14 DAY TRIAL // A recent report revealed that cosmetic interventions, whether Botox, fillers or actual surgery for cosmetic purposes, were becoming a part of the daily beauty routine of many women – and even gents. In a context in which cosmetic surgery is a multi-million dollar flourishing industry, many of the interventions done in a single year are not even new procedures, but rather redoes, surgeons say for the Las Vegas Review Journal.
Pressure to look a certain way dictates the need for cosmetic surgery. Since procedures are becoming more accessible to the general public, more and more turn to it to correct certain flaws or, most often, to fight back the signs of time. However, not all those who get surgery can actually afford it, which forces them to go shopping for the cheapest doctor, perhaps not realizing that they will be stuck for the results of the intervention for life – or at least for half a year, if they’re really lucky.
Because of the phenomenon of “surgery shopping,” people choose to go to unscrupulous doctors or even to travel abroad to get work done because it’s cheaper. Not few are the situations in which they end up with the most disastrous results, which require further interventions to fix it. This latter type of intervention is known as “redo” and it accounts, one surgeon estimates, for about 10 percent of all interventions. Of course, its exact number is not known because doctors don’t declare surgeries as new or redoes.
“Sometimes what has been done to patients actually astounds me. Unfortunately, people will go out and simply price shop for surgery, and then the next thing you know they’re spending two to three times more for revision surgery,” Dr. Michael Edwards, Las Vegas plastic surgeon and spokesman for the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, says for the publication. “Some 17 million cosmetic procedures were performed in the United States last year, but no one knows how many were redoes. While anecdotal evidence tends to support the notion that more redoes are being done – top plastic and cosmetic surgeons throughout the United States believe it is – it is impossible to know an actual number, because major medical associations don’t keep statistics on revision surgery,” the LVRJ adds.
“New York plastic surgeon Andrew Jacono , whose expertise is often sought in the most difficult facial cosmetic surgery revision cases in the country, dedicates 35 percent of his practice to surgery on patients unhappy with results delivered by other doctors. Jacono estimates that 10 percent of cosmetic surgeries in the United States are redoes. If Jacono’s estimate is on the mark, that would mean 1.7 million revision cosmetic surgeries are done each year,” the same publication further informs.
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