Patient in the Sitting Position to Improve Comfort in Follicular Unit Extraction.

Sir:

During the past decade, follicular unit extraction (FUE) has been become more and more popular in hair transplantation surgery.[1] In China, almost half the patients undergoing hair transplantation choose FUE. Traditionally, the patient is placed in a prone position for occipital harvest or the lateral decubitus position for temporal and parietal harvest.[2,3] However, the procedure of hair follicle harvesting, compared with the method of hair-bearing scalp strips, FUE, is very tiring for both the patient and the operator.[4]

To overcome this problem, we use a massage chair (Fig. 1) to improve the comfort of the operator and patient. During the FUE procedure, the patient sits on the seat and lays his/her head on the seat of the massage chair, whereas the operator sits or stands at the head or left side of the patient (Fig. 2). If there is no massage chair, 2 ordinary seats of different heights can be used. The patient can sit on the lower seat and place his or her head on the higher seat. For harvesting the same number of hair follicles, our experience has shown that the sitting position can increase the comfort of the patient and operator.

Fig. 1.

The massage chair is displayed.

Fig. 2.

The patient and operator in a sitting position.