FAQ
What determines the cost of plastic surgery?
The cost of plastic surgery can vary even for the same procedure performed using the same method on different patients. This largely depends on how many risk factors a particular patient has and what materials they decide to use with the plastic surgeon (implants, fillers, etc.). It is always more complex to operate on patients with significant excess weight, those who have had previous surgeries, and those who smoke, as smoking increases the risk of complications. Sometimes, individual anatomical features of the patient complicate the surgery and increase the risk, which, of course, also raises the costs of the surgery and postoperative care.
What is the difference between aesthetic, reconstructive, and plastic surgery?
Plastic, aesthetic or cosmetic, and reconstructive surgeries are essentially very closely related disciplines that overlap in many aspects, making it difficult and sometimes pointless to distinguish them. The word “plastic” comes from a Greek word meaning the art of modeling or sculpture. This means that plastic surgery techniques are essentially designed to model the human exterior, change, restore, or enhance appearance. Tissue plastic surgery is needed in cases where tissue integrity must be restored after scar removal, tumor removal, burns, chronic wounds, as well as for aesthetic indications.
The essence of reconstructive or restorative surgery is the restoration of function, with appearance being secondary. Reconstructive surgeries may aim to restore various body functions lost due to injuries, burns, cancer, or other reasons, such as finger movements. However, one of the most important functions of the human body is aesthetic, so reconstructive surgery also includes operations where the function prior to illness or injury is not restored, but efforts are made to restore the appearance of the organ (restoring a breast does not aim to restore milk production, just as restoring an ear does not improve hearing).
The goal of cosmetic or aesthetic surgery is to “improve” appearance, so in this case, the patient undergoing surgery is often completely healthy (in the narrow sense of health). Improvement of appearance in this case is understood as a change where a person’s appearance is altered to be closer to established societal norms or certain ideals. However, when looking at health in a broader sense, it is often not possible to say that aesthetic surgeries are performed on completely healthy individuals, as health is understood not only as the absence of disease but also as complete social well-being and, of course, a sense of happiness.
What is the risk of aesthetic surgeries?
The operational risk is very individual and depends on both the patient’s overall health condition and the scope of the surgery. Generally, if the patient does not have serious comorbidities and only one body area is operated on (for example, just the nose), the likelihood of complications is very low. In such cases, minor complications occur in <5%, and more serious ones in about 1% of operated patients.
