"Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone" wrote author and quipster par excellence Dorothy Parker way back when. While even the very best plastic surgeons sometimes have to cope with being perceived as shallow people in a shallow business, the fact of the matter is that some of what we do is about much more than vanity, and it's anything but ugly.
Just today, we were reminded of how often top plastic surgeons perform the kinds of surgery that most of us would consider far from elective, even though they might technically be cosmetic procedures. Don't get us wrong, there's absolutely nothing wrong with facelifts, breast augmentation, or any of the kinds of work we do that improve patient's confidence and, more often than you might think, their overall health and happiness.
Still, it warms our heart to read about outstanding board certified plastic surgeons, not to mention a number of nurses and anesthesiologists, who went to work on unpaid on a Saturday a week or so out in Florida in order to perform free cosmetic procedures on 11 needy children. As reported in yesterday's Miami Herald, the procedures at Baptist Children's Hospital included work on deformities in ears, cleft lips, and skin grafts -- the not so glamorous type of plastic surgery that you almost never read about in the celebrity gossip columns.
The important point is that that this kind of work goes on all the time with plastic surgeons. Helping poor children lead normal, healthy, and happy lives might not be as interesting as an actress's most recent procedure, but it really is beautiful -- the kind of beautiful that goes clean to the bone.
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