Hair transplant - is it a painful surgery?

Dear Aakash
Thanks for the question. Most patients are surprised there is virtually no pain during an hair transplant procedure done under a local anesthetic. After the surgery, patients will typically feel some minor discomfort. I wish you all the best.

We use local anesthesia for our hair transplant patients.At the beginning of the procedure our patients do feel a few needle sticks in their scalp, as the local anesthesia is being placed.  But once the local anesthetic has taken effect, the procedure is pain free.During the portion of the procedure when we are implanting the grafts into the recipient site, most of our patients are playing games on their iPhones or iPads.Consider meeting with a board certified plastic surgeon to find out more. 

Hair transplant surgery is performed under local anesthesia. It should not be a painful surgery.  Numbing process is painful as you may expect from local anesthesia.

Hair transplant is a minimally painful surgery. The only pain the patient feels is when local anaesthesia is given. there are various ways of reducing the pain during local anaesthesia.

One of the important question or apprehension a patient can have is whether Hair Transplant is a painful surgery or not?
During the procedure, the patient doesn't feel any pain or discomfort if the local anesthesia is infiltrated properly. This makes the scalp numb. During the post-operative period if it is an FUE procedure then the feeling of numbness may be present which wears off over a period of time. After FUT procedure there may be some feeling of tightness or stretchiness on the scalp. Numbness also will be there for some days. The patient is advised to use an analgesic if he feels some pain.

Hair Transplantation is one of the top elective procedures for men in the world. This is in part because it is not painful. Once the numbing medicine has been injected there simply is no pain. I tell my patients the biggest pain is just sitting in the chair for a few hours like a long plane ride. But patient sits there in pain. Afterward there is some pain in the donor area due to swelling from the procedure, but that usually passes by daybreak of the next morning as the swelling goes down. That's it. No big deal. I've had three HTs and pain has never been an issue for me.

Let's break your question down into the day of the procedure and the recovery period. The only discomfort you should feel during the surgery itself is the numbing process, and this takes only a few minutes. Before administering the local anesthetic(s), most surgeons provide some sort of sedating drugs (typically Valium/diazepam and/or Versed/midazolam; nitrous oxide can also be used. By the time your scalp is being anesthetized you should be very relaxed, and if done properly the numbing process should be quite tolerable. It is important to let the doctor or the surgical team know if you feel the SLIGHTEST amount of pain once you have been numbed and the surgery is in progress.Post-operative pain should also be minimal. Though the pain after an FUE procedure is negligible, in my experience the vast majority of patients also have little or no pain following strip ("FUT") surgery. I call all my patients the day after surgery to see how they're doing and whether they have any questions. Seldom do I hear anything from my strip patients other than "I feel great," "no pain at all," "I haven't even taken a pill," etc. I, myself, have had 3 strip procedures and over 6000 grafts, and I had a similar experience each time. (And my scar is virtually undetectable).

There is some discomfort with Strip surgery in the back of the head, but with FUE surgery patients are nt reporting any pain. I personally had three hair transplants and I did not find it very uncomfortable.