Hi there, Dr. Tansavatdi here. I wanted to talk to you about rhinoplasty surgery and specifically what you should be asking your surgeon when you come to a rhinoplasty consultation. I often find that when I have the consultation sometimes patients just don’t know what to ask and/or they are prepared for their consultation, they’ve been told bring pictures of noses that you want to have of what your expectation would be, but better yet there are some questions I think that you should be bringing to your consultation and I wish my patients would ask me.
So these are a couple of the questions I think that would make your consultation much more effective and the first one would be “Board Certification.” Does your surgeon have certification in the distinctions that are important for rhinoplasty surgery? So those two would be the American Board of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and the second would be the American Board of Plastic Surgery. The second question is, often times I get asked how many rhinoplasty procedures do you do or how many have you done?
The number is not necessarily so much important as how often does your surgeon operate and perform rhinoplasty procedures, because if you’re doing one today and then your surgeon does another one in six months, or three months, that’s not frequent enough. Wouldn’t you want your surgeon to be doing this every week or maybe twice a week that’s what you should be asking that is how frequent is my surgeon performing this particular surgery.
The next question you should be asking is does my surgeon perform more of the pictures so I can see what can I expect as the final outcome because, let’s face it, if we talk about facelift surgery, eyelid surgery, some other services that I perform, the final outcome is still the same. We’re on the same page. We want the eyelids lifted, rejuvenated. The jawline nice and sharp. The jowls taken care of. But when it comes to the nose there’s so many different noses there and you want to be clear what you expect is the final outcome.
So just bringing a picture is fine but being able to see the picture on the screen and seeing what your surgeon is going to perform, that’s more important. So please when you go into consultation with your rhinoplasty surgeon ask them to perform a morph of your picture.
The final question that I think is important is to ask your surgeon whether they perform any revisions in their whole cast of rhinoplasty surgeries they do in a full year because if they do perform revision surgeries they’re going to be more talented and skilled in performing your nose that hasn’t been operated on at all because revision surgeries give us a little bit more of skill in knowing what to do so that you don’t have these problems that arise with the revision cases. So there you have it those are the
top questions that I suggest you bring in to your next rhinoplasty consultation.
Thank you!