Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Alan J. Bauman, MD. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alan J., appreciate you joining us today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

Changing lives through hair restoration for more than 25 years has been an incredible journey and a blessing each and every day. I’m often asked how I became interested in the field of hair transplant surgery–it was definitely a winding path, but there are a few key experiences that were critical in my path.

Looking back, watching my Dad struggle with losing his hair while I was a teenager taught me a lot about how hair affects someone. I liked my own hair and I didn’t want to lose it like my dad and his dad, but I didn’t know what if anything could be done.
At a young age, I knew I wanted to go to medical school and I was lucky during my teenage years to have an early mentor who was a plastic surgeon. Being a hair transplant surgeon was not on my radar at all.

It wasn’t until I was many years into my medical training while pursuing training in plastic & reconstructive surgery did I realize how natural a hair transplant could be and also how psychologically impactful it was to have your hair restored.
It was during my surgical training while on my laser-focused path toward plastic and cosmetic surgery in the 1990s, that I met a hair transplant patient for the first time. I was unable to tell he had had his hairline restored–it looked completely natural (not pluggy or otherwise strange, as I had expected). He was ecstatic that I couldn’t tell that he had had a transplant and he went on to describe the microsurgical process of single follicle implantation in layman’s terms and I was intrigued. Then, after he told me how hair restoration changed his life for the better both professionally and socially, I began to understand how powerful a hair restoration procedure could be. It was that brief 15-minute conversation that prompted me to take a look at hair restoration treatments and procedures more closely and see if this was a skill set I might want to add to my “cosmetic” armamentarium.
If I had not had that brief interaction, had our paths not crossed that day, I may not have eventually done such a deep dive into the world of hair transplants and realized that the entire field of hair restoration was undergoing a complete revolution in terms of techniques and technology. From that day, I looked into textbooks, journal articles, conferences, live surgery workshops, and other training in hair restoration that eventually led me down the path of specialization–the more I looked, the more I learned, and the more I became interested in the field and eventually sought out a preceptorship program in hair transplantation.

Now, more than 25 years later, the exciting thing about each and every day is seeing our patients’ lives transformed for the better. Restoring someone’s hair gives a rejuvenation, not just of the frame of the face, but also someone’s soul and a boost of wellbeing. My team and I are focused each and every day on providing advanced treatments, exceptional results, and the ultimate hair restoration experience. It is our mission to continue to change the lives of those who are struggling with scalp health or hair loss issues by providing state-of-the-art solutions in hair restoration.

Alan J., before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve been blessed to be able to help men and women from all across the globe who have come from all stations in life, including actors, heads of state, entertainers, CEOs, professional athletes, including performing pro bono work on military vets, accident and cancer survivors, but no one patient meant more to me than the hair transplant work I did for my dad to help him restore a full head of hair from near-complete male pattern hair loss.

Have you ever had to pivot?

How the practice coped with the pandemic shutdown and restart: It was March 20th, my birthday actually, when Florida Gov Ron DeSantis signed and issued his executive order restricting elective procedures in Florida. Immediately, we began to unwind the surgical schedule, canceling hair transplants and regenerative hair regrowth procedures like PRP, PDOgro, and others to comply. In examining the executive order’s expiration date (8 weeks in the future) we made an initial plan to maintain all employees’ compensation. We virtualized all administrators and we rotated the clinical staff for the allowable medically necessary post-procedure follow-ups and servicing appointments for medical-grade hair and scalp prosthetics. We immediately increased our outreach frequency: increasing my personal email updates to the patient database, generating call lists of patients for my team to place check-up calls, and increasing the amount of personally recorded video content about our facility upgrades which included NASA-grade air filtration, UV sterilization, disinfection protocols and implementation of other safety guidelines to keep our patients and team healthy. We were optimistic that we would be able to resume surgical procedures when the executive order was lifted, but we didn’t know exactly when that would be. In the meantime, we went to work developing a more robust virtual consultation protocol through our TeleHair.net website as well as new at-home treatment options like the Virtual PRP Kit so patients would have an at-home option if they could not come into the office for their recommended PRP treatment. The Virtual PRP Kit was based on a successfully studied in-office treatment using stem cell-derived growth factors along with microneedling on the scalp we had performed about a year prior to the pandemic. We included the powerful FDA-cleared Turbo LaserCap for hair growth and a unique stem cell supplement that has been scientifically shown to release stem cells from the bone marrow into your circulation.

Thankfully, we were able to resume operations, slowly and carefully at first, when the executive order was lifted.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Someone once said “success is built from a series of small consistent efforts over time” and for my practice, this was certainly the case. We started in a modest office with one procedure room, no full-time team, no referral sources, no patients, no advertising budget… just a vision and a mission to help those struggling with hair loss (oh yeah, and also the confidence that we were using the state-of-the-art techniques!) In those early days, my wife Karen answered the phone and I met with the patients. Yes, I built a website, built a referral network, but my “reputation” was truly built by word-of-mouth, and that was no easy task. We had to make sure every single patient, to the best of our ability, had an exceptional experience and a quality result. One by one, consult after consult, procedure after procedure, we stayed focused on this goal. Over the years, the practice has been blessed by numerous industry awards and consistent interest from the media regarding breakthroughs in technology in hair restoration and our patient’s stories, but our main source of patients has been (and always will be) word of mouth. Patients were sharing their experiences–mostly privately, but sometimes publicly too–about their advanced procedures and their life-changing results.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.baumanmedical.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baumanmedical/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/baumanmedical
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/380395/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Transplant_Hair
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/alanbauman
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/bauman-medical-group-boca-raton-2