Recovery month by month › Month 5

Hair transplant after 5 months: what patients report

This page doesn't explain the medicine; your surgeon should. It shows what patients themselves wrote on reddit (r/HairTransplants and r/tressless) when they posted a progress report 5 months after their surgery, and what the same people wrote when they posted again later.

361 of 5,433 patient progress reports were posted at 5 months, 332 of them with photos. How the patients described their experience so far: 69% positive, 11% mixed, 2% negative (the rest didn't say).

Mentioned in these threads: shock loss (8%), poor growth (4%), scarring (3%), overharvested donor area (1%).

Month 5 compared with the rest of the first year

Share of each month's progress reports that described the experience as positive.

Month 1 56% of 329
Month 2 55% of 251
Month 3 61% of 366
Month 4 66% of 396
Month 5 69% of 361
Month 6 74% of 484
Month 7 70% of 236
Month 8 65% of 204
Month 9 78% of 175
Month 10 69% of 150
Month 11 70% of 74
Month 12 75% of 334

Where the same people were later

107 of the 296 people who posted at 5 months posted another progress report of their own at least three months later. In their latest report, 79 described their experience as positive, 7 as mixed and 0 as negative; 21 didn't say.

Read this with care: only people who chose to post again are counted, and those who stopped posting may differ from those who kept posting, so this is not a success rate.

In their own words at 5 months

How to read these numbers

These are people who chose to post, not a clinical study. Someone worried at month 5 is more likely to ask for reassurance than someone who is fine, and a thread "mentioning" a problem can be a worry as much as a diagnosis. A thread counts once, at the point after surgery the patient stated (month 5 means 5 to just under 6 months), even if it names several doctors. Removed threads are left out of the quotes. Your own surgeon's advice comes first.

Comparing doctors? The directory lists each one's credentials, published prices and patient reports.

SaveMyHairline is an independent hair transplant doctor directory: published prices, checked credentials and real patient reports, with sources — and no clinic can pay to appear.