Selecting a plastic surgeon. What are some key things to ask or consider before selecting one?

You are doing so many of the right things in choosing your plastic surgeon. After your consultations, I hope you will have a feeling based on all of the those factors you mentioned, of who would be the best choice for you. This is how most of these decision are made. Sometimes other factors weigh in (cost, distance from your home etc.). There is no perfect way for you to make the final determination, but know you are asking the right questions and doing good research. Good luck!

To master body contouring requires years and doing hundreds of cases. The key is not to let the surgeon show you the best results of their career but instead to show you all of the results of their career. In other words ask the provider to show you all of their before and after pictures or summer objective evidence of how many sets of before and after pictures they have for Liposuction the anatomic area you’re interested in. If a plastic surgeon cannot show you 50 or more sets of before and after pictures of the area you’re interested in they may not have sufficient experience. A highly experienced provider will have several hundred and some may have thousands.

Seeing the best pictures isn’t nearly as helpful as seeing what average pictures look like.

A provider with sufficient experience should also be able to pull out a whole collection of before and after pictures of patients whose bodies are similar to your own in regards to size, shape, skin laxity age etc. do you want to see what patient’s results were who look like you in the before pictures.

Personally I think the number of justified negative reviews are more important than an abundance of positive reviews. Providers with high numbers of reviews typically have more aggressive marketing campaigns and encourage more people to write reviews.

Providers with less total number of reviews typically rely simply on organic reviews.

Negative reviews are typically always organic.

Unjustified negative reviews or negative reviews that are not related to surgical outcome or direct clinical content such as staff, wait times, service can all be ignored.

Another important topic is the type of anesthesia done for the procedure. During the first 10 years of practice I use general anesthesia for most procedures but mid career converted and began doing almost all liposuction procedures including fat transfer procedures with my patients awake using local anesthesia with mild sedation.

This gives me much better results and in my opinion and overall better patient experience.

The following is a list of general recommendations. Some of these are a recap of what I’ve previously stated.

1. I recommend patients avoid traveling long distances for elective surgical procedures. There are of course instances where there is a lack of local talent and traveling to some degree is inevitable. If traveling for the procedure patients should be ready to travel to have the consultation, post operative appointments and follow up should there be issues or complications.
Patients sometimes do not appreciate the importance of in person consultations, that complications do happen or the number of people who have issues with their results or need revisions.

2. Schedule multiple consultations with different providers in your area who seem to have a good reputation for the procedure you’re interested in. Starting with at least five consultations seems like a reasonable number to me.

3. Whenever possible schedule in person consultations.
4. During in person consultations ask each plastic surgeon to show all of their before and after pictures for the procedure you’re interested in.

The goal is not to see the best results of their career but to get an idea of what average results look like and get some type of confirmation of how many of these procedures that provider has performed.

Ask to see results that were not as good as the doctor would’ve hoped for and talk about the differences in outcomes.

Honest and experienced providers should have no problems presenting this type of information.

A highly experienced plastic surgeon should have hundreds of before and after pictures for the procedure you’re interested in. At a minimum at least 20+.

5. Read all the reviews on various physician review websites paying close attention and avoiding providers with any significant number of justified negative reviews. Providers with an abundance of reviews often have aggressive marketing campaigns.

The plastic surgeons I respect most all have the single variable of not having justified negative reviews on their online profiles.
In my opinion justified negative reviews are far more telling than an abundance of positive reviews.

6. Avoid scheduling for surgery or making a deposit on the day of the consultation. Give yourself some time to think about the decision and make sure you finished all scheduled consultations before committing to having surgery that will permanently and irreversibly change your body.

When in doubt slow down and schedule more consultations.

Choosing the right plastic surgeon is the single most important variable to having a positive experience.

7. Don’t go chasing after technology or names of certain equipment. Instead focus all your efforts on finding the most experienced and talented board-certified plastic surgeon.

Best,

Mats HagstromMD