Dr. John Cole
Just like anywhere you look if you try doing Atlanta hair transplant research, you’ll find a few pioneers here and there. The problem is that most pioneers are not really pioneers, but Dr. John Cole of Forhair Clinic in Atlanta, Georgia is definitely a pioneer. In 2002, Dr. John Cole was one of only a few Atlanta hair transplant physicians that were performing FUT (strip surgery) on a daily basis but he was already producing some world class results. The internet was very different back then as there wasn’t much research to be done about hair transplant clinics outside of basic marketing filled national chain clinic websites. However, when Spencer Kobren of The Bald Truth started talking about FUE and Dr. Ray Woods, Dr. Cole listened and became very interested in this new approach to hair transplant surgery. Atlanta hair transplant surgery and the industry overall would never be the same.
Dr. Cole was literally at the forefront of the development of FUE. Dr. Woods was not sharing his methods so everyone that was interested in FUE at the time had to learn for themselves, from scratch, and Dr. Cole’s interest appeared to be stronger than everyone else’s at the time. He dove into research and development to find out how to perform FUE. By 2003, Dr. Cole not only figured out how to perform FUE, he was so convinced of it’s merits that he completely switched his clinic from performing any strip surgeries to performing FUE only. In fact, he was the first doctor in all of North America to do so, and maybe one of the first in the world aside from Dr. Woods. He’s been an FUE advocate and specialist ever since.
The two biggest contributions thus far have been the PCID motorized FUE system that allows for every parameter of graft coring to be controlled with high precision. The second, and largest, development has been the CIT punch handle, in use today in more quality clinics worldwide than any other FUE punch handle.
Dr. Cole used his previous experience in the Atlanta hair transplant market since 1990 in his drive to build new tools for his FUE endeavors. He was having a lot of success with his designs and eventually started the company Cole Instruments with the focus on research and development for all manner of hair transplant tools and supplies, regardless of procedure. These include the first tabletop refrigerated follicular unit graft holder which helps to keep a more consistent temperature environment for hair transplant grafts after they’re removed from the scalp. Dr. Cole invented the first handheld incision maker that literally counts each incision recipient site incision as they are made via an onboard computer in the handle.
I’ve personally known Dr. Cole since 2003 when I first started working in the industry. I remember emailing him just to say hello and to pick his brain. I remember he was very gracious with me from the start. Eventually we would meet for the first time in San Francisco at the ISHRS World Congress ten years later in 2013, and at several meetings since then. At times, Dr. Cole and I would butt heads on discussion forums but I always respected his surgical skill and his awareness of how patients cannot be treated in a cookie cutter fashion. This is one of the things that I’ve always really liked about Dr. Cole; he thinks outside of the box and tries to be creative when traditional approaches simply don’t work. This is the approach that allowed me to be repaired by Dr. Wong, and this same approach has helped hundreds if not thousands of patients of Dr. Cole. Body hair transplantation is a rarely discussed aspect of surgical hair restoration, mainly because it is so difficult to perform with any degree of consistency. However, Dr. John Cole was one of the first hair transplant surgeons in the world to offer body hair transplant procedures on a regular basis. Today, body hair transplantation is still a tricky procedure but part of the skillset in knowing how to perform BHT is also knowing when not to perform BHT.
Hair transplant repair work is another speciality of Atlanta hair transplant physician, Dr. Cole. In the video I present two beautiful donor scar repair cases but those were only a small sample of the repair cases I reviewed when I was researching his results. Again, Dr. Cole’s natural tendency for thinking outside of the box serves him and his repair patients well as many of his results are only possible because of unorthodox approaches to many problems repair patients face today.
From the time that I’ve known about Dr. Cole all the way to now, Dr. Cole has been a standout compared to other Atlanta hair transplant doctors as well as other doctors worldwide with regards to his hairline design skills. Because he was a master of strip surgery (FUT) for so long his team obviously has a strong skill set with regards to stereoscopic dissection using high powered microscopes. Of course this allows for only properly prepared single hair grafts to go into the hairline, as it should be, since this is the best and most accurate way to replicate nature. You can see it easily with Dr. Cole’s hairlines today, and even when you look back at his work from twenty years ago.
This is one of the primary reasons why I knew that Dr. Cole would be a good fit, but while researching through the pile of photos and information he sent to me, I learned more about the clinic and the man and this allowed me to happily, and easily, accept Dr. John Cole and the Forhair clinic as members of Hair Transplant Mentor™
You can check out his clinic and online results yourself at Forhair.com.
Dr. John Cole has passed my rigorous review process before being given Hair Transplant Mentor™ accepted member status. The review process is based on my own high standards based on over twenty years of working with world class clinics. Once accepted, every Hair Transplant Mentor™ member clinic pays a monthly retainer fee for membership and my services.