Plastic Surgery: Gambling with Your Looks

This film documents the journey that a non-profit founder took from simply empathizing with unhappy national consumers and accidentally discovering a startling communication gap between cosmetic surgeon and patient.

This "little" clarification in semantics, apparently motivated the federal government to award 'Plastic Surgery Survivors Outreach and Support,'(PSSOS) their 501 (c) 3 official nonprofit rating for discovering an untapped niche under the federal education code.

The education is this:

Unless patients undergo plastic surgery for functional reasons, i.e., reconstruction, etc. the procedure is considered "elective" and "cosmetic" or "aesthetic."

Therefore, the patient is technically a "consumer" of the surgery ("services") and the "doctor" is the "service provider." This distinction becomes important if after seeing the results, the patient wants a "revision." Per the film, more often than not, if the patient seeks a revision or perceives a negative result, the surgeon dons his service provider hat and declares the surgery a success if no death or infection occurred. The asymmetries or negative perceptions by the patient of the results were waved away as "subjective."

Hence, social firestorms appeared on plastic surgery chat boards and this exciting phenomenon gave birth to the forerunners of social networking and eventual embryonic blogs were conceived.

Apparently,15 years ago, the cosmetic surgery arena was going through some serious growing pains. This film chronicled the PSSOS organization and the information exposed on its fledgling web site. PSSOS was very cutting edge. Its founders were pioneers and not I.T. people but brilliant visionaries. Three women joined hands across the nation from the midwest to California and presented invaluable information to cosmetic surgery consumers on a global basis.

Theirs was one of the first web sites to devise a member and password log-in, because of the controversial nature of the social issues discussed.

The PSSOS web site exposed that some doctors were using their "M.D." degree in any specialty (not necessarily relevant to plastic surgery) in order to capitalize on the money that could be gained for elective cosmetic surgery. For example, although not typical, a gynocologist or dermatologist could conduct liposuction or procedures they were not necessarily qualified for.

The term: "revisional plastic surgery" came into vogue, in part, because of the good job that PSSOS.org did with educating the public how to exercise more caution when choosing plastic surgeons.

This documentary is an excellent learning tool about consumerism in cosmetic surgery more than a decade ago, but it is also a MUST SEE for Internet History buffs in general!

The making of this fabulous film inadvertently documented how social issues of a significant nature were managed when networking on the Internet was first getting started.

It is my recommendation that not only should anybody considering plastic surgery watch this film, but that academia should absolutely show this film to students of Internet evolution.