What qualities must a doctor have to be a great hair restoration surgeon?

DR. TRUE believes to have a really great hair loss doctor there have to be four things in place. First of all they have to be a good physician. They have to have had good training, they have to be intelligent, and they have to know medicine well so that they're going to be able to make good, clinical judgments and good therapeutic decisions. Secondly, particularly for hair transplant surgeons, they have to have good hands. And you can have someone who's a good clinician, but they may not have good hands.

And what he means by good hands when he talks about a colleague is that they're someone who just has a nice touch. They can use their hands well. They have a good eye. They can see things and they're able to execute. Some people can see things but they can't execute, okay? Some people are technically very good, but they just can't see it. And so it's really that combination of the eye, to be able to see something, to look at someone's face and to appreciate something about it aesthetically, and then the capacity to be able to reproduce that - which really, when we're talking about one hair at a time and being able to conceptualize all of these little dots that go in and how that comes together and creates the final product, there's a really delicate touch that goes into that as well.

Third thing is that they have to be a very ethical doctor. We're dealing with patients' lives in doing this. We're not just putting hair on their heads. We're dealing with their image of themselves. And for many people we're dealing with something that can affect all aspects of their lives. So what we do can make a huge difference or it can harm. And we have to realize that for most patients hair loss is a progressive condition, and whatever we do for someone today they're going to live with for the rest of their life. And that's a heavy burden. And that does require a good, strong ethical sense.

The final characteristic is that the person has to be a team player, because the very nature of this is that it's done by a team. When you go to see a doctor to get a hair transplant, you have to realize that it isn't just the doctor who's doing the hair transplant. It's a team of nurses, technicians and the doctor who produce the ultimate result. The doctor could be the best doctor in the world, but if his nurses and technicians aren't equally good his result is not going to be as good as it could be. Well, you don't have a really good team unless you know how to be a team player.