Has the plastic surgeon become the patient's servant? The number of overly upturned noses and over-tightened faces has grown. Are the surgeons who do whatever the patient asks to blame? Prof. Dr. Ferit Demirkan: "When a doctor uses too much filler instead of declining a patient who refuses surgery, it leads to bad results." Mould-like expressionless faces, tiny noses out of proportion with the face, huge lips and lifeless eyes — aesthetic disasters have multiplied, and the medical world is now asking who is responsible. Below, Prof. Dr. Demirkan answers.
Doctors are no longer authoritarian
Have doctors become the patients' servants in plastic surgery? A new dynamic has emerged in the doctor–patient relationship. Doctors used to be more authoritarian, imposing the treatment method on the patient. Now the approach is to explain the alternatives and decide together with the patient — driven by patients' access to medical information online and by malpractice litigation.
Do demanding patients cause copy-paste faces?
Listening to the patient's wishes is a great advance for patient rights, but in some cases it leads patients to refuse the correct treatment. For example, when a patient with a sagging face says "I don't want surgery, treat me some other way," some practitioners, rather than declining, use filler liberally — and the result can be very poor.
Who knows best — the doctor or the patient?
The doctor knows, of course. But in aesthetic surgery there is no disease, and the intervention is planned around the patient's wishes, so the doctor has little room to take the initiative.
Should every request be granted?
No. The group of patients seeking aesthetic surgery includes different psychological profiles. Some are very insistent that their own choices are right. Caution is also needed with those who attribute all of life's problems to a single flaw on their body: if a patient believes rhinoplasty will give them better social relationships but nothing changes in that area afterwards, they may again blame the nose.
