by Kevin Rands | May 15, 2016 5:07 am
HairlossTalk: Dr. Limmer, pleasure speaking with you today. Could you tell a little bit about the ISHRS, and about the upcoming conference in October?
Dr. Limmer: Pleasure speaking with you! This conference is led by the ISHRS and will have a pretty standard program for the meeting. The ISHRS is primarily an educational society. That’s our function. We exist to disseminate information about hair restoration, to encourage research and development, and to keep everyone in the field abreast of what’s going on in the world of hair restoration, both in a surgical sense, as well as restoring hair in a medical sense.
HairlossTalk: Yes we noticed that there will be some announcements at the conference related to new hair loss treatments as well. This is the 10th anniversary of the conference?
Dr. Limmer: This is the 10th anniversary, correct. The first meeting was in 1993, in Dallas, TX. One of the original founders was Dr. O’Tar Norwood, and he will be at this year’s conference as well. What it really did over the course of these 10 years, is that it pulled together sort of a loose network of practitioners around the world into a society where they could talk and exchange information. It has been very stimulating from the standpoint of moving the field forward. What happened at about the same time was the evolution toward progressively larger numbers of progressively smaller grafts. So it all kind of came together at one time, and it was a good time for things to happen.
HairlossTalk: Since this is the 10th anniversary meeting, is there anything unique going on?
Dr. Limmer: (laughs) Everybody wants to have the best program ever, and the best party schedule ever, but in reality, the meeting is still what it always has been, and that is an educational meeting for those who have an interest in the field, and and update meeting for everyone already in the field.
HairlossTalk: Are you familiar with information regarding new treatments or new technologies/discoveries to be presented at the conference?
Dr. Limmer: There are a number of research programs that are funded each year by the ISHRS. The individuals running those projects will be commenting on where they stand with their research, and what their tentative findings are. I can’t say that I am completely familiar with the entire presentation schedule, but there is some new information in regard to whether or not our theories were correct about donor dominance. We’ve always believed that the recipient area where you plant the hair has very little or nothing to do with how the hair grows. There is some new information out of the Oriental research group that indicates more of an influence by the recipient area than we’d first thought.
HairlossTalk: You are the creator of Follicular Unit Method, the benchmark for what nearly every hair transplant surgeon is doing today. You must have a lot of pride in your accomplishments…
Dr. Limmer: I’ve been in this field of work for quite some time, and it takes a long time to really know this field the way it should be known. When I look at what I know today, versus what I knew when I was in the field for only 5 or 10 years, its very very different. This field has lived on very extensive advertising … to sell a product … and perhaps, sometimes, the product was sold without the customer really needing the product. Sometimes the product was sold even in a way that didn’t exactly fit the customer. I’m glad to say that today’s product, whether you want to call it Total Micrografting or Follicular Unit Transplantation, has made transplantation both consistent and predictable in its results.
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