I've always considered Dr. Harris and his hair restoration clinic to be a gem in the middle of the Rockies. He has been recommended on the Hair Transplant Network for several years and has consistently gotten very good patient reviews. Seeing him and his staff perform all microscopically dissected ultra refined hair transplantation confirmed my confidence in him and his quality work.

Dr. Harris is also well known among his medical colleagues for being an innovator in refining and teaching Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE). His two step FUE process, which he refers to as the "SAFE System", improves on traditional FUE by virtually eliminating follicle damage during the extraction process.

His two step FUE process first uses a small sharp punch to score the scalp tissue surrounding the follicular unit to be extracted. Then a second non sharp punch is slipped down and around the follicular unit to separate it from the surrounding soft tissues below the skin. This "blunt dissection" process frees the follicular unit from the surrounding tissue, while minimizing the danger of follicle transection that occurs during the typical one step sharp punch extraction process. Dr. Harris regularly performs FUE sessions exceeding 1,000 grafts.

Dr. Harris has also performed body hair transplantation (BHT). However, due to the limited growth cycles and diameter of body hair, he feels that a surgeon must transplant four times as many body hairs as regular scalp hairs to achieve the same appearance of fullness. Thus he typically only recommends BHT for patients who have excellent body hair characteristics and little or no scalp donor hair available.

On the day of my visit Dr. Harris and his experienced staff were restoring a patient's frontal hairline, with the grafts being harvested using the conventional single blade strip method. Dr. Harris is reluctant to close the donor area under tension and thus very rarely removes a donor strip wider than 1.5 cm. He uses the trichophytic closure when he feels it will be of value to the patient, especially when the surgery is expected to be the patient's last surgery. He did not perform the trichophytic closure on this particular patient.

Seven medical technicians using microscopes then trimmed the patient's donor tissue into tiny refined follicular unit grafts from a strip approximately 18 cm long by 1 cm wide. The patient's donor tissue yielded 1,702 follicular unit grafts consisting of 283 ones, 809 twos, 532 threes and 78 four hair follicular unit grafts.

His experienced staff has the capability to perform sessions in excess of 3,000 grafts when appropriate for the patient.

Dr. Harris then used tiny blades that were custom cut to match the width and depth of the grafts. Typically these tiny minimally invasive blades range from 0.7 to 0.9 mm. Dr. Harris prefers to create sagital incisions that are parallel to the existing hair rather than lateral (perpendicular) incisions because he believes that such sagital incisions have less adverse impact on the scalps vascular.

During my visit, Tom, a satisfied patient of Dr. Harris dropped by to show me his impressive results. I was impressed by how much density he achieved from only 3,200 follicular unit grafts. His results were also very natural even upon close examination. Tom's first session was a strip surgery, followed by a small FUE session of about 500 grafts and then finally a second strip session. He was very pleased with his results and his entire experience.

I also met a young man who had suffered extensive hair loss due to childhood burns. Dr. Harris did a remarkable job of restoring this young man's hair using a combination of scalp surgery and hair transplantation. Dr. Harris did all this work for free to help this young man restore not only his hair but his life.

Dr. Harris is very down to earth and easy going. He has not actively promoted his clinic or his procedures on hair loss discussion forums. But I hope that he will present more of his impressive results on our forum in the coming months.

Pat,

Thanks for your detailed writeup on Dr. Harris. It's obvious that he is truly dedicated to performing state of the art ultra refined follicular unit hair transplantation.

I hope to see him become a regular contributor on our hair loss forum and present additional impressive patient results.

Best wishes,

Falc

Glad to see you made it out to see Dr. Harris Pat---It only reinforces what I have been saying for a couple of years--Dr. Harris does excellent work and is a great choice for any patient.

My only regret is not seeing Dr. Harris detail an FUE surgery as there are many here and elsewhere who constantly ask for his work in this area.

Thanks Pat,
Jason

It is interesting to note that the after photo shows a combination of strip and FUE. Even now I feel like there is some controversy about strip and FUE. I like both procedures provided that the end result is natural. By natural I mean undetectable. I feel this aspect is sometimes overlooked. Not all physicians are able to recreate natural patterns of hair growth in the recipient area. It is art.

I respect what Dr. Harris does and this is largely informed by Dr. Rose's positive view of his (Dr. Harris') work. Cleary the man embraces the state of the art and I am pleased he has received good exposure on the site.

Dr. Harris' planning for this patient seems quite sound. And the hybrid approach is interesting indeed.