“I should have paid more and stayed in England.”
In 2020, Stephen O’Neill, 50, spent £1,300 on a hair transplant in Turkey.
He traveled to the country for the procedure with two friends in 2020 after the first lockdown.
Upon arrival, they discovered that the company they had chosen was actually a referral company rather than a clinic, even though they had been told that a qualified surgeon would oversee the entire procedure.
When he arrived, the surgeon outlined what would happen next. 3,500 transplanted hairs, small areas of the scalp containing one or two hairs, are taken from the back of the head and transplanted into bald areas of the scalp. His hairline was receding.
Mr O’Neill, a businessman from Kilmarnock, Scotland, said that was his only contact with the surgeon. The surgeon disappeared, and he was put in a room with three or four workers who he didn’t think were equally qualified.
Although he didn’t think much of it at the time, he remembers feeling pressured to write a positive TrustPilot review immediately after the surgery. In it, he gave positive feedback and echoed similar comments he saw online.
He remembers experiencing a lot of bleeding and swelling but thinking it was normal.
“What we saw in the days after the incident was pretty grim,” he said.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later that he began to suspect something was wrong. He was told it would heal in about two weeks, but months later, the scab in his hairline that had been transplanted from the back of his head was still there.
He began emailing the agency for help, but it could take a week or two to get a response from the agency on behalf of the clinic.
“It was really quite stressful and I remember being really, really angry at the time,” he said.
When my scalp healed and hair started to grow, there were gaps between the hairs, making the transplanted area patchy.
Ten months ago, he underwent a second orthodontic implant in the UK, which ultimately cost around £6,500.
“I realized that I had been taking a little bit of a gamble, obviously to save money,” he said. “In hindsight, I wish I had paid a little more and stayed in England.” His friends also had problems with the outcome.
The corrective procedure involved filling in the gaps with more grafted hair. There was much less bleeding and the anaesthetic injections were less painful, which led me to suspect that I had received substandard treatment at the Turkish clinic. This time all the procedures were performed by qualified surgeons.
