an organization · United States of AmericaInternational Society of Hair Restoration Surgery

The international professional society for hair restoration surgeons, incorporated in 1993, run from Elgin, Illinois, and reporting 1,200 members across 80 countries. It publishes a Practice Census — a periodic questionnaire to its own members, from which it extrapolates worldwide procedure counts — and runs Fight the FIGHT, short for Fight the Fraudulent, Illicit, and Global Hair Transplants, which is the organised professional complaint about unlicensed hair-transplant work.

The census is the only number anyone has, and it is a number about the society's members.

From the 2025 census release: 59 per cent of members reported black-market clinics operating in their own cities in 2024, against 51 per cent in 2021. Repair cases arising from a previous black-market transplant averaged 10 per cent of a member's caseload in 2024, against 6 per cent in 2021. The census was run by an outside firm, Relevant Research of Evanston, Illinois, from participating physicians only, with a margin of error the society gives as plus or minus 5.4 per cent at 95 per cent confidence. The 2022 census, on the same method, drew 197 responses from 822 valid invitations — a 24 per cent response rate — extrapolated 703,183 procedures worldwide for 2021, and stated in its own text that the true number performed worldwide is unknown.

Inference — these are the society's claims, and this record reports them as such. A surgeon who repairs botched transplants sees botched transplants; a member answering about clinics in his own city is describing competitors. What the census measures is what a self-selected quarter of one society's membership reports, not what happened in the trade. It is still worth carrying, because there is no alternative: no state anywhere publishes a count of hair transplants performed, and none publishes a count of the ones that went wrong.

The complaint is a decade old and it named a country early. The society's release of 18 May 2016 warned that unqualified technicians were performing the surgery illegally, named Turkey through a surgeon practising in Istanbul, and reported Turkish technician groups working in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium under cover of licensed doctors. Fight the FIGHT launched on 1 November 2019; its standing statement is that "increasing numbers of unlicensed personnel worldwide are performing substantial medical aspects of hair restoration surgery", and it names no country and gives no figures. Operation Restore, running since 2004, has delivered over $653,400 in free corrective surgery to people the society describes as victims of botched work, and World Hair Transplant Repair Day fell on 11 November 2025. ISHRS President Conradin von Albertini put the allegation this way: "These fraudulent, illicit hair transplant clinics operate under the guise of an established medical practice, luring unsuspecting patients with false or misleading advertising, rock-bottom prices, and tempting travel packages."

The better corroboration is not the society's own. Türkiye's regulation on hair transplant units, in the Resmî Gazete of 6 May 2023, No. 32182, reserves the channel-opening stage of the operation to physicians holding the applicator certificate, forbids an assistant to work except under a certified physician, caps a certified physician at five rooms, and permits only one patient in a room at a time. Inference — a prohibition is written against a practice. The 2023 rules read as a list of what the society had been alleging since 2016, set out by the state where most of the alleged work is done, which is a stronger form of evidence than either a trade-press claim or a membership survey.

A membership society with an annual scientific meeting, a journal, position statements, and a census run for it by an outside research firm and published as a report and a press release. Fight the FIGHT is a standing public-awareness campaign rather than an enforcement mechanism: the society licenses nobody, inspects nobody and can strike nobody off. Its sanction is publication, and its repair arm is Operation Restore, which treats patients free.

As of 17 September 2026 the most recent census release is the 2025 one, reporting on 2024, and the Fight the FIGHT and consumer-alert pages carry dates through 30 January 2026.

A society's survey of its own members is a survey of its own members. This record carries the figures with that attached, every time.