During the past decade, a recurring stamp was installed in the collective imagination when talking about health tourism. The one of platoons of Spaniards with bandaged heads boarding a plane from Istanbul Airport on their way home with the illusion of having been able to say goodbye to their alopecia. With the emergence of this type of travel, Turkey consolidated an international reputation as the birthplace of low-cost hair solutions. Meanwhile, countries like ours did it as a sort of El Dorado for their clinics, in the face of the massive arrival of bald men from our borders.
However, as tourism for hair aesthetics has been gaining weight, Spanish specialized centers have also done so by multiplying the number of them in the cities and paving the way in a dazzling way to become the new world reference for hair micrografts.
The binomial de higher quality results and the general drop in prices It has cemented a boom in this type of clinic in Spain that has made the “I prefer to wear it here” fashionable. A boom that, in short, has had its schism in times of pandemic for various reasons, as expressed from the union.
“Although until just three years ago it was a little-known surgery in Spain, now the cost is closely related to a technique that can be done by everyone,” says Jesús GarcÃa, responsible of the Spanish Society of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Therapy (Semeretec).
Compared to packages with a closed price of an operation in Turkey (travel included) that oscillate between 1,700 and 2,000 euros, Spain has substantially reduced the costs of this type of intervention. Specifically, of the nearly 10,000 euros that could be paid a little over five years ago, the figure is now between 2,700 and 3,000 euros, according to the clinics consulted.
One of the keys, as the Capilclinic manager, Pau Vilanova, assures is that “before it was billed by follicle and that changed the price”. Added to this factor is the arrival of innovative techniques in addition to the progressive recognition of” professionals with a much more proven preparation than in other places and umuch more demanding safety regulations”.
Among those avant-garde techniques that have gained acceptance in recent years, Vilanova mentions DHI or direct hair implantation as the most outstanding for results and time savings. The novelty here is that this direct implant of the extracted follicle is performed from the donor area one by one to the transplant area with a special pencil with a sapphire tip that allows to orient the direction, depth and aspect sought so you can see natural bad.
The fact is that Turkey also has this innovation, but, as Vilanova asserts, “the technique is only 10% important, while the most important thing is who does it”. A message that has permeated word of mouth, especially in the last year.
THE PUSH OF COVID
The health crisis has accelerated the demand for this type of intervention to the point that “before, we had waiting lists of around two weeks, and from this situation, we have three months in Barcelona and two in Madrid”.
They all agree on the same reasons that have generated this scenario. Among them, Javier MartÃnez Pascuas, hair surgeon at Corporación Capilar Madrid, who admits that with the arrival of the covid, interventions and treatments of this type in his clinic have increased by up to 30%, with a waiting list that reaches up to next April. On the one hand, he explains, “Mobility restrictions have affected this type of travel. But there is also the fact that many people have seen hair interventions as an alternative investment of money saved in the absence of leisure. Precisely these restrictions have meant that “people who now telework can have surgery and spend the postoperative period at home, without anyone noticing anything”, since the results begin to be evident after four months and “they can be isolated that time, only with the family”.
However, he also adds that spending more time at home and communicating by videoconference “has made them worry much more about the image.” In fact, the American videoconferencing company Higfive has carried out a study that concludes that almost 50% of Spaniards admit that they are more aware of their physical appearance than of the conversation itself during the connection.
A fact that reinforces the emerging scene of the sector described by MartÃnez himself when mentioning that, according to the world ranking of the specialty, Spain is the second most bald country in the world, with 42.6% of men suffering from alopecia.
Loss of apprehension towards hair surgery and its normalization Today it has made part of that percentage of men contemplate going to these clinics. And that has also benefited the advance of the FUE technique, which consists of extracting the follicular units one by one and which has replaced its invasive and crude predecessor, the FUSS (or strip technique, as the hair that is implanted is drawn from the back of the head into a strip of scalp).
On the other hand, the pre and postoperative phases have ended up gaining an essential weight when choosing. Espinosa Custodio, the doctor from the Prado Medical Institute clinic, believes that “little by little patients are realizing that the operation does not end everything and they need an assessment before and after, because the results are somewhat partial and the evolutions fundamental “.
The reality is that, according to account, “many times there is a commitment to a transplant when it is not necessary or recommended, especially in young boys, aged less than 30 years.”
For this reason, he underlines the importance of guaranteeing a specific program, such as the one carried out in his clinic, which counts scalp follicles, measures the thickness and ascertains whether surgery or hair medicine is required. In the latter case, it ensures that women are the ones who lead this type of treatment (up to 80%).
How these treatments are approached is also seen as an added value in Spain. GarcÃa gives an example of treatment with platelet-rich plasma, another novel technique that allows the use of growth factors present in the patient’s own blood to regenerate tissues. “In Spain it is legally qualified as a medicine, while in other countries it does not, so here it has to be done with a closed system and more expensive utensils compared to open equipment with risk of contamination “.
That rigor is, in his opinion, another of the axes by which Spain aims to be the new cradle of hair operations that has as a great challenge to conquer also international health tourism when it is reestablished. When this happens, “it will be the Turks who will come to Spain to show their hair,” he adds.
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