Joseph MacDonald, MD

Prices vary as they do in any major city. They are higher in North America but like most things in life, you get what you pay for! At the most established and well known hair transplant clinic in the city, I charge anywhere from $4000 to $13000. In Calgary, clinics with robotic surgery will cost more for less grafts. Beware of black market surgeries, even in Calgary! There is one such clinic in the NW without an actual physician that claims to perform hair transplants. Always make sure you meet with a board certified medical doctor, preferably one active with the ISHRS, before you trust anyone to permanently operate on your scalp. 

Unfortunately this is not a viable option. There actually was an experiment done years ago and sure enough the patient's immune system rejected the transplanted grafts taken from another person. There was also an accident at a major hair transplant chain where the grafts between two different patients were mixed up and sure enough both patients bodies rejected the grafts. These experiences underline the power of the immune system to reject anything foreign. Taking anti-rejection drugs could mitigate this as it does with organ transplantation however the side effects can be severe and is not worth the risk for a cosmetic surgery such as hair transplantation. 

You want to make sure a hair transplant is worth your while. This depends on a number of factors but certainly if you were an appropriate surgical candidate (based on age, family history, detailed examination of the scalp, etc.) and had realistic expectations then doing a small surgery of 600-1000 grafts may be appropriate. Smaller sessions will only give you a very subtle improvement. My major caution would be that most men who have just a little recession are actually not good surgical candidates. Hairlines should not be too low, meaning that you should not plan on keeping the hairline you had as a teenager. Balding is progressive and if you are bound to loose a lot of hair in the future, you don't want to be stuck with a fringe of transplanted hair in the front and then bald behind. This would look very silly and unnatural and is a mark of poor surgical planning but is unfortunately all too common worldwide. Remember that your hairline must look good for the rest of your life and often what one thinks looks good in one's 20's does not look so good in one's 50's and beyond. 

Great question! You should visit a hair restoration physician to go over your situation in more detail. Useful questions to answer would be, have you noticed your hairline move or has it always been where it is? Some people have naturally high hairlines, many start to recede in their 2nd and 3rd decade. Balding can be diagnosed by looking closely at the hair itself for signs of miniaturization which is why its important you have an in person consultation. 

After surgery the transplanted hair goes into a resting phase. This lasts between 3 and 4 months. So at 3 months its possible that some of those follicles are just starting to produce new hair. It would be hard for you to appreciate the growth this early on.