To avoid this and find success in general, Nachbar says, doctors must set realistic expectations with each patient. While Hollywood positions cosmetic improvements as the key to a global new you, Nachbar encourages those he helps to think of it as more of a localized improvement plan.
“I don’t know the extent to which it makes a global personality change, and I hope people are not expecting that either,” Nachbar says. “I know I try to discourage someone from thinking that surgery is going to completely change the way they are. Hopefully it will improve the way they feel about the areas that we’re treating.”
That’s the same approach Dr. John Gibney took in working on Mark Stevenson, our 60-year-old executive. As Stevenson recalls the initial consultation before he committed to having face, neck and abdominal work done, it was “brutally honest.”
“There was no surprise from my perspective,” Stevenson says of the results. “I said to Dr. Gibney, ‘Being realistic, what can I expect?’ He said, ‘Look, I can’t make you look like a 25-year-old, but a little of that paunch around the sides, a little of the love handles, that we can take down.’ Then he literally… pulled back four points around my head and said ‘That’s what your face is going to look like.’ I said, ‘You know what, I think that’s worth it.’”
The verdict a year after surgery? To say that Stevenson is ecstatic is to understate his response by approximately a power of 10. He was back at work in days, he says. He stopped feeling sensitivity around his waistline within a month, and he reports a three-inch reduction in his pants size. He believes it was approximately $10,000 very well spent.
“Whatever I paid, I’d pay twice as much.… People are much more responsive,” he says. “I feel so much better that apparently I’m doing a lot more. I was turning 60, had put on a few pounds. My hair was turning pretty gray. This has made such a difference psychologically that it’s changed me physically, to the point where I work out more. I’ve just gotten a very, very significant promotion. I’ve been working more hours and am feeling a thousand times better.”
Dr. Gibney, 62, knows the feeling, including what it feels like to be beneath the surgeon’s scalpel.
“I had my eyelids done,” the doctor says. “I looked in the mirror and I said, ‘Geez, you look like a grandfather.’ And I looked tired and I wasn’t tired. I just had kids and I was very busy.”
One blepharoplasty (the fancy name for eyelid surgery) later, Gibney understood exactly why patients like Stevenson become his most fervent evangelists.
“I think the stigma – [men] being embarrassed about having it done – that’s going by the wayside,” he says. “Practically speaking, I want to feel good about myself. When I feel good, I’m a lot nicer person to be with and I’m going to accomplish more. I don’t think that’s an unhealthy attitude. I think if somebody becomes an addict to plastic surgery – they have something done every six months – then there’s a problem there. But the problem isn’t only with that patient. The problem is with the physician who encourages that type of thing.”
Problem physicians came up repeatedly in conversations with the surgeons interviewed for this story – not because there’s so many of them, but because the few surgeons who go bad inevitably are the ones who draw the most intense media scrutiny.
Take, for example, the well-publicized case of Dr. Peter James Normann, who in October 2007 saw his license to practice medicine revoked by the Arizona Medical Board. The board’s emergency action came on the heels of a seven-month period in which three liposuction patients died after procedures performed in Normann’s office.
Among the legion of troubles and errors documented in the board’s case files:
• Normann apparently allowed a licensed massage therapist to perform liposuction on a 41-year-old mother of three. That woman died after a subsequent procedure caused an embolism.
• Normann allowed another untrained employee, “a former restaurant owner,” to assist in as many as 25 liposuction procedures.
• Normann allowed Gary Page, a homeopathic physician not licensed to practice conventional medicine, to perform a liposuction on a 53-year-old woman. That woman died a few hours later.
Normann, who never appeared to defend himself before the medical board, has since disappeared, according to media reports.
Horror stories like Normann’s give legit surgeons like Dr. Alan Gold of the ASAPS a screaming headache. Gold’s pain parallels the agony felt by the good-guy prosecutor whose legal reputation suffers at the hands of an ambulance chaser, or the ballplayer who feels he gets a bum rap as a cheater thanks to the relatively few athletes who bend the rules with steroids.
The best way to avoid a Frankenstein experience at the hands of a quack like Normann? Do your research, Gold says. Look for doctors certified by groups such as the American Board of Plastic Surgery. Take your time, listen to your gut and ask a lot of questions.
“Sometimes patients will spend more [time] picking out a refrigerator brand than they will a surgeon,” Gold says. “The critical thing is that patients need to be educated consumers. They need to look at the credentials of who’s doing the treatment. They need to get sometimes more than one opinion about what’s appropriate for them.… You need to look past the advertising hype.”