Hair loss gets some help.

• Author: LEWIS, PETE

hair restoration surgery is a little like counterfeiting money. Practitioners in both fields typically go quietly about their business, and prefer to keep their work and their clients out of the limelight. Their best work goes undetected. That which is noticed rarely represents the best practices in either field. And there's a lot of money to be made in both fields.

Despite Michael Jordan, Sean Connery and the recent trendiness of shiny pates, most men still prefer hair over no hair. About 35 million American men exhibit some degree of male pattern baldness. The lengths they'll go to combat it, and the price they're willing to pay, can seem limitless. Case in point: the bad comb-over.

Dr. Emanuel Marritt has performed thousands of hair replacement surgeries during more than 20 years. He has taught hair restoration techniques to medical students at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, lectured extensively and published medical journal papers on the subject. Four years ago, Marritt witnessed a surgical technique that impressed him so much he took down his shingle and got out of the business.

"The day that I visited my first follicular unit transplantation (FUT) was the day I decided to become an author," said Marritt. "I was faced with a moral dilemma. The technique that I had mastered was second-rate. As a doctor, I could no longer tell my patients that I had the best solution to their problem."

Why not simply Learn the new technique?

"When done properly, follicular unit transplantation is every patient's dream and every doctor's nightmare," Marritt said.

Like other hair transplant techniques, FUT entails harvesting a strip of hair from the back of a patient's head and transplanting it in areas that are thinning or bald. Hair transplants have been around since the 1930s, but they have evolved from relocating hair in strips or clumps (i.e., plugs) to smaller and smaller grafts.

Micrograph surgery entails transplanting single hairs, and groups of two, three or four hairs. When done properly the surgeon transplants single hairs in the front, followed by two-hair groups, then three- and four-hair groups. This "density gradient" produces a soft natural hairline and natural appearance, far superior to the plug technique that left a patient's scalp with hair growing in clumps surrounded by expanses of bare scalp.

FUT takes the procedure one step further.

If you look at your scalp under a magnifying glass, it appears that hairs sprout...