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One of the things you will notice about Dr. Cole’s website besides extremely satisfied patients, are the large, clear, detailed Patient Gallery photos.
I was recently banned from another forum for attempting to discuss my observation, that many hair transplant doctor’s websites deliberately provide small, dark, slightly out of focus Patient Gallery Images in an effort to hide details that would detract from the result if they were identified.
At the mention of this, the forum’s moderator and one of the doctors began to “foam at the mouth” like a rabid dog, declaring they’re innocence while at the same time lashing out in personal attacks. You can nearly always tell when someone has no substantive intelligent response when they lash out at you with personal attacks.
Anyway, I’m not going to rehash the details here, but I will repeat this quote posted about me by the doctor involved:
“His goal is not to illuminate and educate, but to tear down and debase.”
As a digital professional I will respond to the above allegation by providing some very useful information that I think will be helpful to prospective patients in evaluating doctor’s results imagery on the Internet.
To begin with, here are two basic, rules of thumb:
1. Doctor’s who do poor work are not going to let you see their hairlines in their Internet Patient Gallery. The hair will be styled in the photos in such a way as to hide the hairline. One exception to this relates to PhotoShopped images. I recently examined a Patient Gallery photo posted by a practice I’d never heard of, where they used the “Blur Tool” in Adobe PhotoShop to soften the hairline. Look for blurred hairlines in Internet imagery. Hairlines are the dead give away of poor work. Make a study of peoples hairlines. Notice that the gradual “feathering” of the hairline is nearly always consistent between the temple area and the hairline above the forehead area.
2. Doctors who do fair to good work will let you see their hairlines, but in small slightly dark, out of focus images. Look for lack of detail in their imagery. Brown, Black or Yellow blobs (depending on hair color) where hair should be, but very little in the way of individual discernable hairs.
I once had someone say to me, regarding the above mentioned “foaming at the mouth” doctor; “I’ve seen one of his patients in person and his hair looked pretty good! Well, anyone up for a pretty good hair transplant? I can spot one from across the room.
When pressed, a very large, excellent quality image was posted by this doctor. The work was good, but I could easily tell that it was a hair transplant because the hairline was strong and not feathered like the temple it joined. This may happen in nature in a few odd cases, but this appearance is not the norm on a natural non-transplanted head of hair.
I wondered why when pressed, he was able to produce a large, crisp, patient image even though none at all exist in the Internet Patient Gallery. Very odd. In fact there is one image in particular on his site I’d like to see in greater detail. Looks like a 4mm plug job from the 70s. Can you imagine, images so poor that a 70s 4mm plug job is difficult to spot!
Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting one of Dr. Cole’s patients in person. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the work is freaking awesome. The hairline was perfect. I could not tell at all. Perfectly natural. This kind of work takes much more of any doctor’s time. Few doctors are willing to invest this effort. Instead, they simply hide behind small, poor quality Internet images in the hopes prospective patients will not suspect anything is hiding behind the lack of detail.
Perhaps some people are satisfied with good hair transplant work. If you want excellent work and an awesome undetectable hairline, I don’t think there is any doctor other than Dr’s Cole and the IHTI doctors.
You would think at least if there were a doctor anywhere near as talented as the IHTI doctors, they would at least be proud enough of their work to post large, clear and detailed images for everyone to see.
BTW
Here is a fun Internet link where you can test your digital discernment. http://www.autodesk.com/eng/etc/fake_or_foto/index.html
It is basically a test of your ability to discern the difference between computer generated imagery and actual photographs. The program that created the computer generated imagery is Maya. Maya is a 3d animation program that was used in the creation of the incredibly lifelike Smeagle and the Mammoth creatures in “Lord of The Rings”. |
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