THE ART OF CHANGING WITH EXPERIENCE

My grandmother used to tell me that there are only two kinds of people who don’t change their opinion, and these are the crazy and the dead!!! Being a kid and totally inexperienced with life when she was telling me this, I couldn’t really realize what she was saying and what she meant.  But as I was growing up and I was adding experiences in my bag of knowledge I could only kneel to her grand and wise words. 

These words of hers came to mind again last week when I was talking with Dr. Stephanides about the various procedures performed at our office.  I was basically asking him what distinguishes a plastic surgeon from the next one down the street, or in a different state.  It seemed to me that a liposuction is a liposuction and a facelift a facelift from whichever angle you look at it.  And that’s when he started talking and opening up to all that he calls: “aces in his sleeve”.

He was basically explaining how he had done certain operations when he started off at Stanford University Medical Center, so many years ago, but that the procedures, with the “same name,” are now different.  Not meaning that a liposuction is no longer a liposuction … not at all.  What he was really saying is that plastic surgery is really a form of art, an evolution, and the surgeons get better and better with each time they go in the operating room.  A surgeon who loves what he does and is devoted to his patients will dedicate his life to improving each technique, both for the sake of the procedure itself, making it easier, smoother, safer and more efficient, but also for the sake of the patients, making the operations less painful, with a shorter down time and improved results.

I thought that this was really a natural process of progression in any profession … I couldn’t be more wrong!  Dr. Stephanides told me, and I must admit that at the end of our conversation I was utterly convinced, that since the goal of each plastic surgery procedure is to get the best possible results with the highest patient satisfaction, a surgeon needs to be flexible enough to tweak the traditional methodology in such a way as to raise the level of patient gratification and procedure outcome. He also said that of course there is a fine line between tweaking for improvement purposes and modifying so much that it actually becomes experimentation. 

Dr. Stephanides said that the traditional methods are wonderful, as a basis for starting with operations, but as knowledge accumulates over the years, each surgeon must tender to the needs of each individual patient and even though sticking to the traditional methods found in every plastic surgery textbook is safe, it seems that simply bringing “average” results is not the ultimate conclusion.  Flexibility is a must and being rigid to certain ways for the sake of the traditional methods is not desirable, for this will not bring ideal results.

             Summing up, it seems to me that the best way to go about deciding who will hold the scalpel while you are under anesthesia is by visiting and interviewing more than one surgeon … the same way you would act had you wanted to buy a dress!  You don’t simply try one … right?