‘I wish I’d paid more and stayed in the UK’
In 2020, Steven O’Neill, 50, spent £1,300 on a hair transplant in Turkey.
He went to the country in 2020 after the first lockdown to do the procedure along with two of his friends.
When they arrived, they realised that the company they had chosen was actually a referral agency rather than a clinic, despite being told that a qualified surgeon would oversee the whole procedure.
When he arrived, a surgeon gave him an overview of what would happen: 3,500 hair grafts, which are tiny pieces of scalp containing one or two hairs, would be harvested from the back of his head and transplanted to the bald area of his scalp where his hairline had receded.
Mr O’Neill, a business owner from Kilmarnock, Scotland, said that was the extent of his contact with the surgeon, who disappeared and he was put into a room with three or four workers he did not believe were qualified to the same degree.
He did not think much of it at the time and remembers feeling pressured to fill out a positive TrustPilot review right after the procedure, in which he gave positive feedback and echoed similar comments he had seen online.
He remembers experiencing a significant amount of bleeding and swelling but thinking it was normal.
“It was pretty gruesome, the way we looked a couple of days after it,” he said.
It was only in the following weeks that he started to suspect there might be a problem. He had been told he would heal in around two weeks, but months went by and he still had scabs along his hairline, where hairs had been transplanted from the back of his head.
He started emailing the agency to ask for help and it would sometimes take a week or two to get a response from them on behalf of the clinic.
“It was really quite stressful and I remember being really quite angry at the time,” he said.
When his scalp healed and the hairs started to grow, there were gaps between them, resulting in a patchy appearance where they had been transplanted.
Ten months ago he had a second corrective transplant in the UK, which ended up costing him around £6,500.
“I’ve come to realise that I’ve taken a bit of a gamble obviously to save a bit of money,” he said. “In hindsight I wish I’d paid a bit more and stayed in the UK.” His friends have also had problems with their results.
The corrective procedure involved filling in the gaps with more transplanted hairs. There was much less bleeding and the anaesthetic injections were less painful, leading him to suspect that he had received substandard care at the clinic in Turkey. This time, the entire procedure was done by a qualified surgeon.
Sarah Carter is a health and wellness expert residing in the UK. With a background in healthcare, she offers evidence-based advice on fitness, nutrition, and mental well-being, promoting healthier living for readers.
