Doctor didn't show photos from past procedures. Is this a bad sign?

Rhinoplasty is probably the most demanding procedure we do in plastic surgery. Expertise in this field is hard to acquire and requires a minimum of several hundred surgeries. Every board-certified plastic surgeon is not automatically an expert in rhinoplasty. The website or office collection of before and after photos is a good way to evaluate the expertise of the surgeon, in particular when nose surgery is considered.

A rhinoplasty is just a ridiculously complicated operation, and achieving a good result requires experience, technical skill, judgment, knowledge of what is attractive, knowledge of how to work with everyone's different tissues, communicating with the patient to hone in on an ideal goal, and believe it or not, a lot lot more. Most plastic surgeons are quite poor at this procedure.

Here's a metaphor that might help: if you were planning to hire a portrait artist, for thousands of dollars, to paint a portrait of a loved one, would you hire someone without seeing any of his past work? You never ever would. And it's more crucial here, because if you make a mistake and the portrait sucks, you can throw it away and hire someone else. If the rhinoplasty is performed poorly, though, now the next surgeon has to wade through the first operation's damage to do as best as he can.

Now, having said all that, a doctor must get experience when he gets out of school, and won't have lots of photos to show. It's true. Happened to me. But *you* don't have to go to that doctor.

Interesting side note: I was at a portrait painter's studio, and I mentioned to him that I used "portrait painters" in describing why before and afters are so important in my line of work. He said that, when you're hiring a portrait painter, seeing his past work isn't enough: you have to see a portrait that he painted of someone *that you know well*! I said I didn't get that; he had all these portraits in his studio, mounted adjacent to photographs of the people, and the likenesses were stunning. I told him I can tell perfectly well that he does an incredible job. He said, no, you don't know these people. The portrait might look exactly like the photograph, but you can't tell whether I painted the subject's *personality* into the painting as well. (!!!)

Hope that helps.