Student kills himself after botched beard transplant by estate agent
A French student took his own life after undergoing a botched beard transplant in Turkey carried out by an estate agent posing as a surgeon.
Mathieu Vigier Latour, 24, travelled to Istanbul in March for the transplant, which cost him just €1,300- five times less than the procedure costs in France.
The young Frenchman booked the procedure after seeing the clinic carried the stamp of approval from the Turkish ministry of health, his grieving father Jacques told French media.
But the procedure turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.
During the operation, in which 4,000 grafts were removed from the back of Mr Vigier Latour’s head and transferred to his face, the clinician lost around 1,000 of the grafts.
This caused Mathieu’s beard to grow in an irregular, poorly mapped fashion which saw hairs sprouting at unnatural angles across his face, causing him misery.
His dad told BFM TV: ‘When it started to grow out, it looked like a hedgehog, it was unmanageable.
‘He was suffering, he wasn’t doing well. He was in pain, suffered from burns, and he couldn’t sleep.’
Mathieu later researched the surgeon and found he was not qualified at all – he was an estate agent.
As a result of his botched operation, the student fell into a deep depression and suffered from a severe body dysmorphic disorder, a mental health condition which causes people to obsess about defects in their appearance.
His family later contacted a Belgian specialist who was attempting to correct the procedure, but told Mathieu his scalp would never recover the patch where the grafts had been lost.
‘He entered a vicious circle and couldn’t get out,’ his father said.
Three months after the initial operation, Mathieu took his own life at his student accommodation in Paris, the Telegraph reports.
His father is now campaigning to improve awareness about the risks of seemingly inexpensive health tourism.
He said it would be ‘a tribute to Mathieu’ if his son’s shocking experience could help prevent similar tragedies from happening again.
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