A Medical Student’s Post on the Risks of Facial Plastic Surgery

I came across this by chance somewhere and reposted it. I had my nose done with septal cartilage.. After reading this, I feel so at a loss.. Sigh.. --------------------------------------------------- Since the post is long, to put it simply: Zygoma reduction surgery is almost always a failed operation (it doesn’t really work properly and the level is low). Nose surgery is also dangerous whether with silicone, Gore-Tex, or cartilage, and it eventually collapses later. Facial contouring is the kind of pointless thing even professors try to stop you from doing. Unless it is a surgery like incision double-eyelid surgery, do not do anything else. I myself once suffered because of a wrong double eyelid, but I am a female medical student whose face has been restored to its original state through revision surgery. For reference, I can confidently say that the people who know the most about plastic surgery information after plastic surgery specialists these days are “female medical students,” so if you know any, please ask them for advice. Now, onto the main point... You are planning to have facial surgery....... I am still only a third-year medical student.....just a raw beginner with so much left to learn, but I would like to offer a brief warning. Facial surgery is a huge project. It is an unimaginably risky surgery, and even as recently as five years ago, or even when I was only a first-year pre-med student, if seniors said that an ordinary person, not someone with a traffic accident injury or facial deformity, was going to have facial surgery, the professors would oppose it with tears in their eyes. In short, it is a surgery that has only very recently been performed for cosmetic purposes. In fact, a famous entertainer in her 30s even received consultation at our university hospital because of complications from this surgery. I am truly and sincerely worried about the many female celebrities who have undergone facial surgery. I do not know exactly what surgery you want, but are you thinking of zygoma or jaw surgery? Please look around and see whether among the people around you, there is anyone who has undergone any surgery other than incision double-eyelid surgery and has lived more than 10 years without any problems. No. Try looking for even someone who has had it for 5 years. Look for someone who is living an everyday life satisfactorily without any abnormal issues. Professor Gober Rhim, who is said to be the number one person in plastic surgery (at Johns Hopkins University), said at a 2005 conference, “In facial surgery, beauty is the second issue.” In reality, among doctors in our country, there are doctors but very few medical researchers, and research facilities are also poor. Sadly, there is no helping it, because after studying like mad and paying huge tuition for 15 years, they do not want to do research for low pay. I myself do not want to. Therefore, medical research and new development rely entirely on the West, especially the United States, Norway, and the United Kingdom. But unfortunately, in the West, cosmetic surgeries such as double-eyelid surgery and facial surgery are unpopular and progress is very slow. Nose surgery, liposuction, and breast augmentation are mainstream. Therefore, I think the development of facial surgery is not much different from what it was five years ago. I know a lot of things and have so much I want to say, but I cannot organize it properly. The conclusion is that it is still an operation whose results are not clear, and even if you do not get the result you like, unless it becomes an extreme situation that causes problems in life, compensation is thoroughly denied. And if there is no lawyer in your family, it is very hard to hire one, and even if you win, when you calculate the lawyer’s fees and the opportunity cost over time, in the end the damage falls on you. Lawyers know that medical malpractice cases are likely to add another blemish to their business card in the form of a loss, so it is obvious they will either refuse or demand enormous fees. Are you envious because celebrities become pretty? Thinking, “Why do they all get pretty and never fail, so what is there to worry about?”..... You must never think like that. Many failed celebrities have already been forgotten by us, and only the successful ones survive among today’s celebrities...... Please investigate how many people at the so-called P Plastic Surgery Clinic, which has an unrivaled position in facial surgery among Gangnam plastic surgery clinics, suffer facial deformity, paralysis symptoms, or even death in a year. Please also check how many facial-specialist plastic surgery clinics in Gangnam there are among the famous facial plastic surgery clinics that are not currently involved in lawsuits... And also look into how many medical malpractice lawsuits related to cosmetic medicine are filed at the country’s largest general hospitals. For reference, my medical school is also one of the so-called Big 5 medical schools, but two weeks ago, at our university hospital, a woman in her 20s lost consciousness and became paralyzed while undergoing jaw surgery by a professor, and although she woke up, she ended up with chronic facial paralysis, so for the rest of her life she can no longer smile with the right side of her face. (Similar to Nam Hee-seok.) Because the patient signed a consent form, meaning she had clearly been informed that side effects could occur, and because it was one surgery among many (of course, no medical surgery has a 0% side-effect rate), the final ruling was that our professor was not at fault. In reality, it was not the professor’s fault, but due to the patient’s own characteristics. In short, modern medical technology and the law cannot guarantee you anything. I make it clear that you may suffer for life under the pretext of a special constitution. Please, I beg you not to do it. Please understand how I feel for even adding this explanation. I cannot say this because of defamation, but among female entertainers there are not just one or two who are now walking a thorny path, and even if they succeed, there are countless people visiting hospitals because of side effects such as skin sagging and twitching muscles. Sigh....... You said, from reading the post below, that you are planning zygoma surgery and chin-tip surgery!!!!!!!!!!!!!!;; I didn’t see that and just vaguely thought you meant facial surgery, so I wrote that, but I really must try to stop you. Zygoma surgery is truly a surgery with no countermeasures. Ah, please. Zygoma surgery is the kind of surgery even those flashy celebrities do not easily do, or cannot do. No joke, more than 80% of the before-and-after photos for zygoma surgery on plastic surgery sites are virtual plastic surgery based on materials from the DREC Plastic Surgery Society at Johns Hopkins University. Expecting the skin to adhere so neatly after zygoma surgery without asymmetry is fraud, gambling, and the lottery. As for its risks.. no matter how much I say it, it would not be an exaggeration to call it an extremely dangerous surgery. If you make one wrong move and hit the brain incorrectly, it is a surgery that does not just cause side effects but ends with goodbye~earth! and it is a truly new surgery, having been performed for less than 10 years in exact terms. To compare with double-eyelid surgery in our country, to exaggerate a little, it is like going back to 1985 and having a complete-incision surgery at a university hospital, making it obviously conspicuous with a sausage-style outline double eyelid. If you really want to do it, then wait 10 years until the technology has developed more and there are no side effects on the skin. If you do zygoma surgery, maybe your cheekbones will look better, but the skin will sag very unsightly, it will hurt when you smile, the flesh will tremble, and sometimes when it gets cold or hot the area will turn bluish; I am confident that the likelihood of one or two of those side effects appearing within a year is more than about 50%. You know that if the skin changes, you look 10 years older!!! Moreover, in this case there is no external trauma and it is hard to prove that plastic surgery was the direct cause, so you cannot receive any compensation at all. Plastic surgeons will just say, “Your bones are properly attached and there’s no problem with your health, so go home.” and that’s the end of it. Once a patient’s complaint comes in, if they say, “It looks normal to me,” then there is no solution, you know. A 50% side-effect rate is murderous. Even a side-effect rate of only 1% or 0.5% is scary, so are you really going to bet your life on a half-and-half chance at such a young age? I have advised more than 50 people who wanted to have cosmetic surgery on their face, breasts, and so on, and stopped them. Since I am a medical student, the people who trusted me and did not go through with it... before I even earned my medical license, I am proud to say I have “saved 50 patients.” Even I do not know why this stays on my mind all day and why I stop people so obsessively. But as a former victim myself, I simply cannot let you go ahead with zygoma surgery, jaw surgery, and chin-tip surgery. Zygoma surgery is an operation that will inevitably bring side effects within a few years. Really, appearance is important in this world, but as you already know from having experienced failure, what is more precious than appearance begins to show itself after a failed plastic surgery. You cannot change the past by beating the ground and wondering why you did not know before. And even those precious things that were perfectly fine before surgery are destroyed one by one. It is something that even those who have devoted themselves to medicine for 15 years, up to 30 years or more, cannot judge precisely. I have studied medicine for less than 5 years, so I cannot dare define any one field. But if it were me, I would say that silicone and Gore-Tex surgery, which have only just passed 10 years, are still not at the stage of surgeries like hump nose correction, which are performed only after an appropriate period has passed and stability is guaranteed (about 30 years). In my view, celebrities likely receive continuous, subtle treatment during their hiatus. In short, even if you had nose surgery in our country, at most it has only been 4 or 5 years, no matter how long ago it was. No one knows what will happen 10 years later. Moreover, our country’s medical practice depends entirely on the United States, but the problem is that due to the differences in skeletal structure between Koreans and Westerners, the preferred cosmetic surgeries are completely opposite. In the West, double-eyelid surgery is almost never done, and nose surgery also develops in the direction of shaving the bone and removing a hump. Since the basic nose bone is large and high, they do not use other implants very much. Instead, body-contouring procedures such as liposuction, calf incision, and breast augmentation are the mainstream. By contrast, in East Asia, double-eyelid surgery and, rather than nose surgery, that is, surgeries to reduce the nose, surgeries to make the nose higher account for a much larger share, so implants are used. But if research is slow, it is impossible for implants to develop quickly. I think septal cartilage, that is, surgery using cartilage, will absolutely require revision surgery within about 3 years. In fact, among the people around me, there is not a single person who has endured more than 3 years with ear cartilage, septal cartilage, or costal cartilage, and even after 2 years the bridge of the nose collapses due to natural adhesion. Alloderm is an extremely new compound, so I am cautious about it. And osteotomy, rather than having side effects in itself, involves using another implant during the osteotomy, and when you think of nose surgery as including revision surgery, and even lifelong surgery, if you do not place the implant exactly in the same position as before, from that point on the bone structure and skin fail to adhere, making it very painful. Well..... personally, except for incision double-eyelid surgery, I honestly think that with modern technology, nose surgery, including revision surgery and even lifelong surgery because of skin aging and so on as time goes by, may have to be done until the day you die because it cannot harmonize with the body flexibly......... that is my opinion. Professors honestly seem so cautious about cosmetic surgery because of their social position that I feel they avoid answering. But when I talk with female seniors or read journals, I think true plastic surgery is like a land mine before it explodes. The writer’s post ends here.. As far as I know, because LASIK and LASEK and such surgeries have only been around for a few years, when the eyes age after surgery, they say it is impossible to predict what will happen. I once saw a post saying that in severe cases, it could even cause blindness.