If you are one of the 60% of men who will suffer premature balding due to male pattern baldness then you have probably heard the term Hair Plugs and wondered what people were talking about. If you do searches in older hair restoration medical documents you will find references to this term and then it disappears in the 1990’s. It seemed like maybe this was a procedure that could potentially be used today so I did some more research. Come to find out, the hair plugs treatment is still used but the name which is usually used is hair transplantation or hair implantation. This change has occurred for two reasons.
First, the term hair plugs came from the fact that a surgeon would actually remove round plugs of scalp with approximately ten hairs from the back of the head in order to sew them into the balding area. Men who suffer from pattern baldness will generally lose their hair above the forehead and on the crown of the head. This leaves fairly thick growth at the back. Hair restoration surgeons would use this growth area as a donor site for transplanting. These plugs did not give a very natural looking appearance though because the hairs tended to stick up every which way. Over the years the techniques were perfected to allow for the implantation of individual hair follicles instead of chunks of scalp. So really, the term hair plugs became a misnomer.
The second reason this term has fallen out of use is because of marketing. Hair plugs just sounds coarse and not very attractive, which the original results weren’t. The hair clinics realized they needed something that sounded more benign and yet advanced so they developed new names for the procedure. The terms hair transplantation and hair implantation were determined to give a much better ring. Hair grafts was tried for a while but again the connotation were fairly negative.
Whatever the name you give this hair replacement procedure, it does give a man a full head of hair again after the affects of pattern baldness have been experienced.
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