics and which has caused issues that require a repair. Many of the ISHRS members have registered as volunteer surgeons for this project as part of our Fight the FIGHT campaign, which aims to make patients and doctors aware of the acceptable standards for hair transplantation. We are seeing many unlicensed people, many of whom are not doctors, performing hair transplant surgery. Patients in some situations are getting unsatisfactory results such as scarring and hair grafts that are not growing.
We want patients to become aware that these practices are happening around the world and to research where they’re going and who is doing their procedure. Only doctors are licensed to cut the skin and, although it may be described as a “minimally invasive” procedure, the surgery goes full thickness through your skin.
For many years, the ISHRS has been giving back to patients and we have our pro bono program since 2004 called Operation Restore designed for patients who have suffered trauma such as burns, accidents or scars and who are not able to afford to have repair work done or could find a suitable doctor in their locale who specialize in repairing cases. So, we have had a long association with giving back to patients in need, and ISHRS World Hair Transplant Repair Day is just an extension of it.
For those seeking to get a hair transplant, we also have resources on our website such as guidelines to help patients on what kind of questions you should be asking to any hair transplant clinic and a Find a Doctor tool. We hope by doing this, that we will educate patients, the general public and the media and we will continue with the education of our members so that the standards in hair transplantation are always at the very top of our field.