Piotr Turkowski, MD, PhD

I received my medical degree in Poznań in 2012. A year later, I attended a European workshop on the FUE method; I had read that something new was emerging in Europe, and I wanted to see it before it became the standard. Those conversations and meetings with pioneers in the field determined what I would go on to focus on in my career.

Zawsze szedłem tam, gdzie było ciekawiej — i za każdym razem okazywało się, że to była właściwa decyzja. Od tamtej pory minęło trzynaście lat, podczas których wykonałem ponad tysiąc przeszczepów włosów.

In my practice, an individual approach and complete honesty with the patient are paramount. Before taking any action, we begin by calculating exactly how much donor hair you have available and discussing what your hair loss might look like ten or twenty years down the line. There are times when I advise against a procedure or suggest a smaller one than the patient expected—because a surgeon who doesn’t perform these calculations isn’t planning for your hair’s future; they are merely planning a single procedure.

You cannot learn the skills required for hair surgery just by reading about them. You have to stand next to someone who does it better—and watch their hands. I did this consistently, several times a year, for over a decade:

In October 2025, the 33rd ISHRS World Congress took place in Berlin—the most significant annual gathering of hair restoration surgeons globally, bringing together several hundred physicians from dozens of countries. I was invited to moderate two key scientific sessions there:

A session on scarring alopecia: A panel dedicated to the most challenging category in the entire field, in which the hair follicle is permanently destroyed by an inflammatory process (such as lichen planopilaris or discoid lupus erythematosus). I co-chaired the session with Dr. Nina Otberg from Germany, and the panel included experts from Kuwait, Brazil, Egypt, and Spain—among them the congress’s guest of honor, Dr. David Saceda.

Session featuring the congress’s honorary lectures: I chaired a particularly prestigious session, which included the two most significant named lectures within this organization—the Norwood Lectureship and the Stough Lectureship. These lectures were delivered by Prof. Ulrike Blume-Peytavi from Charité in Berlin and Prof. Leslie Castelo-Soccio from the United States.

At the same congress, I also presented two papers of my own, based entirely on clinical data from my patients: one concerning the relationship between the degree of hair loss and the outcome of a hair transplant, and the other on hair transplantation into a scar resulting from an autoimmune disease.

On September 7, 2026, the book “Hair transplantation from an interdisciplinary perspective: patient selection, standards, and techniques “. Scientific editors: Piotr Turkowski, MD, PhD, and Katarzyna Osipowicz, MD, PhD (habilitation). Hardcover, 382 pages. Publisher: PZWL Medical Publishing.

While the name of the publisher might not mean much to a patient, in the medical world, PZWL is the oldest and most significant publishing house in Poland—active since 1945—whose textbooks are used by Polish doctors throughout their entire medical education and specialization training. When a doctor says, “I got this from PZWL,” it signifies the established standard.

Until now, there simply hasn’t been a book like this on hair transplantation in Poland. Serving as “scientific editors” meant that the publisher entrusted us with the design of the entire book—from determining its content to selecting the authors for its individual sections. When PZWL decided to publish the first Polish textbook on this subject, they turned to us.

The standards according to which you will undergo surgery are the exact same principles that we have outlined for the rest of the medical community.

Together with Dr. Katarzyna Osipowicz, we run our own clinical research center at our clinic in Warsaw.

The OT.CO clinic is listed as an official research center in the ClinicalTrials.gov registry, maintained by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Thirteen of our clinical trials—all in phase II or III—are registered there; in total, we have conducted twenty-five such studies. We work for Pfizer, AbbVie, Amgen, Sun Pharma, and Concert Pharmaceuticals.

We are responsible for the documentation, procedures, and results, and it is us who are subject to oversight by sponsor auditors and inspectors. Six of these clinical trials concern alopecia areata. In recent years, the first medications capable of truly restoring hair growth in this condition have emerged—and our center has participated in the clinical trials for each of them.

Two of these clinical trials involve children from the age of six. Globally, pediatric clinical trials are entrusted to only a select few centers, as they demand the highest level of confidence in the quality of documentation. Furthermore, we are among the centers with the highest patient recruitment rates worldwide for this particular indication. For patients, this means that some individuals—once qualified—may be able to participate in an ongoing trial and receive, at no cost, a therapy that is not yet commercially available in Poland.

Hair loss lies at the intersection of two specialties. A dermatologist understands the condition, while a surgeon understands the procedure—yet the patient often finds themselves shuttling between the two, receiving two different opinions.

Katarzyna Osipowicz, PhD, MD, is a dermatologist, venereologist, and trichologist. She has authored over fifty scientific publications, holds a doctoral degree from the Medical University of Warsaw, and earned her habilitation based, in part, on research into the innovative use of hair transplantation for scarring caused by lichen planus. She received training from some of the world’s leading authorities in dermatology, including Professor Rodney Sinclair in Melbourne, Professor Dedee Murrell in Sydney, and Professor Cristina Has in Freiburg.

In our private lives, we are a married couple. Professionally, we run a clinic and a clinical research center together, and we serve as the scientific editors for a textbook published by PZWL.

The clinic is supported by a broad team of professionals: dermatologists, trichologists, over a dozen nurses, an anesthesiology team, clinical trial coordinators, and an epidemiologist. This means that diagnostics, treatment, and surgery are all available in one place, provided by people who communicate with each other on a daily basis. Kasia performs hair transplants herself, but she refers the most advanced and challenging cases to me.

A surgeon who works without a dermatologist sees an empty space to be filled. A surgeon who works with a dermatologist sees the underlying cause.

I completed my specialization in two completely different worlds, and I consider this one of the most significant experiences of my professional career.
I spent three years at the Specialist Medical Center in Polanica-Zdrój—home to the oldest plastic surgery department in Poland, which for decades served as a training ground for the profession. There, one learns things that cannot be taught in a private clinic: reconstruction following trauma or cancer, the management of complex wounds, and cases that require choosing the “least bad” option. I spent another three years at the Plastic Surgery Clinic of the Centre of Postgraduate Medical Education in Warsaw, under the guidance of Professor Bartłomiej Noszczyk.

Over the course of my six-year residency, I performed more than a thousand surgeries—the highest number among all the residents at my institution. It is the number of operations performed, not the number of years spent working, that builds a surgeon’s skill. During that time, I learned things that cannot be found in any textbook: how tissue behaves, what to do when things don’t go according to plan, where the limits lie, and—crucially—how to avoid rushing when such moments arise.

Along the way, there was also a six-week stint at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan, in the department of reconstructive surgery and microsurgery—one of the best in the world. It is a place where one learns a level of precision that is entirely invisible in the final aesthetic result; it only becomes apparent when it is missing. A surgeon trained in microsurgery approaches tissue differently: with greater delicacy, more restraint, and a constant focus on blood supply. In hair transplantation, where the work involves structures thinner than a millimeter, this is no mere detail.

There are excellent surgeons working in Turkey—I met one of them, Dr. Koray Erdogan, twelve years ago, and I hold him in high regard. The problem lies elsewhere.

When you book a package that includes a hotel and airport transfers, you often don’t end up with a top-tier surgeon. Instead, you find yourself in a clinic where the doctor simply marks the hairline and then leaves, while the rest of the procedure is carried out by technicians with no medical training. The issue isn’t that a team performs the procedure—teams are involved everywhere—but rather that the doctor is not actually present in the room.

The second point is more important. A transplant doesn’t end on the day of the procedure; it concludes twelve months later. If your surgeon is two thousand kilometers away by then, you’re left to deal with it on your own.

And the third, most painful point: you have only one donor area. If it is thinned out too aggressively, there is no way to fix it.

You don’t have to leave Poland to find world-class standards. I spent twelve years traveling abroad in search of them—so that you wouldn’t have to.

Hair loss almost never hurts. It simply takes things away, piece by piece.
At first, you stop liking photos taken from above. Then, you start sitting with your back to the window, because the light is more forgiving there. You buy a hat—one that you end up wearing even when you’re indoors. And at some point, you realize that you’re thinking about it every single day—not in a dramatic way, just as a constant, background presence.

No one will tell you that this is important. In fact, you keep telling yourself that it’s nonsense. But that doesn’t change the fact that it concerns you—and that no one else has to live with it.

For twelve years, I’ve talked about this with a great many people. I have yet to meet anyone who came because of their hair. Everyone comes for the same reason—to stop thinking about it.

The best result from a hair transplant isn’t about having more hair. It’s about reaching a point, a year later, where you can no longer remember the last time you even thought about your hair.

We begin with a consultation and trichoscopy—an examination of the scalp under high magnification. We will assess the condition of the hair follicles, the density of the donor area, and the underlying cause of the problem.

You set aside one hour—an hour that saves you years of wondering. You get a clear answer: whether the procedure makes sense, which technique will be used, how the hairline will be designed, and what you can realistically expect. No empty promises, and no pressure to undergo procedures you don’t need.