How do you decide upon the best hair transplantation clinic and surgeon? Do your research first. If you are reading this article you will be bombarded with information about different hair transplant clinics.Type in the search term “hair transplant “into google and you will be immersed by paid advertisements, articles, SEO ranked websites and YouTube videos. All purporting to be the experts in hair transplant surgery.
Who is a real expert in hair transplant surgery and who do you believe?
I am writing this article as there is so much misinformation out there it’s incredibly confusing for the prospective hair transplant person to sift through the maze of information. Most probably you are a man reading this. In fact 90% of hair transplant patients are male.
If you would type in Hair Transplantation London for example in google search, you will see around four paid adverts on the top of page one.These are identifiable by a square on the left hand side with ad written inside it.These clinics and sometimes middle men have paid to be there on the top of the first page in the high ranking positions. Scroll down a little on the first page and you will notice some article or newspaper stories about hair transplants. These are usually followed by adverts and so on the pattern continues.
The question is how do you decide who is genuinely telling the truth and who is a good surgeon that you can trust?
Paid Adverts
These companies have paid to be number one on the top page of google so that you notice their advertising and click and book a consultation. They need extra research into who exactly they are. The first thing you can do is to see if they are middle men masquerading as clinics or surgeons. This is easy to do as if they are a genuine clinic with a genuine surgeon his name and photo should be on their website. If you can’t find this the best advice is to move on as you are looking for the best hair transplant surgeon.
If the paid advert is a genuine clinic then the best thing is to look for video testimonials from genuine patients. Any clinic can put before and after photos taken from various places on their website and make claim to the fabulous results. Real patients carried out by the clinic or surgeon should show the patient journey so that you can see the progress in real results. This also gives you an indication of if they have kept in touch with their patients post operatively.
Nowadays consumers are getting more savvy about paid advertising as this is not always proof that the service provider is the best out there.
Which kind of reviews can you trust when deciding upon a hair transplant surgeon or clinic?
The next thing to look at is the number of google reviews. These can be found when you google the clinic name and are next to the website.
- You should read them.Do they show consistency in patient feedback? Trust pilot reviews can be taken down by the clinic if they don’t like them and are therefore not reliable in showing the performance or genuine patient experience.
- This is quite informative as any clinic who can pull down reviews they don’t like can’t be reliably verified.
- Google reviews are in my opinion not able to be fabricated or made up as each person has to log into their google account from their own phone or laptop to write the review.
- The reviews posted by each clinic on their own website can only be verified if the authentic source can be produced such as the e mail of the reviewer.
- This is generally not able to be seen by a user on a website. It will need a visit by you to clinic to verify if the source of the review is genuine. As a person looking for patient reviews you should check if the reviews actually give a detailed insight into the user or patient experience.
How do you read a a review when deciding upon a clinic to choose for your hair transplant surgery?
Real patients describe sometimes details of the procedure. They should give you an insight into how they have been looked after during the procedure. Some clinic staff write their own fake reviews and these are easy to check on google reviews identified by their staff name! Some competitors post defamatory reviews that do not match the consistency of the other user reviews.
Here are some tips on how to check out patient reviews for a clinic
- How did they feel?
- We’re they made to feel welcome and respected?
- Did the clinic and surgeon explain everything in detail?
- Were they kept comfortable and did they feel safe ?
- What was the post operative care like?
These are all important questions and when you read the clinic reviews you can search for these answers. Find out what good post operative care instructions are like.
Articles written in magazines
Articles written in magazines promoting a clinic or surgeon are paid advertising. The magazines usually receive money for promoting the clinic or surgeon. These may promote reach and audiences but they cannot be verified as genuine honest content as effectively they are written by the clinic via the magazine to promote them.
Articles written by influencers
If you are researching into a hair transplant you will notice certain influencers who write articles and post You Tube videos on hair transplants. They aim to influence the trends and which clinic or surgeons people choose for their hair transplant surgery. These are confusing as they promote different messages and claim to have had dozens of hair transplants . The clinics they promote most probably pay the influencers to promote them . This is so they get to the top of page one when you searching for a hair transplant surgeon or clinic.
One question to ask yourself is if the influencer’s opinion carries more weight than several real patient experiences. You would be wanting to know the overall experience of real patients. This is better than one influencer when making your decision.
When looking at influencers you can check what messages they have been promoting over the years. Do the messages vary or are they consistent. Can you believe the influencer? One thing you can do is to check the google reviews on these Surgeons or clinics they are promoting. This will be something you can do before you decide who to book your consultation with.
SEO ranked clinics.
When you type in search terms like best hair transplant clinic London some clinics will appear without paid advertising.
These clinics are ranked because they are considered to be great resources for the user in making a decision about hair transplant surgery. But your question is what is the user experience like? They may have dozens or hundreds of blogs posted. But what about the user experience of hair transplant restoration?
The best thing to do is to check their google reviews. Do they show consistency in a great patient experience? What star rating do they have? How many google reviews are written about the clinic?
How to decide whether the reviews are genuine
Another question to ask is how many reviews are written recently describing the user experience? If the reviews are sporadic or written years ago them this does not give you much information. You want to know what the services and quality of hair restoration is like now. You should also look for videos posted by real patients describing their experiences and showing real results.
Another important bit of research you can do is to visit the CQC website. The CQC stands for Care Quality Commission and is an Independent inspection body for clinics who provide services. See the points above to help you decide if the reviews are genuine.
How do I choose a good hair transplant surgeon?
The surgeon’s experience and number of years of surgery is also crucial in marking a decision about who to go with for your hair transplant surgery. A good hair transplant surgeon will be perfecting and honing his skills. This requires a surgeon to be specialising in doing the surgery every day. Hair transplant surgery is complex and results take a whole year to come back. You should choose a surgeon who specialises in hair transplant surgery. He or she should have at least ten years experience or doing solely this type of surgery.
A good surgeon will be doing on going training through membership of hair transplant Societies such as the ISHRS https://ishrs.org
and the British version BAHRS
You can check the name of your surgeon on these registers.
Location
It’s better to choose a surgeon in the country you live in so that you can keep in touch throughout your hair restoration journey. Remember hair takes a whole year to grow and show the full results after surgery. Post operative care is really important in achieving good results. A good clinic or surgeon will provide post operative reviews and packs after surgery to ensure your results are tracked. Remember that there’s two types of hair transplant surgery. If you want the new virtually scarless FUE surgery then choose a surgeon who specialises in this technique.
Summary
To summarise the best way to decide who to book a consultation with is to check out the google reviews of the surgeon and clinic on their website. Do look at the patient testimonials including patient diaries and videos as these can’t be fabricated especially if there is more than one. Ultimately the best hair transplant clinics are the ones rated as the best by you the consumers and patients in your reviews.Remember to choose a highly experienced surgeon who specifically specialises in hair transplant surgery.
Good luck in choosing your surgeon and clinic. You can book a consultation and we are here to help you in our hair transplant clinic in Harley Street London.
Thank you
Farzana
The Clinic Manager
Providing patient centred care.
