New policies needed in cosmetic surgery practice

Wednesday August 23, 2006 ins: Cosmetic Surgery News Tag(s):

Technorati Tags: cosmetic surgery, cosmetic surgeon

The current situation in the cosmetic surgery practice is far from likable due to its harshness towards the consumers. The status quo calls for consumers or cosmetic surgery patients to play the role of an investigator --- prying over matters concerning plastic surgeons and their practices, their backgrounds and specialties --- and hope that they are making the right choices. If in case they fail to make the right decision, they are going to suffer the consequences through major complications and perhaps a series of corrective surgeries while the unqualified physician --- usually an uncertified surgeon --- who caused all the trouble can get away with it. Isn’t that just a lovely setup?

Kerri O’Reilly’s terrible experience, which was chronicled in Dayton Daily, is enough to get us all alarmed with the present scenario. O’Reilly is a picture of a regular cosmetic surgery patient who hoped that her cosmetic surgeon would aid in alleviating her dilemma. What happened was the opposite. Aside from the fact the she woke up during her breast reduction surgery and had complications, she is now facing at least two more surgeries to correct the previous operation. What happened to her surgeon? Dr. Terri Savage looks like she got away with it, leaving O’Reilly with scars that will never heal.

Who’s to blame? Well, O’Reilly has her mistakes of course. She could have been more careful. She could have done a thorough research about Savage and did not believe her friend’s success story. She could have done everything in order to prevent her from going through all this pain. She could have. But isn’t this something that somebody else aside from O’Reilly should have also checked? Is it O’Reilly’s entire fault to believe that Savage was really a board-certified plastic surgeon in this area of practice? Or there should have been some third party who prevented Savage from being able to perform any type of operation outside her expertise?

These are tough questions to ask as of the meantime especially when the current policies and guidelines in the cosmetic surgery practice cannot provide the right answers that would benefit the consumers. Right at this very moment, the burden lies on the shoulders of the patients. They should be thorough in selecting their cosmetic surgeons for their safety and for the success of any procedure they plan to undergo. Otherwise, they will be the ones taking all the mistakes of an incompetent surgeon who might even put their life on the line.

This definitely doesn’t sound like a great setup but as of the meantime, the consumers have no choice. They need to do this or else. This is how the present system operates. And this will always be the case unless something is done in order to rectify the flaws and make the policies and guidelines more consumer-friendly.

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Very timely piece

Thank you so much for highlighting this area where organized medicine has not caught up to the reality on the ground. Expect to see more & more of these cases where Plastic Surgeon pretenders cause publicized complications. I've written several articles on this at my blog Plastic Surgery 101 (http://plasticsurgery101.blogspot.com/)

Related entries:

http://plasticsurgery101.blogspot.com/2006/08/ent-earnose-thighlifts-nailed-by.html

http://plasticsurgery101.blogspot.com/2006/08/monster-in-munster-very-painful.html

http://plasticsurgery101.blogspot.com/2006/08/back-alley-liposuction-death.html

http://plasticsurgery101.blogspot.com/2006/07/regulating-medi-spas-and-office.html

http://plasticsurgery101.blogspot.com/2005/12/whos-plastic-surgeon-and-who-is-not.html

Dr. Oliver at 12:11am on Aug 26, 2006

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