Jack Of All Trades Or Master Of One?

People are often surprised at how diverse a plastic surgeon’s skills extend.
We are one of the only medical specialities that can operate on any part of the body.
We are trained in:

• Cancer reconstruction in the head and neck, breast and skin
• Treatment of burns
• Hand injuries
• We treat congenital birth defects including cleft lip and palate
• We manage any soft-tissue defects such as lower limb trauma after a road traffic accident or management of pressure sores or ulcers

We can literally operate from the head to the toe.
All plastic surgeons will sub-specialise in a particular field and his or her practice will be limited to that area while working in the NHS.
However, in the private sector, where most plastic surgeons perform cosmetic surgery, there is no limitation to the area that they operate on.
Any fully trained plastic surgeon will be able to do a facelift, a nose job, put in breast implants, do a tummy tuck and do liposuction as well as the range of non-surgical injectable treatments available.
When I was in the NHS, my practice was limited to breast reconstruction following cancer and now that I work in the private sector, I limit my work to breast and body contouring.
This is very rare and most plastic surgeons will at least offer facelifts and botox, even if they specialise in the breast.

In fact, there are only a handful of plastic surgeons that specialise in the breast, and so pretty much every plastic surgeon will offer breast enlargement even if they are trained as a hand or a burn surgeon.

I certainly have a lot of patients who request botox or a blepharoplasty and I am capable of performing the procedure, but the ethos behind my clinic is to provide a world-class service delivered by the most highly trained professionals.

I have been very careful about who I choose to work with me at the clinic to help me expand and grow.

It is great to have Khurram Khan on the team.  He is a Consultant Plastic Surgeon at the Children’s Hospital and he is focusing on all of the local anaesthetic work. His main area of interest is in facial plastic surgery, so he is the perfect complement to the team to allow us to expand the range of treatments that we can offer.

We also have Azzam Farroha, who is a Consultant Plastic Surgeon at the QE Hospital in Birmingham and he specialises in skin surgery and treats benign and malignant skin lesions with a special interest in skin cancer.

I have been very careful how I expand the clinic because it can be tempting to just take on as much work as possible.

However, early on, I set out our Brand Values and I will stay true to these and will always aim to do the right thing.

Ethics and delivering the best results to our patients will always be the core focus of what we do.

As plastic surgeons, we are trained to be ‘Jack of all trades’ and this is one of the great appeals of the speciality, but I feel that we are moving in to an age where the specialist is becoming more important and certainly in the niche of cosmetic breast surgery, there is a need for surgeons who are experts in the field to help to bring the speciality away from some of the negative publicity that it receives.

The variety of surgeons who offer breast enlargement is vast.  In fact, I have written a book about it!

“Never Accept A Lift From Strangers – how to choose the best plastic surgeon for your cosmetic breast surgery”

As is the case with most things in life, it is not enough to be doing excellent work and the success or failure depends on getting the message out there and getting the world to listen.

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