News that a Chicago Bears former linebacker is taking a hair loss clinic to court for falsely claiming responsibility for his hair transplant caught our eye, we take a closer look.
Difficult Beginnings
It is a huge challenge to convince an audience that your clinic is capable and to be trusted when it comes to treating your hair loss. You have to overcome the natural caution that will have been built up by any potential client who has been trawling the web for research. They will have found many unhappy accounts of fortunes spent to achieve nothing, or even to have spent a fortune to be left in a worse position than when they started… a hair transplant that did not settle properly, that leaves the client with a terrible choice of shocking looking hair or shaving it down and exposing the scars left when the surgeon harvested the follicles for transplantation.
To get that wary candidate to pick up the phone and call your clinic, never mind getting them through the door, takes a compelling website with a convincing story. A story that addresses the clinic’s experience and evidences many successful treatments with a gallery of before and after shots.
But what about a new clinic? How are they meant to prove their qualifications? It used to be enough to describe the qualifications of your surgeon, but that no longer seems to be the case – understandably as every one of those horror stories was inflicted on the client by a qualified surgeon. A new clinic has no choice but to spend heavily on advertising and to lead on price… over time they will build up the client base to provide proof of their abilities. It can be a long process but it is the only acceptable and ethical way to build the brand.
The same is true, maybe more so, for Scalp Micropigmentation clinics. A relatively young industry, even compared to hair transplants, it has a steady stream of “newly qualified” practitioners joining the fray. Some are trained in-house by the established clinics, others sign up to dodgy on-line training and receive their certificate by email a few weeks later.
All too often there are clinics, transplant and SMP, who decide to take short cuts. The most obvious of which is to steal before and after pictures from your established competition and post them on your site as your own work… it does usually require you to embellish your experience and training too – or else how do you explain having only just opened your doors but demonstrating such a depth of experience.
Angry Bear
Brian Urlacher is a Chicago legend. He served the local football team for a full decade as a linebacker winning defensive player of the year in 2005 and being selected to appear in no less than eight Pro Bowls. Following his retirement from the game in 2013 not much was seen of Urlacher, but he returned to the public eye three years later with an impressive head of hair, impressive at least when compared to the famous image of him as a clean shaved pro bowler.
The company responsible for the work, Restore Hair, understandably signed him up as an official spokesperson. All of which makes the approach of the Charles Medical Group in Boca Raton more surprising. Maybe they thought they could fly under the radar and get away with claiming the work as theirs. The claim was made in a blog post which discussed how he “came by his full head of hair”. This could have been written off by senior management as a simple misunderstanding on the part of their writer but there was another more sinister element to what they did. It was discovered that Urlacher’s name had been inserted into their website’s source code more than a dozen times in the hope of intercepting the traffic of people searching for his hair loss story… they even advertised special rates for people in Chicago willing to make the trip to Baco Raton for their treatment.
Suffice to say Urlacher is taking the same approach to Charles Medical as he took to his opponents on the field, well, almost. But he is taking them to court for the princely sum of $200,000. Good luck to him we say! For the record, it would seem the surgeon did a pretty good job on Mr Urlacher, we’re just not sure he didn’t look better before. SMP would, in our humble opinion, have been a preferable option… its not too late of course.
HIS Hair Clinic
The problem of other clinics stealing our content has been an issue for us almost from the beginning. Right at the beginning there was only us, as inventors and developers of Scalp Micropigmentation we were, for a while, the only provider. But almost as soon as there was competition the problem appeared. Often it is our client getting in touch, asking why their picture is appearing elsewhere (sometimes thinking that we might actually be in cahoots with the clinic who has done the stealing). Not everyone has pockets deep enough to sue, and HIS do not have the resources to police the web world of SMP these days, given its size. But if notified we do go after the clinics concerned to make them remove our material.
It points to a world where it is still necessary to perform your due diligence carefully. If you want to be confident you are in the safe hands of experience friendly professionals with your best interests at heart then complete the contact form at the side of the page to set up a free consultation. Or click here to find your nearest HIS Hair clinic.
