• ANGEL G. PERIANES

Thursday, February 11, 2021 - 01:22

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  • DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION.

    The digitization of companies is the way, there is no other

  • AGROINDUSTRY.

    A more complex harvest for a 'gourmet' market

During the past decade, a recurring stamp was installed in the collective imagination when talking about health tourism.

The 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 kind of El Dorado for their clinics, before the massive arrival of bald men from our borders.

However, as tourism for hair aesthetics has gained weight, Spanish specialized centers have also done so by multiplying the number of them in cities and paving the way brilliantly until they become

the new world reference for micrografts of hair.

The combination

of higher quality results and the general drop in prices

has cemented a boom in these types of clinics 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 by the union.

"Although until only 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 García, head of the Spanish Society of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Therapy (Semeretec).

Compared to the packages with a fixed price of an operation in Turkey (travel included) that range

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 now ranges between 2,700 and 3,000 euros

, according to the clinics consulted.

One of the keys, as Capilclinic manager Pau Vilanova assures, is that "

before it was billed per follicle and that changed the price

."

To this factor has been added the arrival of innovative techniques as well as the progressive recognition of "professionals with a much more proven preparation than in other places and

much 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 implantation of the extracted follicle is carried out from the donor area one by one to the transplant area with a special pencil with a sapphire tip that

allows the direction, depth and desired aspect to be oriented

so that it looks more natural.

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 Martínez 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 the money saved due to lack of leisure

. Precisely those restrictions have fact 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 to being 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 Martínez himself when he mentioned that, according to the world ranking of the specialty,

Spain is the second country in the world with the most bald spots, with 42.6% of men suffering from alopecia.

The loss of apprehension towards hair surgery and its normalization

today has made part of that percentage of men contemplate going to these clinics.

And this has also benefited from the advancement 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, since 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 of the Prado Medical Institute clinic, believes that "little by little

patients are realizing that the operation does not end everything

and they need an evaluation 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.

García 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 whose

great challenge is also to conquer international health tourism when it is re-established

.

When this happens, "it will be the Turks who will come to Spain to get hair," he adds.

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