The Science Of Hair Restoration: A Conversation With Dr. Alan Bauman
44:18 Share

Forget frequently asked questions. Common sense, common knowledge, or Google. How about advice from a real genius? 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified and licensed. 5% go above and beyond. They become very good at what they do, but only 0.1%.

are real geniuses. Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field. Sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. Here come the geniuses. This is the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast, now part of the Finding Genius Foundation. My guest today is Dr. Alan Bauman, MD. He's a leading expert in hair transplant surgery and hair loss treatment. He's been doing this for over 28 years. He leads Bauman Medical, a globally respected practice that is dedicated to restoring confidence and self-esteem through cutting-edge hair restoration procedures, and he's based out of Boca Raton, Florida. So welcome

Welcome, Alan. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. Thanks, Richard. Great to be here with you. Yeah, what got you into hair? Why not other parts of the body or other conditions? Well, you know, as they say, you're not born into being a hair transplant surgeon, so my story is pretty unique. I guess if you clock all the way back to before my interest in medicine, if you ask my...

My grandmother, when she was alive, you know, when did Alan become interested in becoming a physician or a doctor? She probably would have said something like the day he was born. So it was a little bit preordained that I was on my path towards medical school, I guess. And it was probably a good thing, probably a good thing that I was OK in biology and chemistry and math and all of that business.

My dad's a dentist. My uncle's a gastroenterologist. My grandfather's a PhD in chemistry. And so somewhere around there, and my mom is actually a teacher and an artist, an oil painter. So somewhere around there, I got some interest in going into medicine. And later on in

uh, in, in my early childhood, actually, before I could drive a car, I was actually mentored by a plastic surgeon from New York and he introduced me to surgery. And so just, you know, for those folks out there who, um, maybe were not around in the eighties, uh, you know, there was no Snapchat, there was no discovery channel, there was no YouTube. And so if you wanted to go see surgery, you actually had to go and, you know, physically see the surgery. And that's what I had an opportunity to do, uh,

Before I could drive a car, at least. So I was able to watch plastic surgery, cosmetic and reconstructive surgery through a friend of the family who introduced me to that end of medicine. And getting to know his patients and his techniques, I really became interested in cosmetic and reconstructive surgery and kind of followed that as a path. My undergraduate medical school, even my internship and residency was in surgery, always thinking that I was going to be a plastic surgeon. And it wasn't until I met a hair transplant patient, actually, that

did I even think that hair transplant was a viable thing? I mean, I guess like most people, I thought hair transplants were pluggy and painful and didn't look right. And like, why would you ever do that? And this patient's experience and actual evidence on his scalp was to the contrary, that it looked beautiful and natural. And I was just fascinated by that.

It's funny that you say that because to me, plastic surgery, it looks like they mess it up all the time. I mean, you see these stars that you think are paying like crazy amounts of money for the best in the world and they look horrible like monsters. You know, like to me, hair stuff, I think, again, not knowing.

But hair seems like it works well and plastic surgery seems like it's botched a lot. But that's just my layman perspective. Well, it all depends on the surgeon. You know, that's the thing. You know, to be honest, our best work goes unnoticed. And so that's what I noticed about this gentleman's hair transplant that I was expecting to see plugs.

You know what I mean? And his his results from his procedure in that early stage of like, you know, the genesis of hair transplants was amazing. And I talked to him about that. And he explained to me how he chose a surgeon and things like that. And then, you know, granted, this was like 30 years ago.

And so that kind of started me on my path thinking to myself, OK, this is a cosmetic and reconstructive thing that has some artistry to it. He had obviously had some single follicle implantation, so it looked normal and natural. And so I started to look into it. And that's where I really began my journey of investigation. First, you know, going to the journal articles and textbooks and and even some of those textbooks were just pretty nasty. I mean, we're talking like the old plug type procedures where it looked like doll's hair, you know.

And, uh, it didn't comport with what I saw. I wonder if they called it a bug in play. That'd be funny. Maybe. Um, but the old hair plugs, you know, they were pretty nasty looking. Um, but, uh, but what I saw on this guy really, you know, encouraged me to dig deeper. And that's where I started to travel around the country and around the world to go to these different conferences thinking if I could learn, uh,

the latest and greatest in hair transplant, I could probably add that to a plastic surgery, you know, repertoire, if you will. And I had the unique opportunity to do an externship, really like a preceptorship with a hair transplant surgeon out on Long Island. And I was able to work with him and his practice for a year.

And so I took a little hiatus from my training and did that, my general surgery training. And it was at that point I realized, listen, if I'm going to do this, first of all, I loved it. I fell in love with the process, the procedure, the artistry, the technology. And I realized that I had to dedicate full-time effort in order to make it work.

work correctly you know make it look good and that's uh that's how i got started so that was back you know in the 1990s and in 1997 i opened my practice here in bocratone florida you know with a very small office of 1 000 square feet one operatory um i was engaged to my wife at the time and i had her answering the phones and i hired a team of people to help me on the weekends to get things started and obviously uh you know from those humble beginnings uh i've grown it into uh

practice today that has treated over 33, 34,000 patients. That's cool. So now that you've been doing it for a while, what are you helping people to do? What are the reasons they tell you they want hair transplant? Well, of course, in the world of hair restoration, what we do is not just hair transplant surgery. And of course, that's a big part of the exciting aspects of my career. But a good for

percentage of patients that I see day in and day out may never ever need a hair transplant because we have preventative therapies in the world of hair restoration today. And those might be medications or cell therapy, regenerative treatments, devices like red light, laser light therapy devices and things like that. So it's kind of a combination of things. But I guess what you're asking is like, why do people want to keep their hair? And, you know, hair is an important part of our self-expression. It's an outward sign of our youth and vitality. You could

you know make a judgment call from across the room if someone is healthy and and young and obviously fertile which is important in terms of evolution uh based on their hair and i think that's why it was so important to our you know maybe our caveman ancestors you know so many years ago um and why it remains important to us today as an outward sign of beauty and youth um you know because when when our hair looks good we feel good and so being able to restore people's hair after it's been lost

is really a blessing for me because I get to change people's lives for the better every day. And that's the exciting part of being in the field of hair restoration, to be honest. Yeah. What do the patients tell you? What do they complain about that they want to have, you know,

Either hair augmented or restored to before. Again, in their own words, what do they say to you? Yeah. Well, patients come in and they say, hey, doc, you know, I've been thinking about my hair for a long time. I know I've got some hair loss in the family, and now I've been seeing the signs in myself. I see the receding hairline.

very commonly in men, losing coverage in the crown. For women, they'll often say, I'm seeing a lot of shedding or my ponytail volume is decreasing or I'm seeing more scalp shining through in my part line. And so what they're asking me is, can we stop the progression of the hair loss? And the answer is yes, obviously we can. And also, can we restore some of the hair that's been lost? And yes, absolutely. We do that as well. So

Patients want to look better and feel better because, as I mentioned before, hair is an important part of our self-image. When we get up in the morning, we groom ourselves, usually. For most of us, we look in the mirror and groom ourselves. Hair is a big part of that, whether we're just running a comb through it or hands through it, maybe thinking about the product or whatever shampoo we're using.

But, you know, whether you have long hair or short hair, it becomes part of self-expression. And when a gentleman, for example, is in his younger age years, such as like in their 20s, and they see that hair loss is occurring, you know, it's often a reminder of how they're aging. And, you know, look, 20% of guys in their 20s have hair loss. And, you know, you don't want to be that –

that guy, that one guy out of your five friends who's out there in the bar Friday night or whatever, and you're the one dealing with male pattern hair loss looking much older than your stated age. So it can weigh heavily on your, like I said, on your self-image and self-esteem. You look older, feel older, and that's not so good. We want to try to restore that.

Are there any shampoos or diets or things that you see that people do that inadvertently contribute to their hair loss? Well, absolutely. I mean, think about this for a moment. The hair follicle, very highly metabolic organ that's sitting inside the scalp, right? You're born with about 150,000 of them. Each hair follicle has about 100,000 cells.

probably over two dozen to three dozen different types of cells are inside that hair follicle. And that's one of the most highly metabolic cell populations in your body. So it's very, very responsive to your overall health. And what I mean by that is if your hair, let's say your overall health is suffering in some way, either you've gone through a traumatic physiotherapy

physiologic event, you're in an accident, you're in the hospital, you have a fever, sick, whatever, or if you've gone through a traumatic event mentally, you know, a severe psychological stress, these are things that can affect your hair. If metabolically, nutritionally, you're deficient,

in, let's just say protein, you're, you know, you're on a new low protein, you know, vegan vegetarian diet or something like that, you know, that could stress out your hair as well. There's not enough nutrients and fuel to actually fuel those cell populations who's responsible, who are responsible for growing that healthy, smooth, thick head of hair, right? And so over

Overall body inflammation and, you know, your overall wellness, you know, how much sleep you're getting and exposure to toxins and many things like that. So we take a very holistic approach today when it comes to evaluating folks who are dealing with hair loss, looking at all those lifestyle factors, toxins, nutrition.

even their sleep and wake cycles and so forth, what medications they might be on and so forth. And you asked specifically about shampoos. I want to know what is their scalp hygiene regimen look like? And is their scalp, you know, doing okay? Is it healthy? Is it looking flamed? Is it itchy, flaky, oily? Is it red? Is it pimply? You know, these are things that the average everyday person can understand. If your scalp is not healthy...

and there's inflammation going on there, you're not going to grow good hair. That's going to interrupt hair follicle function as well. So we do take, to your point of view, a very holistic approach.

kind of view of the scalp, making sure the scalp is healthy as think of it like soil for the plants to grow well. And then that you're providing a great environment, you know, from nutrition and lifestyle factors to be able to grow good hair. So that is all loaded on top of your genetic tendency towards male or female pattern hair loss. You know, the, the genitalia,

The genetic tendency towards hair loss can be quite severe. And as I said, you know, young guys are in their 20s can often experience some early male pattern hair loss for women. It can happen due to metabolic imbalance or hormone imbalance of childbearing age, like polycystic ovarian syndrome or childbirth where the hormones change. Even menopause obviously is another common trigger for female hair loss. So, you know, the hair follicles are very sensitive organ to hormones and health for sure.

Before we continue, I've been personally funding the Finding Genius Podcast for four and a half years now, which has led to 2,700 plus interviews of clinicians, researchers, scientists, CEOs, and other amazing people who are working to advance science and improve our lives and our world. Even though this podcast gets 100,000 plus downloads a month, we need your help to reach hundreds of thousands more worldwide. Please visit findinggeniuspodcast.com and click on support us. We have three levels of membership from

from $10 to $49 a month, including perks such as the ability to see ahead in our interview calendar and ask questions of upcoming guests, transcripts of podcasts you're interested in, the ability to request specific topics or guests, and more. Visit FindingGeniusPodcast.com and click Support Us Today. Now, back to the show. Why do people lose their hair?

Maybe it's too open a question. Well, I mean, let's unpack, you know, some of the things that I just said. Of course, there's a genetic tendency. So, you know, you need to look in your family history on their mom's side or the dad's side. Is their hair thinning? What does the hair quality and texture look like? Is there male pattern or female pattern hair loss in the family? You know, again, mom's side, dad's side. And look farther back from your parents. Look at your grandparents and your great aunts and uncles. And if you know or have the ability to look at photos of your great grandparents, what is their situation? Look at siblings.

And genetic hair loss can sometimes skip generations. It can skip siblings. So, you know, we now know there's hundreds of different single nucleotide polymorphisms or SMPs genetically that we can look at to determine whether you're likely to have extensive hair loss

due to hereditary factors and what are the metabolic pathways that influence hair follicle metabolism or even nutrigenomics today. Like what are you more likely to be deficient in, you know, whether it be vitamin D or iron or minerals or protein intake or collagen production. All of these different things can be looked at from a genetic standpoint to kind of figure out what's going on. So when someone comes into the practice, a lot of our diagnosis is

is from this history taking, right? We've just talked about all of these different factors. So we want to try to get all that

as much as we can, evaluate it. Let's look at what's going on in their genetic code. Let's do some biomarker testing. Let's do some lab work if necessary. But also we want to know, you know, what are those family history look like in terms of hair loss? And what is their own history of hair loss? Is it a sudden shedding phase, you know, after COVID infection or the lockdown or something that we've just seen or vaccination? Is it something where you're on a new medication like a weight loss drug, for example, which can often be associated with

with hair loss at the same time. And so blood pressure medications. But literally, why do people lose hair sometimes? What's happening at the follicle level causing them to lose hair? And why do they seem to grow hair in other places they don't want? It seems like hair, the signaling, the cellular signaling stops in one place and starts in another. Well, that's a good point. So let's just think about how hormones affect hair for a moment. Of course, as we all, as men, go through puberty, we start to grow hair

in places we didn't have, right? So whether it's below the belt or under the chin, under our nose, we start to grow hair. And that's from the male hormone increase that happens around the time of puberty. But we also know that male pattern hair loss is due to a trigger that is derived from

from male hormones. So the male hormone, master male hormone is testosterone. It's broken down into DHT, dihydrotestosterone occurs in the body. And it's actually the DHT which causes male pattern hair loss. So what's happening at the level of the follicle is that certain hair follicles

like I said, the ones that you see appear, quote unquote, after puberty or basically mature, which are pubic hair, beard, facial hair, and all of that, that is going to be stimulated by certain hormones. And then other hormones like male hormones are going to affect the hair follicles on the scalp in the opposite fashion. They're going to cause that miniaturization or weakness. So if we

If we just look at androgens as a general category of hormones, we know that androgens have two different effects depending on where your hair follicles live in your body. After puberty, you're going to have more hair on the rest of your body and less hair on your scalp over time. And, you know, even as guys like us, we get older, we can see more hair growing out of our ears and crazy hairs growing out of our eyebrows or our nose and everything.

And certainly that happens increasingly with age, of course. Okay. So what's like the average situation of a person that comes to you, like how old, more

More men than women or it's equal? Well, you know, see here in the practice, so I've been in practice almost 20, well, 28, almost 29 years, and I've treated over 34,000 patients. So I have seen it all. And there are patients that come in who are of young age that have had traumatic hair injuries or scalp injuries due to an accident, whether it be a dog bite or other trauma, a car accident, a burn or a fire.

And so, you know, in those cases, we're talking about scarring alopecia. And so that anybody can be affected by that, right? If they have an injury. Women who have had cosmetic surgery can have scarring alopecia where the incisions were made for their facelift or brow lift. But most of our patients, I would say, are coming in today at a much younger age than they were previously.

And even though I see patients from, you know, let's call it 18 to 88 in general, when it comes to male pattern hair loss, that's going to skew mostly in the 25 to 35 or 45 range. Oftentimes around midlife, men kind of wake up and they're like, oh my gosh, I'm getting older. I need to fix myself, fix my hair, get my gym membership going, trade in my old car. You know, those are oftentimes where we see change of life. And so that's often a trigger. But

But as I mentioned earlier in our discussion, sometimes it's those guys in their early 20s who are affected most detrimentally mentally from their hair loss situation and they're in a dire state of emergency when it comes to seeing their hair loss occur. And so for

For women, as I mentioned, you could see different peaks in the life cycle of women. So, for example, in the women of childbearing age, if they're afflicted by polycystic ovarian syndrome, for example, PCOS, that happens. That's actually the most common hormone abnormality of women of childbearing age. That's often associated with hair loss as well as weight gain, acne, oily skin.

oily skin and scalp, whole body inflammation and things such as that. And that has to do with an androgen sensitivity. So, you know, dialing back to those androgens again. Women often see hair loss after childbirth. So very oftentimes we see hair loss occur after childbirth, maybe about a month or so later, there's an excessive shedding. Now you

Usually that grows back after some time, but sometimes it just accelerates the natural female pattern of hair loss. And of course, during menopause, women will come in. Oftentimes they're seeing a change in their color of their hair, their texture of their hair, the overall volume and length of their hair is changing over time. So really throughout our entire lives, hair can be an issue. And I meet every patient, you know, wherever they are in their hair loss and hair restoration journey.

Probably the average age of hair transplantation is going to be, you know, in the mid to high 30s in terms of their years. But again, you know, we have patients who are much younger who need hair transplantation to effectively change their goal. But of course, we would never transplant, you know, to reach the goal, I should say, but we would never transplant a patient in the younger ages unless they're stabilized on hair loss. And so that's a big part of what we do in the practice is evaluate, measure, benchmark their hair situation, get them on some kind of medical therapies first.

What would happen if you did do a hair transplant of someone that was younger and, you know, existing hair tried to grow in under or above the new hair, the transplanted hair? Well, the most common issue with applying a treatment such as hair transplants in a person who is not on treatments to stop the progression of hair loss would be the fact that the transplants are permanent. You know, when we harvest hair follicles today from the sides and the back of the scalp, and even though we're doing it today a lot

a lot less invasively, completely painlessly. We're taking the individual groups of hair follicles one at a time. There's no scalpel or stitches or linear scar left behind. We're doing that methodology of transplantation that's minimally invasive and we're recreating a beautiful new hairline and maybe even filling in the density as we go further back wherever we can. Those follicles are permanent so they last forever but it's your other hair that's not. So you've got to be on some kind of medical therapy to hold on to the rest of the hair. Other

Otherwise, you're going to be needing a repeat transplant pretty quickly. And unfortunately, this is, you know, we're seeing this more often today because, you know, hair transplant surgeons either don't have the time or the impetus, let's say, to talk to their patients about prevention. And we're seeing a lot of younger patients go under the knife or traveling to foreign countries where they're not getting good guidance on how to take care of their hair, their non-transplanted hair. And

And, you know, a lot of these folks are becoming walking wounded. They're running out of their own donor hair, actually. And it's a big problem. What happens when you do a transplant? Literally, what are you doing? I don't know. How does it work? Yeah.

Yeah, hair transplant surgery is a very cool procedure. We're basically taking the follicles almost individually or as small groupings of one, two, or three hair follicles, one at a time, from the back of the scalp where the hairs are immune and permanent. They live and grow there forever. They're essentially almost immortal. Those follicles are harvested from the back of the scalp.

and then implant it into the thinning or the balding area. Now, we have to do it not only with great surgical skill, microsurgical magnification, good lighting, but we also have to apply artistry. So the design of the hairline, the angle, the orientation of position of the hairs are critical in order to get a result that looks normal and natural and not like a picket fence. And so there's a really interesting blend of technology and artistry that's used to create the final result. The procedure is done under local anesthetic.

It's not a fast procedure. It does take many hours. Sometimes it takes more than one day to accomplish the results that we try to achieve. But the patient will be experiencing no discomfort during the procedure. Their scalp is totally numb. And usually at night after the process, you know, if they have a minor headache, it's easily handled by an over-the-counter pain medication like, you know, Tylenol, Advil, that type. And then the cross-stitch. Are you like stitching the hairs in like a cross-stitch and a rug? Yeah.

What are you doing? Yeah, no, no, no. When we say something is microsurgical, we're talking about harvesting follicular unit grafts that are literally smaller or less, you know, have a smaller diameter than the tip of a ballpoint pen. You know, a tip of a ballpoint pen is about a millimeter in diameter.

And so our instruments are about that same size or smaller. And what we're doing is we're creating a scoring incision around the follicle, and then the follicle is then plucked. The follicle has a depth of about, let's call it four to five millimeters below the skin. And so that graft is then plucked

from the back of the scalp, and then it's stored literally in a storage solution, which is very highly specific for hair transplantation that enables us to keep those follicles alive outside the body for a number of hours while awaiting implantation.

And then those follicles are then implanted into the thinning or the balding area, according to our design work, obviously. And that has to heal. Those follicles will then heal in position in their new location. New blood flow will be developed into that area, attached to those hair follicles. And the follicle will heal. There's a little scabbing, crusting that goes on for the first, you know, it's called six to eight days or so.

Crusts flake off, the little tiny stubble of hair is shed, and then a new hair shaft is produced by that follicle starting about four to six months later, depending on some of the intricacies of the procedure.

So about six months after the procedure, you have about 50% of the growth coming in. And then it continues to improve more density, more length, more quality and caliber of hair up to about a year. And then you'll see the full final result at that time. Oh, wow. So it really takes a year for everything to come back. Yeah, it takes a good six months to kind of get an idea of how it's growing. That's about the halfway point. But it really takes a full year to appreciate the full final result. And now, honestly, depending on the severity of hair loss, we might need to do more than one session. Yeah.

You talked about DHT for the men, maybe even the women. The women only need a tiny bit, but do you also check the men's testosterone level and supplement with that to encourage hair growth? Well, of course, if blood work is needed, we will do it. In men, it's not so important to check their testosterone levels as it is to keep an eye on DHT, right? So dihydrotestosterone, the DHT, is something that we may monitor to

depending on what kind of medications we have those patients on. Again, that's something that is really, really important and customized to each and every patient. It's not a cookbook, you know, one size fits all. But certainly if we're trying to use some of the more nuanced medications that have a little bit more power, a little bit more strength, maybe have a little bit more risk,

And certainly we want to be tracking those really critical biomarkers to see how things are going. But even more important than that, we want to be measuring how the effects are occurring on the scalp, right? The scalp and hair density. We want to look at the numbers of hairs and the quality of those hairs over time. How many hairs are needed for like square centimeter in order for it to look like someone has a full head of hair? And is there a big range on that? Yeah, actually there is quite a big range. So here's the thing about hair, right? Hair...

varies in terms of caliber, right? So the range of hair caliber, if you're on the lower end, you have thinner, finer hair to begin with, you know, your hair caliber might be in the high 50s or low 60s. If you have thicker quality hair, coarser hair, Asian hair, for example, could be 90, even up to 100 microns thick,

which is very, very different because the amount of hair follicles that you need for coverage has to do with the thickness of the hair. Think about like, are you growing birch trees or oak trees? Right. And then the curl of the hair, right? So if the hair is exceptionally curly, you get a little bit more coverage per, per hair. And then the length of the hair, right? If the hair is super short, well,

wow, you're going to need more density, meaning more numbers of hairs in the forest, so to speak, in order to cover the ground. So there's a lot of different variables. But most people want to know how much transplants are actually needed to get to their end result. And of course, that depends on the amount of hair loss that they have to start with. All of those color, quality, texture issues we just discussed, the contrast between the color of the hair and the color of the scalp can make a difference too. So let's just say you have dark hair, light skin, you need more hair.

to make that happen. Whereas if you have more blonde or gray versus lighter colored skin, you don't need as much hair. But most patients will need probably one to two sessions of transplants to reach their goal. That's just kind of the average. My dad needed four. It was a more heroic restoration. He needed four separate procedures to get to his goal. He was totally bare. We went from bare to hair.

A number of years ago. Well, remember, the transplanted hairs are permanent. They are not going to be affected by natural male pattern hair loss. There are other things that can affect your hair. But yes, if you met my dad today, he's in his mid 80s. You're going to see that he's got a full head of hair and you would never know that it was totally bald. Yeah, it's very rare.

So I know that's kind of a roundabout way to discuss it. You know, people like to have a number. You know, how many follicular units per square centimeter is required to get the density? Well, I want you to think about it this way. I think the more important question to ask is how much hair can you lose before it looks noticeable to the naked eye? And I think that's an important question. Can you over-restore it where it's too thick and it looks ridiculous? That I'm not coming to. No, I haven't seen that yet. No one's ever complained that they had too much hair. Because here's the thing.

The way that hair covers the scalp, you could actually lose 50% of your density. And science has shown this in clinical trial. 50% of your density can be lost. And it still looks about the same as 100%, believe it or not.

And so that means that you can lose 50% of your hair mass and it still looks okay. It still looks like you've got a decent head of hair. And so that also works in reverse. If we put back a certain percentage of hair, let's call it, you know, 30 to 45% of your hair, then that's enough to deliver coverage. And so that's why hair transplants work because we're not yet creating new hair follicles. We're just redistributing some from the back of the scalp. We're like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. You know what I mean? Oh,

All right, so what else can you do besides a transplant? Let's say the person has no hair back there. They can't be a donor to themselves. What do they do now? Well, the good news is that male pattern hair loss does not affect the hair around the sides and the back of the scalp. So the vast majority of men who have male pattern hair loss

They can be treated with hair transplantation and other therapies to protect their own living and growing hair. Sometimes patients get into trouble. They've had previous surgeries that were maybe not done so efficiently or effectively, and they end up with a lot of scar tissue in the back of their scalp from old style techniques like a strip harvest or the old plugs that we talked about earlier. They haven't been treated with this less invasive technique.

technique. And then running low on donor hair, well, gosh, we can't make any new hair, but we can use other sources of donor from their body, actually. We can use body hair as well as beard. And so beard follicles are a very excellent source of donor hair if you're running low on scalp hair. Donors grow in crooked or curly? Well, and I'm glad you asked that question and brought to light the fact that, yes, your beard

quality is usually a little bit different than your scalp hair quality. Now, some of the good news is that the caliber of the hair is a little bit thicker. So that for hair follicle by follicle, you actually get a little bit better coverage, right? Think about that oak tree versus a birch tree. But yes, the wiriness or the curl of the hair that you get from the beard is a little bit different. And sometimes it's more gray in guys who are getting to be middle-aged or older.

than let's say their scalp hair. So color and quality texture issues can be an issue. And that's one of the reasons why we have to use that kind of alternative donor hair very carefully. Maybe we wouldn't put it in the hairline, for example, or create a patch of it in the back of the crown. We would want to kind of pepper it in between some of their other hair that's available, maybe from the scalp, for example. And the same is true in terms of different types of quality of hair if we go to the body hair. So you may have

a gentleman who's got exceptionally high density of chest hair or belly hair or even arms and legs, but those hairs grow much more slowly and they actually spend more time resting and not growing. And they have a maximum length that may be very short compared to like what you would get

from the beard or the scalp. So those are important considerations, you know, if we have to, you know, abandon the scalp and go someplace else to go get hair. Because we don't have hair follicle cloning yet. Although, you know, there is some cool technology on the stem cell therapy side that's coming our way. What about the ethnicity of the person? You know, African-American people seem to have, like, coarse hair,

you know, white people a different way, Hispanic people, Chinese, you know, Asian people, you said Asian hair seems to be very thick and coarse. They, you know, I don't know, is it easier for white people to get hair transplants or black or, you know, how does it go along those lines? Yeah. Well, the question I often ask is like, does hair transplant work in, you know, all ethnicities? And the answer is yes, of course it does. But, you know, we're planting different trees, right? So as you noted, and as I mentioned before,

Asian hair is typically round in its orientation. It's got like a circular cross-section, if you will, and it's usually dark in color and pins straight. Now, of course, you know, we see all kinds of mixes out there of ethnicities and genetics. So, you know, pure Asian hair is going to be usually coarse, dark, and straight, and actually quite low density compared to Caucasian. And

And then African-American hair, Afro textured hair is going to have a cross section that looks more like a bean, like a kidney bean shape. So it's almost like flat in cross section and it has a, can have an extremely curly or curl to a kinky curl to it. And there's actually quite a range of different types of,

kinky curls so the curls can be very very tight almost like a spiral or can they can be more of a core corkscrew curl and certainly that makes a big difference if you're transplanting scalp hair or even eyebrows or eyelash you know be very careful about that you know and so yeah there are very very uh strong differences uh you know i would say caucasian hair is going to be more of oval shape and you're going to have a gentle wave to it as opposed to a tight curl

But again, we see all different types of mixes that are out there and densities vary from person to person. And that's why hair density measurements are so important as part of your hair loss evaluation.

What's, I don't know, what is the future of hair? Do you have all the tools at your disposal to help people or are there new things that you're lacking that, you know, may be coming in the next few years? Well, one of the most exciting things about being in the world of hair restoration and being a hair transplant surgeon is that the technology is advancing so fast. And, you know, we sometimes struggle to keep up. I mean, I go to a lot of conferences to share information about what we've

what we're doing here in the practice at Bauman Medical and also to learn what other physicians are doing and not just in the realm of hair but also in regenerative medicine. We spend a lot of time at cell therapy, stem cell conferences, like for

for example, Cell Surgical Conference and World Stem Cell Summit and things like that to really find out what's happening. And I'm really, really excited about regenerative medicine. You know, we've used platelet-rich plasma, PRP, as a tool for over 20 years here in the practice. And that's certainly evolved immensely over the years that we've done it. We've done over 14,000 PRP treatments. We include it with every hair transplant procedure. We've done, you know,

13,000, 14,000 hair transplants now. And that's really helpful to get the patients to heal faster and even grow their existing hair a little bit better, whether it's in conjunction with the transplant or as a standalone. But the new stem cell therapy derived treatments like exosome treatments are

are really, really exciting. And, you know, we look, we don't have hair cloning yet. We don't have hair follicle multiplication yet, as we talked about previously. So we don't yet have an unlimited supply of hair follicles, but I think that we're getting there. You know, the laboratories and researchers and scientists that I'm in connection with are doing some amazing things with induced pluripotential stem cells down in San Diego. They've gotten some really cool, uh,

hair follicle multiplication things going in laboratories, for example, in 3D cultures, spherical cultures and things like that in a lot of different

a lot of different research facilities around the world. I know in Japan they've made some great strides with using human-derived dermal papilla cells combined with mice to get some powerful hair growth in some mouse models, which is exciting. But one of the things that I personally did in preparation for the years to come, and I think it's probably going to be eight to ten years before we have some really viable hair cloning programs,

that we can use is hair follicle stem cell banking. And so, you know, like I'm in my 50s. You know, when hair follicle stem cell banking comes available, I'm probably going to be in my 60s. Well, I don't want to clone my 60-something-year-old hairs. I want my 50-year-old something hairs to be cloned. So two years ago, I used a process called ACORN to bank my hair follicle stem cells. Okay.

And so my youngest follicle stem cells are now in the bank. And so when, if, and when we get hair follicle cloning and I, you know, I'm certainly probably going to need it looking at my genetics, like my dad. And even though I fight like hell every day to keep my hair, it still thins out a little bit each year. I might need hair follicle cloning. So I've got in the bank, my

my 53-year-old hair follicle stem cells. And one of the things that this company has now enabled us to do is to derive a personalized exosome, which is a stem cell messaging type of therapy, directly from those banked follicles. They expand those follicle cells, those mesenchymal stem cells that are in the hair follicle,

and create an exosome or secretome therapy and send it back to the clinic. And so that's called STEMGRO, S-T-E-M-G-R-O, STEMGRO. And that's a protocol that we're going to be testing and trialing and piloting here at Bauman Medical. We're amongst a few clinics, literally North America,

that are going to be able to do those tests and trials. And so we're really excited about doing that. So that's going to be derived from my own hair follicle stem cells and our patient's own hair follicle stem cells in the laboratory. And then we'll be able to apply that therapy here in the office as a lunch break type of treatment for hair regrowth, hopefully. Oh, wow. Okay.

I'm very excited about that. Going back earlier, you talked about plugs. What are they? What do they look like? How do they work? Well, we talked about hair plugs as the old technology of hair transplantation because hair plugs were done back in the 80s and 90s with the use of a

punch biopsy tool. So a four millimeter punch biopsy tool was the only thing that hair surgeons used before the microsurgical techniques came available. And that's why, you know, if you look back at, you know, Joe Biden's old pictures from his Senate days, you know, he looked like he had doll's hair across the top of his head. And that was the only technology available in it before

Before we had microsurgical techniques to transplant single follicle implants in an artistic and natural way, hair plugs was the terminology that was used. So today, hair transplants are not pluggy. They don't look like hair plugs of the 1990s or 80s. They're much more natural.

But we also have problems out there. Many places around the world are doing destination locations and medical tourism is, you know, unfortunately harming the lives of many hair loss sufferers because a lot of these procedures are being done even with microsurgical techniques. They're being done without any artistry or with any care whatsoever to, you know, to take care.

any kind of effort to make it look normal and natural. And I think that's really the critical step is to make sure that, you know, find a board certified hair restoration physician, someone who is a member of the American Board of Hair Restoration Surgery, who's, you know, achieved that level of sophistication and expertise, someone who's experienced and credentialed, someone who has been accepted into the International Alliance of Hair Restoration Surgeons, someone who is a

fellow of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery. These are credentialing organizations and some of them third-party organizations that look at surgeons' expertise and results and make sure they're doing safe and aesthetically pleasing surgery. And so you don't end up with plugs, essentially. That's a take-home message. Don't end up with plugs, so do your homework. That's a critical step.

Okay. Any other techniques that are new or novel that people should know about? Can you put highlights in someone's hair permanently? Can you select hairs that are lighter or, you know, gray and, I don't know, put patterns in someone's hair? It's pretty difficult to kind of pick and choose the hair follicles. But, you know, what's interesting about hair transplant surgery is that when we are looking at the donor zone, which is around, again, around the size and the back of the scalp, usually those follicles have the highest degree of pigmentation. So those are going to be your

your healthiest, most youthful looking hairs. And so if you are going a little bit of gray from the front, as many men do, when you get a hair transplant, oftentimes because the percentage of hair that's darker in the back of the scalp, it actually rejuvenates the color. But there are some newer treatments, I would say, like peptides and such, like copper peptide, which we believe is having an effect on maintaining the melanocyte, which are the pig

pigment cells in the hair follicle and treatments with copper peptides, whether it be at home with something like StemGrow, which is an AMPM type of treatment, or something in the office, for example, like a TED treatment, trans-epidermal delivery with growth factors and peptides. Those kinds of therapies, we believe, are maintaining hair follicle function and also rejuvenating it. Okay. Well, very good. Do you serve just your area in Florida and Boca Raton, or how far out can you go, or how far are

our people that come to you. Yeah, so, well, Richard, I've got now a 13,000 square foot facility here in Boca Raton, Florida. I have over 30 team members and as I mentioned previously, nearly 30 years of experience. I happen to be shortlisted in one of the top

clinics in the world, one of the top 20 in the world. So we do have patients that fly in from all across the globe for the types of procedures and treatments that we do, not just the evaluations and non-invasive therapies like regenerative medicine, PRP and exosomes, TED and PDO and things such as that, but the state-of-the-art hair transplantation procedures that we provide as well. I also have a scalp department that takes care of issues with scalp

scalp inflammation and other things that may be happening at the level of the scalp. And so we do see patients from all over the world. Nearly 50% of our patients that come in from out of town require hotel accommodations with their procedures. And so we've really become a destination location for the entire world. I've been listed as the number one top hair restoration surgeon in North America for nine years running. And we're soon to hopefully next year we'll make it 10 in a row. So again, we do have quite a

a number of patients that come in from all across the country, from New York to LA and everywhere in between, as well as from across the world who are seeking the kind of state-of-the-art hair restoration techniques and technology, in addition to exceptional patient care, and of course the artistry, which makes it look natural. And I think that magical combination of the techniques and the artistry and my amazing team, who I thank every single day for being with me. Many of my team members have been with me for almost two decades or more or something.

in some cases, uh, for enabling us to take care of so many patients from so many places around the world. So, um, you know, it's really been a blessing to have treated over 33,000 patients actually. Yeah. Well, very good. Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Dr. Allen. I appreciate it. And, um, for people that can't get to you for,

for whatever reason, what would be a resource for them to learn more to get help for themselves? Yeah. So for anyone out there who's got some maybe signs or symptoms of thinning hair, you're noticing, let's say, some receding hairline or loss of coverage in the crown area if you're a man. Or if you're a woman, you're noticing excessive shedding or a decrease in ponytail volume or a change in the overall texture and quality of your hair. The number one thing to do is to get educated. And I always tell patients, look, go and visit BaumanMedical.com.

B-A-U-M-A-N medical.com. You'll see thousands and thousands of pages there that I've written over the nearly 30 years that I've been in practice. You can watch hundreds of hours of videos on our diagnostic tools or other interventions that we use to help maintain, enhance, and preserve your own living and growing hair. And of course, the hair restoration treatments and procedures. From a first-person point of view, you can look at many first-person accounts or documentaries about the hair transplant surgeries that we've performed.

And so get that information first. If you would like a consultation, the good news is that we can do an evaluation preliminarily from your home or phone, anywhere in the world, virtually. You can connect with the practice. Just click the button, start here, and you can schedule either. Of course, we invite you to come into the office for that really cool measurements that we do with the AI-powered microscopes and things like that. But we can certainly start your journey virtually from anywhere in the world using just a simple Zoom call, video call, and

And we can figure out what's going on, identify the risk factors in your particular situation, maybe get some therapies and treatments out to you or do some additional diagnostics like genetic testing and such. So all of that can be arranged through BaumanMedical.com. You can click on a consultation or evaluation, you know, choose whether you want to do something in person or virtually. And I look forward to helping you. It's really, like I said, it's an honor to take care and serve those patients.

patients who are out there dealing with the hair loss situation because we know what an emotional burden it can be. And then we also know what's amazing is on the back end, once you have your hair restored, how great it can feel. And that's the work that we enjoy doing every single day, me and my amazing team, my associate physicians, Dr. Rose, she's amazing as well. And Trina, my nurse practitioner, and Kimberly, my trichologist, they are all amazingly special people in addition to the rest that make up my 30-person team here at Bauman Medical.

Very good. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it. All right, Richard. Hey, thanks for having me, and I really appreciate it. If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes. You've been listening to the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

If you like what you hear, be sure to review and subscribe to the Finding Genius Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And want to be smarter than everybody else? Become a premium member at FindingGeniusPodcast.com. This podcast is for information only. No advice of any kind is being given. Any action you take or don't take as a result of listening is your sole responsibility. Consult professionals when advice is needed.