the selection of a surgeon is really a complicated and somewhat daunting process today for many reasons. first of all medicine is becoming more and more specialized. there are more and more subdivisions within given specialties and within those subdivisions there even further subdivisions so you have to not only be in the right church you have to be in the right pew. you want to be in the right place. compounding it is the fact that there’s a little bit of blurring of specialty lines. one is not prohibited by law from migrating from one’s specialty into one of the 4 cosmetic surgery specialties. basically there are 4 recognized specialties that perform cosmetic surgery plastic surgery which is cosmetic surgery all over the body; head and neck surgeons who perform the cosmetic surgery only of the face and neck; dermatologists who perform skin peeling and other and liposuction and again procedures on the skin and then ophthalmologists these are eye specialists who further specialize just in the reconstructive and cosmetic surgery of the eyelids. so you have a lot of different participants in the delivery system and the question is how do you pick which one and that’s where you’ve got to do some homework. not every ophthalmologist for example has had additional training to be an excellent eyelid cosmetic surgeon and not every dermatologist has had the additional training or experience to be a world class chemical skin peeler to remove wrinkles. not every plastic surgeon is good at both breast augmentation and nose jobs which are operations in two different arenas. so you’ve got to be armed with questions so that you can ferret out who really is most appropriate and the answer comes with how specialized are you doctor? now in the world of cosmetic surgery if you have a choice between a plastic surgeon an ophthalmologist a dermatologist or a head and neck surgeon you need to find out what each of those doctors majors in. for example head and neck surgeon may major in nose jobs and do more nose jobs than say face lifts or eyelid surgery. on the other hand across the street is an ophthalmologist that does eyelid surgery exclusively. so if you needed to have an eyelid surgery example you’d be very well served by going to that eye surgeon who only does eyelids. maybe by some of the other doctors but you’d feel more comfortable being in the hands of the most specialized. so how do you ascertain that? you ask the doctor’s training and then you ask what i think is probably the key question that most people don’t ask. did you have a fellowship in cosmetic surgery? fellowships are the finishing school of the world of cosmetic surgery and by the way fellowships exist in other specialties. the fellowship is the practical training in a very narrow sphere of cosmetic surgery because cosmetic surgery is really a well defined world unto itself. it’s a limited number of procedures. it’s everything from face lifts and forehead lifts all the way to tummy tucks and breast surgery and necks in between. so my advice is to find the doctor that has trained the longest and strongest meaning that additional training and that’s voluntary and strong meaning they are very focused on what they do. the best most accomplished most talented surgeons the ones that you and i would like to go to typically are the ones that are the most specialized.
how can i find the best surgeon for my procedure?