Plastic Surgery Booming on Mexico Border
The Miami Herald
February 6, 2005
Associated Press
SAN ANTONIO - Thousands of people yearning for a better body are visiting Mexican plastic surgery clinics that offer makeovers at a third of the cost in the United States.
The industry has flourished, with new clinics touting their services on billboards, newspaper ads and television commercials across South Texas.
While some full service clinics offer American-style standards with inviting waiting areas and scrubbed surgical suites, those images mask the downside of a booming business that has littered northern Mexico with backward operations run by physicians with questionable credentials, the San Antonio Express-News reported Sunday.
In more than two months of reporting on both sides of the border, the newspaper found a largely unregulated system where patients can enter a dentist's office that also advertises plastic surgery and leave with a nose job performed by an unlicensed doctor.
Through interviews with doctors, patients, government regulators and families, the Express-News learned some patients were left horribly scarred or fighting severe infections from botched surgeries. But because of poor record keeping, weak oversight and a system that discourages lawsuits, it is impossible to know the number of injuries or deaths in Mexican clinics.
U.S. doctors along the border said they're all too familiar with the problem. Some have begun to specialize in "secondary repair" undoing damage done in Mexico because so many patients have required reconstruction.
Dr. Tolbert Wilkinson, a San Antonio plastic surgeon, said he's seen dozens of women return from the border with broken or slipping breast implants, infections and large scars.
"Ugly scars are coming from the border," said Wilkinson, one of the few Texas surgeons who is willing to treat people after things go wrong in Mexico. Many doctors won't accept those patients because the liability is too great.
A Lakehills mother of four who asked only to be identified as Lynn claims she was disfigured in December from plastic surgery at the Centro de Ginecologia y Obstetricia in Nuevo Laredo. The newspaper said the clinic apparently was not accredited.
Lynn, 36, said she had trouble healing after having a tummy tuck and liposuction on Dec. 10.
"I kept bleeding on my suture, and I didn't know what it was," said Lynn, who returned to the clinic and had surgery to repair her bleeding stomach incision.
The Mexican clinic is co-owned by David Hernandez, a San Antonio-based marketer who goes by the name Dr. Dave, though he is not a doctor on either side of the border. He acknowledged that Lynn experienced complications after undergoing surgery but said he thought they were successfully treated in the follow-up visit.
But the infection returned in late December, and she had trouble standing up straight.
"I still can't stand up perfectly straight and it's been eight weeks," she said.
Lynn went to see Wilkinson, who discovered she had fluids trapped inside that hadn't drained properly. Wilkinson put her on new antibiotics and has been draining the fluids out of a hole on her lower abdomen.
Asked if she do it all over again, she said: "Oh, absolutely not."
Some patients can't be saved. Plastic surgeons in Brownsville said they couldn't help two women who died from gangrene that developed from infections after their surgeries in Matamoros. One woman's skin peeled off when emergency room doctors lifted her from one bed to another.
"I have never seen a worse case of gangrene anywhere - not even in Mexico," said Dr. Rafael Arredondo, who was working in the emergency room when the woman's husband brought her in.
Natick Bulletin &Tab
Maddocks: A little surgery can fix this
By Philip Maddocks
Friday, February 4, 2005
It was bound to happen. Someone was going to realize that life had to offer more than television programs like "The Swan" and "Extreme Makeover," which suggest that all those sleepless nights spent worrying about nostrils that aren't symmetrical isn't unhealthy at all as long as you pay a plastic surgeon thousands of dollars to fix them.
Happily life does offer more now. Last month saw the launch of NewBeauty, a print publication which suggests that all those sleepless nights spent worrying about nostrils that aren't symmetrical isn't unhealthy at all as long as you pay a plastic surgeon thousands of dollars to fix them.
Its publishers, Sandow Media of Boca Raton, Fla., say they are responding to a shortage of reliable information about surgery and other procedures - and they plan to make a profit while doing it.
The debut issue of NewBeauty is an ambitious foray into this new field for print journalism - both historically and advertorially.
According to one newspaper account, the inaugural issue features an illustrated "before and after" section on breast augmentation, a two-page glamour spread on a young Boca plastic surgeon, Albert Dabbah, a story titled "All About Injectables" that covers Botox, a "Beauty Brief editorial that claims, "[c]osmetic enhancement is almost as old as civilization itself," with an anecdote about Cleopatra bathing in milk and "benefiting from the exfoliating qualities of the lactic acid" added for good measure.
The issue also managed to implant 650 pages of ads among the magazine's 13 regional and one national editions, surgically enhancing each edition to a youthfully firm 300 pages or so and bearing out the publisher's belief that there is no shortage of reliable plastic surgery advertising to be had.
All that advertising will make it a little difficult to find those staff-written stories filled with reliable information. Not to worry. Andrew Sandow, the publisher, assured a reporter the ads in his new magazine are reliable because all the information in the publication - in ads and stories - is vetted by an editorial advisory board comprising plastic surgeons, dermatologists and cosmetic dentists.
Even the advertorials - paid ads that look like articles - are fact-checked by the editorial advisory board to ensure no false claims sneak into the magazine content, not that some of the professionals didn't try.
'We had to remove about six-figures' worth of advertising because doctors wanted to say things that weren't ethical,'' claimed Sandow, whose company publishes magazines and books on travel, home and beauty.
Of course, like sagging flesh, keeping all those unreliable doctors in check comes at a price. That's probably why NewBeauty carries a Palm Beach-like price of $9.95 for each issue.
This is apparently a small price to pay for a glossy that gives you the skinny on "cosmetic enhancement."
"I'm going to be thinking about facelifts and Botox as I get older, so this magazine sounds perfect for me," said Tracy, 33, a Boca housewife and breast implant recipient. "I will definitely buy it."
Vicki, a 44-year-old Boca saleswoman, also seems eager to put her money where her recently face-lifted mouth is.
"As I get older, I work out and eat right," she said. "But I'm always looking for competitive ways to stay young-looking, through skin products or new techniques, so I'll definitely buy it."
Tracy and Vicki are by no means alone, though they may be a little old by today's surgical standard. The number of girls under age 18 who had breast implants reportedly nearly tripled between 2002 and 2003, from 3,872 to 11,326.
In all, nearly nine million cosmetic procedures were performed in America in 2003 - a 33 percent increase from the year before .
"Plastic surgery is definitely more accepted now, especially in our community," Dr. Cristina F. Keusch of the Boca Raton Plastic Surgery Center told a reporter recently. "In the past, people wouldn't even discuss it with their closest friends. Now we're seeing more men, more young people, more educated individuals. Cosmetic maintenance is not just for the rich anymore and this sort of magazine is absolutely appropriate in Boca."
It's message certainly seems appropriate to Boca, and beyond.
Plastic is for everyone these days. Cosmetic enhancement isn't just a way to live out a fantasy. It's a way to enter a world of reality where perfection and lost years are just one skillful incision away and where the ways of SpongeBob and other cartoon characters must be kept in check for the sake of the Republic.
The real allure of plastic, though, is its shadowy promise. It's not that life doesn't come at a price, it hints, but that it's a cost we can buy ourselves out of with a little expert makeover work.
If this doesn't pass your sniff test, maybe it's time you made an appointment for a nose job.
In time you'll be buying into NewBeauty and thinking just like Boca Raton Tracy.
"It's about making myself feel better," she says.
And the work has just begun.
For victim, surgeons are a 'Dream Team'
Update: Operation to rebuild Waco woman's face after shooting
February 4, 2005
By JACQUIELYNN FLOYD / The Dallas Morning News
HOUSTON – To the doctors who will build her a new face, Carolyn Thomas' surgery is a technical challenge, unique in its own aspects but nothing heroic.
Carolyn is content to call it a miracle and let it go at that.
"I call 'em the Dream Team," she whispered, sitting in an examining chair Thursday while her five white-coated surgeons conferred outside the door.
"To rebuild this" – she gestured toward her face, swathed in its customary masklike bandage – "they're gonna go from nothing to something. They've got to be a Dream Team."
Her face ruined more than a year ago when her abusive ex-boyfriend shot her at point-blank range, Carolyn has lived life without being able to eat or smell. She can't speak clearly without the assistance of a trachea tube.
And she has not been able to go out in public without enduring the stares of strangers, shocked to see a woman whose face is concealed beneath a heavy layer of gauze that hides everything between her eyebrows and upper lip.
Except for her undamaged left eye, visible through a hole cut in the bandage, most of her face is a blasted wreck.
On Monday, a five-surgeon team will go to work restoring as much as medicine can of what Carolyn lost.
"The goal is that Carolyn will be able to walk down the street and no one will stare. No one will know that she's different," said Dr. Gene Alford, who heads the team made up of three facial reconstructive surgeons, a dental surgeon and an oculoplastic surgeon.
Thursday's meeting was a preoperative examination, where the five surgeons conferred and planned out a rough game plan for what they expect to be at least an eight-hour procedure. That will be the first and most complicated of at least a half-dozen surgeries over the next two years to restore the Waco woman's face.
Carolyn, already a petite woman, looked as small as a child, sitting patiently while her doctors towered over her in a cramped examining room.
"OK, we're gonna take the bandage off," Dr. Alford said gently. As he worked, the heavy gauze Carolyn uses to pad out the asymmetrical crater beneath the mask dropped to her lap in snowy drifts.
Revealing her damaged face before five doctors, a half-dozen interested reporters and photographers, and a camera crew from the Discovery Channel must have felt like stripping naked on a public street, but Carolyn sat quietly, calling on the innate dignity that has served her so well over the last year. During that time, she has willingly shared her story as a real-life warning to other women who allow abusive men to stay in their lives.
Her unflinching courage is part of the reason her supporters campaigned hard to get her accepted by the "Face to Face" program, a humanitarian branch of the American Academy of Facial and Plastic Reconstructive Surgeons.
The services are sadly in demand: The academy estimates that of the 5 million women subjected to domestic violence every year, 1 million need medical attention. And it estimates that among those who are battered, 75 percent of the injuries are to the head and face.
Police say that when Terrence Dewayne Kelly shot Carolyn, he also shot and killed Carolyn's mother, Janice Reeves. He is awaiting trial on charges of capital murder in Mrs. Reeve's death.
Dione Jackson, a counselor for the Family Abuse Center in Waco, has worked with Carolyn since early last year. She said she drafted a grant application to get Carolyn reconstructive surgery the day they met.
"It's her spirit," Ms. Jackson said. "No matter what happens to her, she just pulls herself up and keeps going. She has this everlasting impact on you."
Once accepted by the program, Carolyn was referred to The Methodist Hospital in Houston, which will cover all the costs of her doctors, surgeries and care. There's no total yet, but it's estimated that the costs will be at least $200,000. Monday's surgery alone will require a team of 22 medical personnel, and her hospital stay will be seven to 10 days.
Characteristically, Carolyn managed a wisecrack or two even during the consultation.
"I'm getting used to all this attention, but I wish we were talking about a role in a movie instead," she said, adding wickedly, "with Denzel."
But even Dr. Alford noticed that she was unusually subdued. Talking calmly and kindly – a wonderful thing in a doctor – he said gently, "It's all right to be nervous. Just don't be afraid."
Carolyn said stoutly that she's not, but it's an astonishing task the surgeons are undertaking.
On Monday, the team will "unfold" some of the damaged but usable tissue that was sewn into place by doctors working to save her after she was shot.