The Work Of A Plastic Surgeon: It's More Than Just Being Pretty

When most people think plastic surgery they think breast augmentation, nose job or liposuction. And since those are the top three most popular cosmetic procedures it's natural to assume that a plastic surgeon does little else but alter the acceptable into the exceptional, but here you would be wrong. A plastic surgeon can also do reconstructive cosmetic surgery to repair and restore abnormalities caused by congenital defects, trauma, disease or genetic conditions to help give a patient a more normal appearance so they can live a more normal, productive life.

One of the more common types of reconstructive surgery that plastic surgeons perform is to repair cleft palates or cleft lip on children. A cleft lip or a cleft palate is the most common type of birth defect a child can experience in North America with as many as one in seven hundred children born with this condition. A child born with a cleft palate or a cleft lip may have one or both of these conditions and they may have them on one or both sides of their face depending on how severe the birth defect is. A cleft palate or a cleft lip is the result of an incomplete formation during the fetus's developmental stage and without surgery a child can be ostracized and isolated by their peer group and those around them. The incomplete formation of the child's upper lip or the root of their mouth can interfere not only with the child's normal development and self-esteem but also with their ability to eat normally and survive.

A plastic surgeon can correct this defect and restore a normal lip and upper palate to the child allowing them to grow, function and live normal lives. Surgery can be done as soon as two to three months after birth to correct the condition. The surgery itself is done under general anesthesia and the length of surgery will vary depending on the amount of defect to correct.

Plastic surgery has also made the news lately as doctors push the boundaries past just correcting cleft palates and cleft lips to performing face transplants on patients whose own faces have been mangled or destroyed by animal attacks or disease. This new frontier in plastics is making it possible for patients who once had no hope for a normal life to begin to have hope and life again.

Plastic surgeons are able to improve the small cosmetic blemishes that plague us, they can reshape our noses, change the size of our breasts and even alter how we look as we age, but more importantly they can restore what was once broken and make it whole again.