Bargain-Basement Plastic Surgery

Hunting for a nip-tuck...

Surgery Safari?

Ah, the safari.

Imagine jetting off to stalk the lush river valleys and arid savannahs for wild game, your rifle (or camera) at the ready. There you are, treading softly behind your Swahili guide, taking part in the great circle of life in the (supposedly) very cradle of mankind.  And while you’re there after the trophy of a lifetime, you can...

Make yourself INTO the trophy of a lifetime — with bargain-basement plastic surgery!

Folks, I’m not making this up. Following in the footsteps of the wildly successful scalpel-happy “Extreme Makeover” TV series, there are now “extreme vacation” nip-and-tuck trips available to such locales as Africa — where life is cheap and so is the surgery.

That’s right — according to a recent CBS News online article, the next big thing in travel might well turn out to be “medical tourism.” Apparently, foreign surgeons are scrambling to capitalize on the modern boom in cosmetic surgery, offering slashed (sorry, couldn’t resist) prices on such high-dollar procedures as facelifts, arm and thigh lifts, liposuction, and wrinkle work.

There’s even one company that specializes in setting up combination tourism/surgery trips. The South-Africa-based “Surgeon and Safari” company uses a slick Web site to seduce surgery-hungry Americans of limited means with enticing promises of cut-rate cosmetic procedures they’d normally never be able to afford in the States.

All that, plus a chance to go on a real, live safari.

Right now, I’d imagine you’re asking: What about safety concerns? What about medical standards? And what happens if something goes wrong? That, or you might be clicking over to their web site right now. Either way, these concerns are valid — but apparently not grave enough to prevent ordinary folks from packing their bags and jetting off for some discount dissection. Just five years old, the company has already swelled into a multi-million dollar business. Ah, capitalism. It cuts both ways, you know?

And now, it looks like even the elderly are cleared for take off.
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Heart Health Alert:  Don’t listen to your doctor!”

To find out more, visit: 
http://www.youreletters.com/t/82696/6626399/650931/0/
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You’re never too old to… get a facelift?

As though there aren’t enough 40- and 50-something Americans already shelling out for surgery to keep them looking a few years younger, now there’s a movement to expand the generally accepted (but not hard and fast) cut-off point for certain common cosmetic procedures upward to well into the “elderly” range.

According to a recent Reuters online article, the number of plastic surgery procedures performed on those in their 70s doubled in the two-year span from 1999-2001. And for those in their 80s, the number QUADRUPLED.

Facelifts for octogenarians? Whatever happened to “growing old gracefully?”

As if this trend weren’t accelerating quickly enough, recent research published in the Archives of Plastic Surgery (and no doubt conducted by plastic surgeons) adds fuel to the fire by concluding that healthy patients aged 75 and over suffer no more serious complications of facial plastic surgery than do those still firmly entrenched in middle age.

To keep this in perspective, the average modern expected life span of an American is only 77 years!
I don’t know about you, but if I’d rather spend my golden years doing the things I love than recovering from a facelift just so that at my funeral, I can look like I died a decade before I was supposed to!
                                                                                                                                                                                    But that’s just me...

Happy to look (and be) my age,

William Campbell Douglass II, MD