Doctors Bemoan the Fall of Plastic Surgery

Celebrity backlash and low economy are bringing the institution of plastic surgery down.
(...and it couldn't happen to a more deserving medical specialty)

Cosmetic surgery, or vanity surgery, as it’s often been called, has undoubtedly shaped the society and the culture we know today. While the phenomenon is mostly encountered, or more meditated, in the US, it is not limited in any way to it. As a matter of fact, we often hear mentions of the past ten years or so as to the “era of the mass medicalization of attractiveness.” An era that is dangerously nearing its end, plastic surgeons all over the world are now saying.

Although it was somehow to be expected for plastic surgery to take a massive hit because of the international crisis, no one in the industry expected to see celebrities themselves, the very persons who helped build it up, gang up against it. Yet, they did, US surgeons are lamenting on personal blogs, and the consequences of their actions spell disaster for a segment of the industry that, no earlier than a couple of years ago, was positively thriving.

Actresses Courteney Cox and Lisa Rinna, both once suspected to flirt with Botox and lip fillers, are now speaking up against these beautification methods. Dubbed “unsatisfying” and “too plastic,” what were once favorite procedures amongst stars are falling to ridicule. Moreover, the celebrity backlash is just one facet of the problem that the industry of plastic surgery is dealing with and the numbers for the past year speak volume in this sense.

“In Orange County, where plastic surgery is a part of their culture, doctors told me business is down 30 to 40 percent,” Thomas Seery, the president of RealSelf, a site devoted to reviewing vanity-oriented medical procedures, says. “That tells me something is fundamentally changing there.” And it’s not just in the OC that figures are dwindling, but all over the US, a fact that also became painfully obvious at the most recent American Society of Plastic Surgeons meeting held in Chicago, where, for a first in many, many years, doctors announced openings and even their availability to negotiate fees with patients.

“Cosmetic surgery is going to become the new S.U.V., something that you can do without, that is less justifiable for you and your family,” concludes Dr. Pitts-Taylor, author of “Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture,” cited in a NY Times piece called “Putting Vanity on Hold.” By all means, 2009 does not shape out to be the year of cosmetic surgical interventions, so maybe this is just a good enough time to start thinking of what they say about real beauty coming from within.
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The economic crunch just may turn out to have a silver lining after all.