- Just like real estate where the 3 most important aspects are location, location, and location, the most important aspect of looking for a plastic surgeon is experience, experience, and experience. In general, it takes 10 years before a plastic surgeon gets enough volume of cosmetic cases before they develop a mastery of those cases.
- Most patients will look at the doctor’s credentials, but not look critically at their gallery and their results. Look for certain flaws: are the areola is symmetric on breast lifts? Do you should really see an overall nice result? Do the noses really look great in all aspects or they are they just improved? Really inspect those results as they should be the surgeon’s best results and make sure that they align with your vision.
- When I look at other surgeon’s galleries, I look at tummy tucks for attention to detail and craftsmanship for the body and face respectively, and I look at breast lifts and rhinoplasty for art form. Generally, if the surgeon has irregular tummy tuck scars, then they overall will not have very good attention to detail.
- Make sure that they are board-certified in plastic surgery or facial plastic surgery. In the curve of life, you want to discriminate in this group as opposed to looking at a surgeon who is not board-certified in these specialties. For example, if you are looking at having breast or body work, you certainly do not want a facial plastic surgeon doing your surgery or a “cosmetic surgeon” with no particular training in aesthetic surgery performing any surgery.
- Read online reviews with a grain of salt. Any busy surgeon will have an occasional bad review despite best practices and results. I would be more suspicious of a surgeon who had all 5*reviews and not a single bad review.
The 5 biggest mistakes when searching for a plastic surgeon
