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Awful. Treated with Contempt. Unprofessional from Start to Finish.
This is a difficult review to write but I feel I should tell my very detailed story in order to help others understand what their experience may be be like having a hair transplant at Dr ilker Apaydin surgery in Turkey.
Coming to Dr Apaydin clinic in Istanbul was the culmination of more than 15 years of slow hair loss but 15 years of research & ambition of hoping one day in my life I would be able to afford the procedure that I’d wanted to have done since my early 20’s. (I’m now 38 having had the FUT procedure in December 2021)
In October 2021 I was finally in a financial position to persue my dream of a hair transplant & with the help of a friend who had also done lots of research we decided Dr Apaydin in Istanbul was the man for the job & my friend decided that he would like to also come along and persue his dream too of fixing his hairline so we both initiated our conversations with Dr Apaydin whos reputation & online reviews made him seem the perfect choice by a long way.
In my review I would like to post my honest experience of a man from London with insecurities about his receding hairline.
I feel as a man who has always tried to organise things in good detail & cross every T & dot every i that once the organisation began and the initial reaching out to the clinic in October that there were red flags appearing from the start.
My friend who I jointly had the procedure with was the first to reach out to the clinic using the WhatsApp direct contact option on the website to begin asking Dr Apaydin about possible dates, prices & gathering general information. That was all fine & then shortly after I was added to a WhatsApp group that included my friend, myself & dr Apaydin so we could discuss our treatments, organise the sending of photographs of our heads & getting quotes. This did get a little confusing and I would probably recommend generally a one on one contact rather than 3 people discussing different treatments & prices in the same group but generally dr Apaydin was reasonably quick to respond to questions initially & we were able to see fairly clearly a breakdown of individual pricing for each of us & most importantly what procedures we were agreeing to have & the amounts grafts/hairs that would be taken from & grafted onto our heads. We were told to make our flight reservations and give him the flight numbers before any confirmation of dates could be made which we did. Then things went a bit quiet for a little while. A very basic ‘don’t worry everything is booked in’ response after a few days. But with me wanting a more formal/official confirmation i decided to send a long email just making sure all the details were correct so I sent an email to the website address clarifying everything including what procedures we were having, costs, hotel details, airport transfer details, just lots of questions just to make sure we were all set and knew what was going to happen. This email was never responded to. Instead after a couple of weeks we were WhatsApped by our liaison Leila who started giving us basic details of our itinerary. This was sent on the 10th of December, around 13 days before our departure from London. The messages were informative and helpful I must say but some information could have been better displayed. There was confusing information about 3 different currencies being accepted, in dr Apaydin messages he’d said the price was in euros but then Leila told us that he also accepted pounds which could have been a pain to have exchanged all our pounds into euros. Then we were told that our pcr tests in Istanbul would be 300 Turkish lira each but then on the very day we arrived in turkey Leila changed the price and said it would now be 400 lira. I had to inform her that she had told us it was 300 on the 10th so she agreed to revert to the old price.
Leila told us that we would be met by someone at the airport at a particular exit and she sent a photo of what it would look like and what card they would be holding up for us to recognise them. We arrived and waited 25 minutes and saw no sign of these men so my friend telephoned Leila who answered by saying “who is this??”My friend telling her we’d arrived and we’d sent a photo of the area she told us to wait at and her reply was that she “couldn’t open her eyes” which was very odd & alarming. She said she would call him back shortly. About 5 minutes later we heard a man shout my friends name & only his name and told him to go and stand in a separate area. I obviously went with him. A few minutes later a different man came along and told us and 2 others to follow him to an area up an Escalator to a street with taxis and again wait there. My friend was then told to come with him and my friend had to tell him that we were together & must travel together. It was very disorganised & then once we were put into a taxi the taxi man didn’t know who we were or where we were going. Luckily I had the hotel address at hand on my phone and I had to hand the driver my phone so he could see where we were going. Then to my surprise I saw on my phone the journey was 1 hour & 30 minutes to the hotel. On arrival at the hotel things ran a little smoother & the receptionists had details of our stay. Our hotel rooms were nice and the area in which the hotel is in is also good & lt felt safe with plenty of shops and places to eat and drink so I add this to my positive feedback.
Leila WhatsApped us to tell us we were being collected at 7.30am to be taken to the clinic and to make sure we ate from the free breakfast buffet which opened at 7 at the hotel. A good selection if eating meat & cheese for breakfast is your thing but nothing there for vegans other than cucumber, olives & tomatoes & no cerial. But croissants and bread was available.
We first meet Leila outside the hotel at 7.30 and are taken a short taxi journey to the clinic.
The first thing that was done was a meeting in the office were our cash was taken and a brief lightly detailed description of what would happen shortly. One of the only questions I asked was if I would get consultation time with the dr and how long I would have, Leila said I would have maybe 20 minutes to half an hour which suited me as I really wanted to know what was going to happen & for him to understand why I was having the treatment done etc. We were taken into a room where we were to have our hair brushed and observered by Leila. I was disappointed by this as I was really hoping to meet dr Apaydin to see me as I was with my hair styled the way I like it and to talk over my hopes & so he could see what I looked like now and talk about my expectations etc. But this did not happen. Some photos of our hair were taken, combed in various ways then next we were put into our hospital gown and had to take off our shirts and shoes. Then we filled out some paperwork and then just waited in reception for maybe another half an hour. Things felt slow and staff were arriving in the first hour or 2 of our arrival.
I had to fill out some paperwork then just waited around again for a while, maybe another half an hour 40 mins sitting there just watching customers & staff arrive.
As I recall maybe 3 hours after arrival I was asked to come into main brightly lit photo room again but this time to meet dr Apaydin . I was very happy to see him & got up and broadly smiled at him & shook his hand. He immediately started putting his hands through my hair and straight away said “so we’ll be shaving everything off today” & before he could continue talking my eyes bulged wide & I interrupted in an upset way waving my hands saying No no no no we agreed I wasn’t having my hair shaved I’m having the non shave one done & starting upsettingly raising the volume and tone of my upset voice whilst grabbing my phone to show him all the photos of our WhatsApp conversation saying we were doing “no shave FUT” & photos of me with hats on where I’d been able to convince all my friends and family by combing over and hair spraying my hair that no one knew that I was going bald (& this is the truth, not denial, from barely acquaintances to long term close friends no one knew) & desperately showed him the confirmation on WhatsApp of me showing pictures of a previous client who had very similar hair to mine who had the no shave procedure & then in WhatsApp the doctor agreeing that he would do the no shave method. This created such a scene in the room as there were 5 or 6 nurses all witnessing this drama & what made me look like a bad customer. There was muttering in Turkish & a lot of angry and confused looks from the nurses & lots of chatter between doctor and one of the head nurses. Then a bit of silence as he looked at me and says “ok..I’ve made a mistake, we will do the fut no shave procedure” my elation was so emotional and from that point on I just wanted to get on with it. He drew a hairline on my head and I just agreed to it straight away. I was in a state of panic and didn’t want to start creating any more drama by adding anymore questions so I just agreed to whatever line he drew on. Then that was that but in reflection the hairline he drew on in pen was very high & still represents a receding hairline. He walked away (no sorry or anything) then I was taken into the operating room. This is where I broke down and started crying. Luckily Nihal (who was to become my best friend for the rest of that day) was stood right next to me & grabbed me & gave me the most comforting hug I think I’ve ever received. She saw how shocked and upset & was & knew she had to do something about it, wherelse it felt like nobody else cared
I had no idea that I would be then be there until 8pm having the procedure done. my strip of hair was removed removed by Dr Apaydin about 40 minutes after a local anaesthetic was given to me which took about 30 mins. I then had to wait maybe another hour to see him again where he inserted hundreds of little holes into my scalp for the hairs to be inserted later on. I only know this cause I had to ask & at no stage was told during what was actually happening. That was the last time I saw dr Apaydin that day. The next 2 or so hours was waiting for a nurse to begin removing hairs from my donor strip of skin to prepare them for transplantation. Then finally at around 3pm they started implanting my hairs. They did this for around 4 hours with a 30 minute break. It was painful & I had to keep notifying them when the local anaesthetic wore off. All the while the nurses chatting away and joking to each other in Turkish. Never being informed of what was going on or how long this was going to take.
They finished at around 7.30pm & was taken into Leila’s office and told all the aftercare information. My paperwork had an amount of grafts written down that Leila seemed to think was wrong & so she rubbed it out & tapped away on a calculator and then wrote a larger number which was totally mad in my head and made no sense. Went from something like 2000+ to 3400 grafts.
We were then allowed to leave to make our own way back to the hotel with our bandages on our heads and bucket hats provided & we were given our medicines (anti biotics & painkillers & special medicated shampoo) & told to return at midday the next day for our head wash. We were also told explicitly to sleep on our backs and were given a kinda puppy pad to put on our pillows to soak up the blood. Fair enough as there was obviously a little bleeding.
We were told to return the next day to have our heads professionally shampooed; here’s one of the more shocking parts of the story: Dr Apaydin & Leila upon seeing me arrive the next day basically berated me & Dr Apaydin actually accused me of sabotaging the procedure. This was based purely on the thin bandage loosely tied around my head overnight had moved about an inch. Dr Apaydin became completely over the top rude with me and I was completely baffled and answered back saying why the hell would I want to ruin the procedure that I’d waited years for & spent thousands on. Leila was also rude and cold with me, like I was creating problems. Nihal the wonderful nurse was able to pacify me and tell me everything was fine and there was nothing wrong. The absolute unprofessional attitude of Apaydin and Leila was completely insane & made no sense as I was purely a paying customer who had already been messed around with the day before. I had been nothing but humble & eager to please and do what I was told all along but Apaydin & Leila made those 2 days 2 of the the worst of my life.
In the time between leaving Turkey and 4 months on I have gone above and beyond to turn this experience into what I hoped would be worth it in the end by immaculately looking after the grafts, following post procedure care guidelines to the letter and not stepping one foot outside what the paperwork says I should do in the days and weeks after the procedure. Now 4 months on I can clarify that I have been left with a faint wisp of perhaps 50 to 100 new hairs & significantly visible patches of no hair growth at all. (Bare in mind I had a “no shave procedure so in the photos I’ve uploaded any hair longer than a couple of centimetres is my original hair) It is clear to me that due to the administrative error on their side I was clearly rushed and they had to work late and use one nurse for 2 FUT procedures that day when it should have been one just for me, knowing friends that have had the same procedure in London had taken half the time mine did.
All I wanted for years and years was to have some new hair & I saved for years to afford the £2500.00 plus travel to have this done & I’m utterly disappointed with nearly every aspect of it & I would recommend strongly you do not initiate conversation with Dr Apaydin in this unprofessional manner of using WhatsApp (& yes I did try to confirm everything I was having done with him in advance via email but they were never replied to).
Save your money. Don’t go to Turkey, do not go to Dr Apaydin.
I would like to add to this review a mention of the nurse who showed first class quality in terms of treatment during & post procedure. This for me really starts & ends with a young nurse called Nihal. Nihal is the kind of professional employee that you would want to be cared for & helped by in any/every service in the world in every sector of work. Her hard work, empathy, exemplary customer service, kindness, professionalism & individual care is what we would all wish for in every aspect of our lives & I can honestly say in my 38 years I have never met a more inspiring employee in any profession ever. Her empathy & understanding of my individual needs were met by her exclusively & felt so lucky she was there to hug me when I was upset & understood why & made me feel an individual rather than just another transplantee on the never ending treadmill at Dr Apaydins clinic.
Coming to Dr Apaydin clinic in Istanbul was the culmination of more than 15 years of slow hair loss but 15 years of research & ambition of hoping one day in my life I would be able to afford the procedure that I’d wanted to have done since my early 20’s. (I’m now 38 having had the FUT procedure in December 2021)
In October 2021 I was finally in a financial position to persue my dream of a hair transplant & with the help of a friend who had also done lots of research we decided Dr Apaydin in Istanbul was the man for the job & my friend decided that he would like to also come along and persue his dream too of fixing his hairline so we both initiated our conversations with Dr Apaydin whos reputation & online reviews made him seem the perfect choice by a long way.
In my review I would like to post my honest experience of a man from London with insecurities about his receding hairline.
I feel as a man who has always tried to organise things in good detail & cross every T & dot every i that once the organisation began and the initial reaching out to the clinic in October that there were red flags appearing from the start.
My friend who I jointly had the procedure with was the first to reach out to the clinic using the WhatsApp direct contact option on the website to begin asking Dr Apaydin about possible dates, prices & gathering general information. That was all fine & then shortly after I was added to a WhatsApp group that included my friend, myself & dr Apaydin so we could discuss our treatments, organise the sending of photographs of our heads & getting quotes. This did get a little confusing and I would probably recommend generally a one on one contact rather than 3 people discussing different treatments & prices in the same group but generally dr Apaydin was reasonably quick to respond to questions initially & we were able to see fairly clearly a breakdown of individual pricing for each of us & most importantly what procedures we were agreeing to have & the amounts grafts/hairs that would be taken from & grafted onto our heads. We were told to make our flight reservations and give him the flight numbers before any confirmation of dates could be made which we did. Then things went a bit quiet for a little while. A very basic ‘don’t worry everything is booked in’ response after a few days. But with me wanting a more formal/official confirmation i decided to send a long email just making sure all the details were correct so I sent an email to the website address clarifying everything including what procedures we were having, costs, hotel details, airport transfer details, just lots of questions just to make sure we were all set and knew what was going to happen. This email was never responded to. Instead after a couple of weeks we were WhatsApped by our liaison Leila who started giving us basic details of our itinerary. This was sent on the 10th of December, around 13 days before our departure from London. The messages were informative and helpful I must say but some information could have been better displayed. There was confusing information about 3 different currencies being accepted, in dr Apaydin messages he’d said the price was in euros but then Leila told us that he also accepted pounds which could have been a pain to have exchanged all our pounds into euros. Then we were told that our pcr tests in Istanbul would be 300 Turkish lira each but then on the very day we arrived in turkey Leila changed the price and said it would now be 400 lira. I had to inform her that she had told us it was 300 on the 10th so she agreed to revert to the old price.
Leila told us that we would be met by someone at the airport at a particular exit and she sent a photo of what it would look like and what card they would be holding up for us to recognise them. We arrived and waited 25 minutes and saw no sign of these men so my friend telephoned Leila who answered by saying “who is this??”My friend telling her we’d arrived and we’d sent a photo of the area she told us to wait at and her reply was that she “couldn’t open her eyes” which was very odd & alarming. She said she would call him back shortly. About 5 minutes later we heard a man shout my friends name & only his name and told him to go and stand in a separate area. I obviously went with him. A few minutes later a different man came along and told us and 2 others to follow him to an area up an Escalator to a street with taxis and again wait there. My friend was then told to come with him and my friend had to tell him that we were together & must travel together. It was very disorganised & then once we were put into a taxi the taxi man didn’t know who we were or where we were going. Luckily I had the hotel address at hand on my phone and I had to hand the driver my phone so he could see where we were going. Then to my surprise I saw on my phone the journey was 1 hour & 30 minutes to the hotel. On arrival at the hotel things ran a little smoother & the receptionists had details of our stay. Our hotel rooms were nice and the area in which the hotel is in is also good & lt felt safe with plenty of shops and places to eat and drink so I add this to my positive feedback.
Leila WhatsApped us to tell us we were being collected at 7.30am to be taken to the clinic and to make sure we ate from the free breakfast buffet which opened at 7 at the hotel. A good selection if eating meat & cheese for breakfast is your thing but nothing there for vegans other than cucumber, olives & tomatoes & no cerial. But croissants and bread was available.
We first meet Leila outside the hotel at 7.30 and are taken a short taxi journey to the clinic.
The first thing that was done was a meeting in the office were our cash was taken and a brief lightly detailed description of what would happen shortly. One of the only questions I asked was if I would get consultation time with the dr and how long I would have, Leila said I would have maybe 20 minutes to half an hour which suited me as I really wanted to know what was going to happen & for him to understand why I was having the treatment done etc. We were taken into a room where we were to have our hair brushed and observered by Leila. I was disappointed by this as I was really hoping to meet dr Apaydin to see me as I was with my hair styled the way I like it and to talk over my hopes & so he could see what I looked like now and talk about my expectations etc. But this did not happen. Some photos of our hair were taken, combed in various ways then next we were put into our hospital gown and had to take off our shirts and shoes. Then we filled out some paperwork and then just waited in reception for maybe another half an hour. Things felt slow and staff were arriving in the first hour or 2 of our arrival.
I had to fill out some paperwork then just waited around again for a while, maybe another half an hour 40 mins sitting there just watching customers & staff arrive.
As I recall maybe 3 hours after arrival I was asked to come into main brightly lit photo room again but this time to meet dr Apaydin . I was very happy to see him & got up and broadly smiled at him & shook his hand. He immediately started putting his hands through my hair and straight away said “so we’ll be shaving everything off today” & before he could continue talking my eyes bulged wide & I interrupted in an upset way waving my hands saying No no no no we agreed I wasn’t having my hair shaved I’m having the non shave one done & starting upsettingly raising the volume and tone of my upset voice whilst grabbing my phone to show him all the photos of our WhatsApp conversation saying we were doing “no shave FUT” & photos of me with hats on where I’d been able to convince all my friends and family by combing over and hair spraying my hair that no one knew that I was going bald (& this is the truth, not denial, from barely acquaintances to long term close friends no one knew) & desperately showed him the confirmation on WhatsApp of me showing pictures of a previous client who had very similar hair to mine who had the no shave procedure & then in WhatsApp the doctor agreeing that he would do the no shave method. This created such a scene in the room as there were 5 or 6 nurses all witnessing this drama & what made me look like a bad customer. There was muttering in Turkish & a lot of angry and confused looks from the nurses & lots of chatter between doctor and one of the head nurses. Then a bit of silence as he looked at me and says “ok..I’ve made a mistake, we will do the fut no shave procedure” my elation was so emotional and from that point on I just wanted to get on with it. He drew a hairline on my head and I just agreed to it straight away. I was in a state of panic and didn’t want to start creating any more drama by adding anymore questions so I just agreed to whatever line he drew on. Then that was that but in reflection the hairline he drew on in pen was very high & still represents a receding hairline. He walked away (no sorry or anything) then I was taken into the operating room. This is where I broke down and started crying. Luckily Nihal (who was to become my best friend for the rest of that day) was stood right next to me & grabbed me & gave me the most comforting hug I think I’ve ever received. She saw how shocked and upset & was & knew she had to do something about it, wherelse it felt like nobody else cared
I had no idea that I would be then be there until 8pm having the procedure done. my strip of hair was removed removed by Dr Apaydin about 40 minutes after a local anaesthetic was given to me which took about 30 mins. I then had to wait maybe another hour to see him again where he inserted hundreds of little holes into my scalp for the hairs to be inserted later on. I only know this cause I had to ask & at no stage was told during what was actually happening. That was the last time I saw dr Apaydin that day. The next 2 or so hours was waiting for a nurse to begin removing hairs from my donor strip of skin to prepare them for transplantation. Then finally at around 3pm they started implanting my hairs. They did this for around 4 hours with a 30 minute break. It was painful & I had to keep notifying them when the local anaesthetic wore off. All the while the nurses chatting away and joking to each other in Turkish. Never being informed of what was going on or how long this was going to take.
They finished at around 7.30pm & was taken into Leila’s office and told all the aftercare information. My paperwork had an amount of grafts written down that Leila seemed to think was wrong & so she rubbed it out & tapped away on a calculator and then wrote a larger number which was totally mad in my head and made no sense. Went from something like 2000+ to 3400 grafts.
We were then allowed to leave to make our own way back to the hotel with our bandages on our heads and bucket hats provided & we were given our medicines (anti biotics & painkillers & special medicated shampoo) & told to return at midday the next day for our head wash. We were also told explicitly to sleep on our backs and were given a kinda puppy pad to put on our pillows to soak up the blood. Fair enough as there was obviously a little bleeding.
We were told to return the next day to have our heads professionally shampooed; here’s one of the more shocking parts of the story: Dr Apaydin & Leila upon seeing me arrive the next day basically berated me & Dr Apaydin actually accused me of sabotaging the procedure. This was based purely on the thin bandage loosely tied around my head overnight had moved about an inch. Dr Apaydin became completely over the top rude with me and I was completely baffled and answered back saying why the hell would I want to ruin the procedure that I’d waited years for & spent thousands on. Leila was also rude and cold with me, like I was creating problems. Nihal the wonderful nurse was able to pacify me and tell me everything was fine and there was nothing wrong. The absolute unprofessional attitude of Apaydin and Leila was completely insane & made no sense as I was purely a paying customer who had already been messed around with the day before. I had been nothing but humble & eager to please and do what I was told all along but Apaydin & Leila made those 2 days 2 of the the worst of my life.
In the time between leaving Turkey and 4 months on I have gone above and beyond to turn this experience into what I hoped would be worth it in the end by immaculately looking after the grafts, following post procedure care guidelines to the letter and not stepping one foot outside what the paperwork says I should do in the days and weeks after the procedure. Now 4 months on I can clarify that I have been left with a faint wisp of perhaps 50 to 100 new hairs & significantly visible patches of no hair growth at all. (Bare in mind I had a “no shave procedure so in the photos I’ve uploaded any hair longer than a couple of centimetres is my original hair) It is clear to me that due to the administrative error on their side I was clearly rushed and they had to work late and use one nurse for 2 FUT procedures that day when it should have been one just for me, knowing friends that have had the same procedure in London had taken half the time mine did.
All I wanted for years and years was to have some new hair & I saved for years to afford the £2500.00 plus travel to have this done & I’m utterly disappointed with nearly every aspect of it & I would recommend strongly you do not initiate conversation with Dr Apaydin in this unprofessional manner of using WhatsApp (& yes I did try to confirm everything I was having done with him in advance via email but they were never replied to).
Save your money. Don’t go to Turkey, do not go to Dr Apaydin.
I would like to add to this review a mention of the nurse who showed first class quality in terms of treatment during & post procedure. This for me really starts & ends with a young nurse called Nihal. Nihal is the kind of professional employee that you would want to be cared for & helped by in any/every service in the world in every sector of work. Her hard work, empathy, exemplary customer service, kindness, professionalism & individual care is what we would all wish for in every aspect of our lives & I can honestly say in my 38 years I have never met a more inspiring employee in any profession ever. Her empathy & understanding of my individual needs were met by her exclusively & felt so lucky she was there to hug me when I was upset & understood why & made me feel an individual rather than just another transplantee on the never ending treadmill at Dr Apaydins clinic.
Provider Review
