Mathieu Vigier Latour took his life after a botched beard operation in Turkey
A French student took his own life after undergoing a botched beard transplant in Turkey carried out by a real 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, which saw 4,000 grafts removed.
The student paid €1,300 for the operation in Istanbul
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 around lost 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 much misery.
‘When it started to grow out, it looked like a hedgehog, it was unmanageable,’ his father said in an interview with broadcaster BFM TV.
‘He was suffering, he wasn’t doing well. He was in pain, suffered from burns, and he couldn’t sleep.’
The ‘surgeon’ later turned out to be a real estate agent
Mathieu later researched the surgeon and found he was not a qualified surgeon at all but an estate agent moonlighting as one, the Telegraph reports.
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.
After falling into a deep depression, Mathieu later took his own life
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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