The injections of the local anesthetic into the scalp before hair transplant procedures are definitely painful to some degree. Anyone who has had a tooth pulled knows that, if the tooth is deadened properly, it is not the tooth-pulling that hurts. It is the needle going in with medication to numb the tooth that is the real agony. They looked quite unnatural; if a person had hair plugs, everyone knew it. They were not only unbecoming, they were also permanent. Improvements were made in hair transplant surgery in the 1980s. Mini-grafts were better, but they still had the appearance of plugs, albeit smaller plugs. These were made up of 5-8 hairs each. A common quote for hair transplants is between $2 and $10 per graft. The reason for the wide variance is mainly because the price per graft decreases the more grafts you have done. Often, the price per hair transplant session is quoted. This may be a lunchtime session. For example, 200 grafts may be done in a short session for $2000. Their hair is lost in a more diffuse manner, thinning uniformly all over the head. It is not so much where their hair is that is the problem, but how much they have. Hair transplant surgery will not correct this problem. It is best used to move hair from one place to another. There is a very small percentage - about 5% of all women with baldness problems - who are good candidates for hair transplant surgery. Any doctors who make decisions that are not based on the welfare of his patient are following their Hippocratic Oath in its intentions. Doctors are held to a high standard and when a surgeon tries to convince a patient to get hair transplant surgery when it is not best for him, he is not really acting as a doctor should. It is called stereomicroscopic dissection. This means that the follicular units are carefully taken out of the donor tissue and kept individually intact. When doctors use hair transplant procedures with FUT, they do not have to use quite as large of a donor site. The follicular units are small and they can be separated from tissue that has no hair, under the microscope.