I’ll try to keep this review unemotional and without generalising it beyond my own experience of the treatment I underwent at Dr. Batra’s.
I had signed up for the year long hair loss treatment course at Dr. Batra’s clinic in Bangalore sometime in 2001 or 2002 (can’t recall exacty when) - I don’t how things have changed since then.
First, the good points: their clinics are neat, well-mentained and possess a pleasant ambience (at least the two branches in Bangalore that I visited). The staff and the doctors for the most part are well-mannered, polite and professional in their demeanor.
However, all that is just fluff to you if you’re not going to get what you pay for. In all fairness, there really isn’t any magically effective treatment for male pattern hair loss out there, so I won’t use their failure to treat my condition to trash everything they do. Also, they did not claim you would get hair on a bald pate or anything outrageous like that. My own case, in terms of the degree of hair loss, was rather mild, so that wasn’t a concern of mine. [Going a bit of the tangent here, having visited their website recently, I notice one of the photo testimonials they use for their hair loss programme show treatment of patchy hair loss which I believe is caused by fungus and is quite distinct from male pattern baldness; there are effective treatments of patchy baldness using conventional medical treatment. I think they should indicate that fact along with the photo; otherwise it seems like misleading advertisement - I expect most of the hair loss cases at Dr. Batra’s to be male pattern baldness-related.]
While I’m not going to argue here about the effectiveness of homeopathic treatment (or the lack thereof) in general or for hair losstreatment in particular, personally I can’t say I derived any benefitfrom my course at Dr. Batra’s.
However, the thing that I really disliked about them - and what actually prompted me to write this review - is their constant pestering that you commit yourself to another year (or two or three, if they could have their way) via telephone calls, or during your visits to their doctors, by the receptionists and even the doctors themselves, starting just from just a few months into your treatment. I did sign up (and pay) for a whole year the first time, because they claimed that it takes around 6 months for the treatment for excessive hair fall to stop, and their monthly payment programme was much costlier than the (already expensive) one-off year payment. The way I see it, if their treatment really was effective for the majority of their patients, they wouldn’t have to harrass them into extending it for longer periods. If the nature of the complaint was such that could be cured completely by their treatment, then why would the patient want to extend it? And if it was something like hair loss reversal where continuous long-term treatment might be needed, if the patient saw any really benefit from the programme, then he wouldn’t really need much convincing to extend his course for longer. This stark profitteering approach is what really put me off them the most; it gave me the impression that they were just a bunch of charlatans out to make big bucks. Although in the end, they managed to get me to extend my treatment for another year, but after about six more months without any real progress to my hair loss condition, I just stopped going for my monthly consultation.