The clinic
The physician and his team
A practitioner who operates on one patient a day, and four assistants who have worked alongside him for more than ten years.
The physician
Dr Fares Seffen
Dr Seffen's practice is devoted to hair restoration: fifteen years spent on a single discipline. It is a deliberate choice, in a field where transplantation is often one line among many.
He operates on one patient a day. That is the decision everything else rests on: it makes back-to-back procedures impossible, it leaves time to draw a hairline at the mirror without watching the clock, and it allows him to stay in theatre from the first graft to the last. There are no simultaneous procedures: only one case is open all day.
He personally performs the steps that decide the result: donor harvesting, recipient site creation and the design of the hairline. None of the three is delegated. The incisions in particular are made one by one, at the angle and in the direction proper to each area: it is that work, invisible in a photograph, that decides whether a result can be guessed at.
Beyond three thousand grafts, he prefers to spread the procedure over two days rather than lengthen a single session. A graft tolerates time outside the body poorly, and a team in its eleventh hour does not work as it did in the morning. That decision costs the patient a day and improves regrowth; it is taken in consultation, not at the last minute.
He also says no, and regularly: hair loss that has not yet found its pattern, a scalp disease still active, a patient too young, an expectation no operation can meet. A physician who accepts everyone has no opinion.
Background
Training and qualifications
- National doctorate in medicine, registered with the medical council (no. 19953)
- European inter-university diploma in the treatment of baldness
- University diploma in the anatomy of the superficial structures of the face applied to injection and volumisation techniques for aesthetic purposes, Université Côte d'Azur
- European inter-university diploma in medical lasers, Faculty of Medicine, Lyon
- Inter-university diploma in morphological and anti-ageing medicine, Paris XII
- Former resident in the hospitals of Tunis
- Former trainee in private hair transplant clinics in Lyon
- Chief physician of the Jugurtha hair transplant centre in Tunis since 2012
The team
Four assistants, and why that changes everything
A transplant lasts six to eight hours. Over that time, the result rests on the team as much as on the physician: they are the ones who prepare, sort and preserve the grafts while he harvests and makes the incisions, and the survival of every follicular unit depends on their hands as much as on his.
They have between ten and fourteen years of experience, all four of them, in this clinic. This is not a team reassembled each season, nor extra hands brought in for the day: they are the same people, full-time, for more than ten years. On work measured in tenths of a millimetre, that continuity is worth more than a recent qualification.
That time has given them a dexterity nothing else replaces. Sorting grafts under the microscope, telling a one-hair unit from a two-hair unit, setting aside a damaged follicle, keeping the whole batch hydrated and at temperature, all of it done quickly and without hesitation. Speed is not a matter of convenience: the longer a graft stays outside the body, the less it grows back.
They train at international congresses, alongside Dr Seffen, not by correspondence. What is on show there is hands at work: a way of holding forceps, a preservation protocol, a knack for implanting into scar tissue. They come back with technique, not with notes.
They are also used to patients from abroad, who make up most of the practice. The team is multilingual, it knows that a patient who has travelled alone from Paris or Montreal has nobody to help him the next day. They know how to welcome, explain and reassure in the patient's own language, which counts as much as technique on the day itself.
The follow-up over the months that come is organised the same way. Dr Seffen's team will answer, on +216 55 203 302 and at drseffen@gmail.com, from the first worry the next morning to the final review, and passes on to him what is his to decide. None of that shows in a result photograph, and it is what patients talk about most.
The place
The clinic
The practice is at Berges du Lac 2, in the business district of Tunis, about ten minutes from Tunis-Carthage airport. Two hotels stand alongside it, and the city's shopping centres are next door: a patient arriving from abroad has no journey to arrange on the morning of the procedure, and none to repeat the next day for the first dressing.
Procedures are carried out as day surgery, in a clean room approved for treatment under local anaesthesia, with the standards of hygiene and safety any medical procedure requires.
Your privacy matters as much as the rest. You have a private rest room with television, lavatory, Wi-Fi and a safe. Lunch is served there. You will not cross paths with anyone: there is only one patient in the clinic that day.
Associations
Member of the international learned societies
Have your case assessed
Send your photographs and receive a preliminary assessment and an estimated quote, prepared by Dr Seffen himself. Free, and without obligation.