Dermatologist

Nineteen ninety-five [1995] you opened your office [in Chicago, Illinois], your practice--$$Seventy-five [1975].$$Nine- I'm sorry, '75 [1975], and then in '76 [1976], what gets you involved in hair transplants?$$Well, what got me involved in hair transplants, was that I think I heard the word (laughter). Somebody mentioned hair transplants, I said, "What, what?" And somehow that just grabbed my imagin- I mean, you can do that? And once I heard it, I wanted to do it. And I'm s- I got involved in doing it, so when I finished--now, I heard about it before I--my residency [at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois] was up, and they didn't offer that type of training during the residency, so when I finished, then I pursued it with some vigor. And then I said, ah, I'll give myself about ten years, I'll become the expert in hair transplants in black people. People will fly all over the world to see me, I'll be in Ebony magazine, and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. So, ten years later, I was an expert, and people were flying all over and I was in Ebony magazine back in--$$Just what you said would happen did happen. But tell me about the procedure, it was first done because you have what's called the Earle flaps [sic. Earles flap], but it was a Juri flap (simultaneous)?$$(Simultaneous) Yeah, well, you see there were two, there were two--there was a plastic surgeon whose name is Jose Juri, J-U-R-I, he's in, I think, in Argentina, and his brother, Carlos [ph.] I think. One was a (unclear)--I mean one is a plastic surgeon, and one was a dermatologist, and they created this, this piece of surgery I think a strip of hair from the side, and you can rotate it around, and put it on the front, and so it gives you a strip of hair around here. It was a fairly complicated procedure. And I had a friend of mine who was in Philadelphia [Pennsylvania], who was getting a hair transplant from a doctor in California, Newport Beach, Constantine Sparkle [ph.] was his name, who had been down to Argentina to learn this flap, amongst some other things. Now he had went and invented something called the scalp reduction, where you just cut out the bone there, your scalp, you throw it away, and pull the scalp together (gesture) like that. And you may do that serially (gesture); you may start off suppose this is--with this much bone (unclear), you cut out once, you got that much, you cut out again, that much, cut out again, you see, until it's gone--if the scalp will, you know, allow you to do that. And so, I would fly out with Harold Pierce [Harold E. Pierce], who's his name, in Philadelphia to, to see Dr. Sparkle do this procedure. And so when I had an opportunity, I did it on people, started off on my brother in law (laughter). And so I did that, and then I went out there one time and he was doing this, this Juri flap. I said, oh my god, not in my office will I do that (laughter), and I ended up doing it. And then, I addressed the problem of African American women who had their hair loss here (gesture) where people have and it's sort of--just sort of reverse Juri flap that works, that just simply hadn't been done. Nobody had considered doing it because people said, "Eh, there's nothing you can do about that," so.$$So, the Earle flap that you created is for women?$$Yeah, or anybody who has hair loss here (gesture). Who has hair loss here? African American women had the hair loss thing, so it's a flap of hair from here (gesture), and you lift it up, see, it's like this, you lift it up, and it goes there (gesture). So you could get full thickness of hair here, but you had to have some thickness of the hair here. If you have hair loss here, there's nothing to move, but you can take that from there, and put it in there, and it just changes the whole thing.$You were gonna talk about the mixing of the medicines for your hair care line [Dr. Earles] I believe, tell me about that.$$Yeah, what would happen was that I've always been a mixer of things and so--which is what goes on in dermatology, 'cause dermatologists have been mixing things for probably since the profession started. And so, I had always been very curious about mixing things and a lot of the prescriptions that I wrote were compounds. A dermatologist's only specialty in medicine when you can say take a little of this, pinch of that, quarter teaspoon of this, oh, add, and an eighth of a teaspoon of that, and mix it up and put it on. I mean you can't be a cardiologist and say take half of this pill and then a piece of that one (laughter). And so, as a result, now I got a lot of experience in that, seeing what would work and what wouldn't. And you see, you can do it, and as long as these are approved substances, you can put it on people. You see, that would be called experimentation, it's something else, but it's sort of like the art of medicine in dermatology. Now, there was one pharmacy in the City of Gary [Indiana] who could mix things, and he was slow, he was arrogant, and he was expensive, and people would take their prescriptions to him and he'd say, "Well, it's gonna be a week, and it's going to cost you, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah." "Oh my god, I need that stuff now," and they would complain to him, and then he would, he would say, he would reach in, or, "Here, take this back and take it somewhere else." And they would take the prescription and as they would turn to leave, he would say, "But you'll be back." And by god, they had to come back because he was the only one in Northwest Indiana that knew how to do that, they'd come back with their tail between their legs. They complained to me so bitterly, that I started, I said, oh, let me see, let me see. I had a major in (laughter) biology and chemistry, another major in pharmacology, oh, it's nothing to this. And I started mixing things and preparing them. And that led from--and then, in order to cut costs, then I said, oh, there's a 4 percent thing of this, why don't you just get thing and you know, the raw materials, and I started getting the raw materials, and I could weigh down the cost, but it also gave me a vehicle for creating things, and so that's how I got to creating different products.