Gimme a head with hair, long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen
Give me down to there, hair!
Shoulder length or longer . . .
Other than internal organs, there’s hardly a part of the body that plastic surgery and noninvasive aesthetic treatments don’t touch. One of our goals at PSP is to go everywhere on the body that you might go in the course of treating patients.
In this issue, we’re starting at the top—the head, that is. As Alan J. Bauman, MD, points out in his article on hair restoration (page 22), an attractive face isn’t complete unless it’s framed by good-looking hair. Of course, one doesn’t need to go to the extremes described by the above lyrics of the song “Hair” from the Broadway musical and movie of the same name. But many patients do need a “lift” for their hair as much as they need a lift for their faces.
This is one restorative procedure that applies nearly equally for men and women. Nature has seen fit to generate both male- and female-pattern baldness, and it falls to hair-restoration physicians to bridge the hair gap.
Bauman’s article stresses the need for cooperation between plastic surgeons and hair-restoration specialists. This principle applies to all sorts of other medical specialties as well. In the coming months, we will present articles on medical conditions and treatments that involve collaboration between plastic surgeons and dermatologists, gynecologists, microsurgeons, otolaryngologists, and other types of physicians. It’s interesting to note that, as medicine becomes more sophisticated and specialized, there is also a trend for the lines between specialties to become blurred, and some procedures—laser treatments are a good example—may be performed in the facilities of a wide variety of practitioners.
Mentioning lasers allows me to segue into the other end of the hair spectrum that we cover in this issue—laser hair removal (LHR). It seems that for every patient who wants hair to grow on his or her head, there is another who wants it to stop growing elsewhere on the body. Of course, many of these are one and the same. Kathleen Gilmore, MD, (page 32) takes you through some typical LHR procedures and discusses how they can be used on individuals with all skin and hair types.
The mere inclusion of articles on hair restoration and hair removal in the same issue of PSP symbolizes how wide-ranging aesthetic medicine has become. I leave it to your imagination to come up with parts of the body that plastic surgeons and their physician colleagues will be able to enhance in years to come.
