World renowned cosmetic surgeon Dr.Vijay Sharma - A specialist in Facelift,liposuction,breast augmentation,buttock lift,Hair transplantation

SOME OF THE WRONG REASONS

      Making a body part, such as a large nose, the focus of your personal problems and believing that changing it (through cosmetic surgery) will change your life.
• Believing that lifting your face will cause your sagging spirit to lift.
• Believing that a new nose will metamorphose you into the local Don Juan.
• Thinking, "My husband's left me for a more voluptuous girl, and maybe if I get a breast implant
   I'll get him back."
• Hoping a "tummy tuck" will revive a flagging marriage.
• Or, to take things to their facetious limit, believing that dermabrasion will remove your old girlfriend's name from your bicep. It won't.
      When your expectations are skewed, the surgery - even when it boasts of aesthetic excellence - is likely to leave you feeling frustrated, savagely disappointed. To avoid contributing to the nation's homicide rate, make sure your expectations are realistic. The best motivation for having cosmetic surgery is self-improvement - you should be doing it entirely for yourself. Because you want to feel better about yourself, because you want to have a better self-image. Remember that cosmetic surgery can change your life in small but significant ways: the emphasis is on both 'small' and 'significant'.
      What then would be the right-reasons to go in for cosmetic surgery?
• You've successfully used diet and exercise strategies to lose weight - except for some stubborn
   fat on your thighs. Liposuction (fat removal) can help.
• Your five-year-old is the butt of taunt and ridicule by his school friends because of his protruding   'bat' ears, setting the stage for a severe and lifelong inferiority complex. Otoplasty (ear surgery)
can nip this psychological damage in the bud.
• You have a large, bulbous nose and feel it compromises your otherwise hugely handsome looks.    Rhinoplasty can get you closer to the Apollian ideal.
      Is career improvement a valid motivation for cosmetic surgery? Could be. Not because your boss is going to think, "What a wonderful new nose Krishnan has acquired, let's promote him", but because the improvement in appearance can enhance your self-confidence, causing you to interact more positively, more assertively with others, which in turn produces positive feedback, giving you that vital edge that could eventually lead to, yes, a promotion.
_____But remember that the bottomline is that cosmetic surgery changes appearance, not personality. A face-lift may, as rewarding fallout, boost your self-esteem, but there are no guarantees about this. Psychological tests on some patients in the U.S. have shown that about 40 per cent get "measurable emotional improvement" - but that the majority gets no such improvement. After all, the transformation has been wrought on an operating table, not a Freudian couch. In fact, if your decision to have cosmetic surgery is based on factors other than improving your appearance, the operation could leave you psychologically worse off than before.
_____Just as there is a right and a wrong motivation for electing to undergo cosmetic surgery, there is a right and a wrong time. Wrong times include:
• When you are experiencing a personal crisis, such as an impending divorce.
• When you are going through a time of grieving or severe depression.
• The reason, in both the above instances, is that, during such times a person does not have the emotional reserves to go through elective surgery. And a cosmetic operation does require emotional preparedness: for one thing, you've got to be ready to look worse before you look better, (To imagine the immediate aftermath of eyelid surgery, for example, imagine going a few rounds with; Mike Tyson, only he's using a scalpel instead of gloved fists).
_____Practical considerations can also dictate when the time is wrong for cosmetic surgery: for instance, if you have a family wedding coming up in a fortnight, it would be unwise for you to schedule a dermabrasion session before that, unless you want to grace the function looking like a protagonist in a Ramsay horror film. All cosmetic surgery has a recovery period that's more often an extended one: from several days to several months. If you're thinking you'll be able to get back to work a few days after the surgery, you'd better rent a Frankenstein casette and think some more. Cosmetic surgery is the only medical discipline that takes people who are well and makes them 'sick' - you'll be bruised, you'll be swollen, you'll hurt, you'll feel worse before you look better. Like the Boy Scouts, your motto should be to be prepared.

LOOKING FOR DR. RIGHT

      Okay, so you're prepared. Right motivation, right time, right emotional state. What next?
It's time to look for the right cosmetic surgeon. You'll need to check him out at two levels. First, his surgical competence. After all, he's going to take his scalpel to places no man has gone before - your inner places. And you've got to feel secure about entrusting your scalp, face, breasts, abdomen, whatever to him. How do you find Dr. Right?

First, a few don'ts:
• Don't go to your friendly neighborhood beautician for procedures like chemabrasion or dermabrasion. Many of them do offer these "services", but both are potentially risky procedures and the risks are naturally heightened in inexpert hands. The last thing you want is for an aesthetic procedure to leave you looking more than imperfect you started out.
• Don't pick out the first name listed in the yellow pages, or the one that's nearest your residence. You need to put more serious effort into finding your surgeon.
• Don't go to a practitioner from a medical system that doesn't include surgery in its curriculum - for instance, acupuncture or homeopathy. An M. D. or an M. S. should be the basic qualification you look for.

And now the dos:
• Do consult your family physician. Tell him the technique you're looking to get done; and listen to his advice and recommendations: he knows the men in the field. He may have seen many of them at work; he knows who's a technical wiz, who overcharges, and who rejects candidates from time to time - a good sign in a cosmetic surgeon. (You'll learn why in a later chapter).
• Do speak to others, who you know, have undergone the same procedure - by no means an easy thing since cosmetic surgery is one of the best-kept secrets of men and women. But if you're lucky to be able to talk to such persons, you'll get first-hand reports of different surgeons' skills - which goes far beyond just their qualifications on paper.
• Do contact a professional body, such as the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery or the Indian Association of Cosmetic Surgery, for recommendations. Membership in this body is a good sign because it offers board certification. Unqualifed and unethical practitioners are automatically weeded out. The Association has its offices in big cities.
      When you contact them, mention the kind of procedure you intend to undergo: in our age of super-specializations, some surgeons have more experience and/or skill in some procedures than in others. If the Association knows your precise requirements, it can guide you better.
The surgeon's expertise is, however, only one of the levels at which you need to check him out. The other is how comfortable you feel with him. A cosmetic surgeon is part counsellor-cum-confidante. If you have taken even a vague, but distinct, dislike to him in your very first meeting, that's a good enough reason not to select him. After all, the hand that shook yours across the table, will soon be holding a scalpel, and you'd like to feel that this person is your friend.
      Even if you feel at ease with him, don't let that stop you from meeting other cosmetic surgeons, Take your time before you finally decide: after all, this is elective surgery, not an emergency operation.
      Your mind will be bursting with questions you'd like to ask the surgeon you're meeting for the first time: put those questions into words! Don't be afraid to ask him, first about his qualifications and experience. Although there are absolutely no guarantees in this field, and even the most reputed surgeon has had his share of misses along with the hits, your chances of a successful outcome rise with the expertise and experience of the surgeon you select.
      Once you've picked him, talk some more. You'll have your share of fears and anxieties about the operation, and this is no time to be macho. Remove that bullet from between your teeth and tell your doctor how you feel. The experience of doctors is that, the more overtly worried a patient is, the better he tends to do later when it comes to things like tolerating pain after surgery. Ask your doctor about how you need to prepare for the surgery, as well as what you can expect in the aftermath. It's amazing how emotionally therapeutic it is to know something is going to happen rather than being surprised by it. Being told, for example, that your skin will be a little numb after surgery is a lot different from waking up and suddenly realizing you can't feel the left side of your face.

THE NEW-LOOK YOU

      And now for the most important question of all: what will you look like after cosmetic surgery? Earlier, doctors had rather unsatisfactory methods of giving you a sneak preview: inking in alterations on your photograph, drawing rough-and-ready 'before' and 'after' sketches, or verbally describing what you could expect. Because of this imperfect communication, several patients ended up feeling sorely dissatisfied and cheated, when the results were out : their expectations had been quite different!
      Today, the communication chasm has been dramatically bridged by that wonderful instrument of precision: the computer. Using it, a cosmetic surgeon can produce 'before' and 'after' images of his prospective client right there in his consulting room, at the first sitting itself. First, a video camera captures and projects duplicate images of the patient on the computer screen. Then, keeping one image constant, the cosmetic surgeon electronically alters features on the other image: removing under-chin fat, soothing out wrinkles, changing nose shape, lifting eyelids, and so on, to give the client the closest approximation to what he can expect post-operation. A scrupulous surgeon will, of course, not allow his imagination to get the better of him by producing absurd or exaggerated computer modifications that are not realistically possible on the operating table.
      As a matter of routine, the cosmetic surgeon will also take "before" photographs of the body part on which surgery is scheduled to be done (where necessary, both front and profile shots); after the surgery he will take 'after' shots so that you can see the alteration - and sometimes the virtual transformation - that has been achieved. The camera, as stated at the beginning, does not lie!