Precision in Practice: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Cosmetic Facial Plastic Surgery (Podcast)

When it comes to cosmetic plastic surgery, one of the most important things a surgeon can do is listen.

“I think for most of us, the first minutes of the visit are just meant to listen to the patient, find out why they're seeking care and what they're concerned about,” says Peter Ciolek, MD, a facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon at Cleveland Clinic. “As a surgeon or a practitioner of cosmetic medicine, you have to match patient's expectations with what you can achieve either surgically or with minimally invasive therapies… it's really about listening to the patient and having a conversation with them before jumping in or offering any types of procedures.”

In a recent episode of Cleveland Clinic’s Head and Neck Innovations podcast, Dr. Ciolek, along with Francis Papay, MD, Chairman of the Dermatology & Plastic Surgery Institute at Cleveland Clinic, discuss innovative approaches to facial plastic surgery, managing patient expectations, and Cleveland Clinic’s growing aesthetics practice in the Northeast Ohio region. In addition, they also look at:

• The impact of social media on aesthetic surgery
• What makes a good cosmetic surgeon
• How technology is improving rhinoplasties
• Taking a multidisciplinary approach to aesthetics at Cleveland Clinic’s new Landerbrook Aesthetic Center

Click the podcast player above to listen to the episode now, or read on for a short, edited excerpt. Check out more Head and Neck Innovations episodes at clevelandclinic.org/podcasts/head-and-neck-innovations or wherever you get your podcasts.

Excerpt from the podcast

Podcast host Paul Bryson, MD, MBA: In this era that you both alluded to with social media and lots of pictures, [our listeners] may hear about technology trying to predict surgical outcomes or facial analysis — do you think technology has been helpful? Or is it more challenging in terms of expectations when people maybe come to you with something that might be really challenging to achieve or is that now more realistic to achieve?

Francis Papay: Aesthetic surgery is what I call surgical self-esteem. So how social media affects self-esteem in the general population is a big deal because the ideals are set out there. And as you know, those ideals change with culture. And so social media and news and what's on the [magazine] cover or what's the latest in TikTok is going to drive sort of the behavior of our culture. So yeah, I think it's a big change, at least in my tenure, in aesthetic surgery, and it does affect it.

Peter Ciolek: I've seen technology as a double-edged sword in aesthetics. Oftentimes, I've had patients come in with either photos of themselves or photos of other people they've seen online that are heavily manipulated, and so the ideals that they're seeking are not of an actual person, but they are [looking at] a person with heavily photoshopped or modified images. So, it turns into this whole different conversation — these pictures that patients are showing me where a person has had a lot of post-production work done on their Instagram, well this is not actually how somebody looks. And so that becomes a whole different problem to navigate.

I've also seen in my practice many patients seeking care specifically just for how they appear in photos on social media. So, they may be comfortable with their presence and appearance in real life, but it may be certain angles that they see in photos or with a selfie that's driving them to try to manipulate something on their face or make it look better. So yeah, it's certainly an interesting time to be practicing facial aesthetics.