The summer season will soon be drawing to a close, but the search for the perfect summer figure hasn’t necessarily slowed down. And while some may hope to get a body suitable for “Hot Girl Summer” by obtaining less expensive plastic surgery in a foreign country, an Atlanta-area cosmetic surgeon advises against it.
“One of the big trends now is for people to go overseas and get work done in other places because of cost, trying to save money,” Dr. Aaron Fletcher, who specializes in facial plastic surgery, explains to Atlanta Black Star on August 21. “I think the most important thing is to get a board-certified specialist and to carefully select based on their reputation, their before and after pictures and their bedside manner.”
Fletcher also noted that most plastic surgery that is elective is not covered by insurance and so patients largely have to pay the costs out of pocket.
It’s the high price point that has led many people to seek plastic surgeons who can perform popular procedures like butt implants outside of their home countries.
In 2015, Australian Evita Nicole Sarmonikas died of cardiac arrest at a hospital in a Mexicali, Mexico, hospital after getting butt implants. That October, south Londoner Joy Williams stopped breathing after being anesthetized in Thailand before undergoing the same procedure Sarmonikas sought.
But despite the stories of patients losing their lives from getting procedures overseas, Fletcher noted that there are qualified surgeons outside of the United States.
“The biggest drawback is once you leave their facility, you won’t have any follow-up,” explained the award-winning doctor, whose practice, the Georgia Center for ENT and Facial Plastic Surgery, is based in Stockbridge, Georgia. “If you were to come back to the States within a week or two of your surgery and there was something that you have a question about or something that went wrong, you have no longer any access to that facility or that service.”
And while patients may think they can easily get their surgery areas checked on by a domestic cosmetic surgeon, Fletcher, who has performed a nose job on “Growing Up Hip-Hop: Atlanta” star Jhonni Blaze, says not so fast. According to him, most surgeons would be reluctant to see a patient on whom they did not perform a procedure.
“It’s hard to find people that would be willing to deal with someone else’s complication,” he says. “Being distant from your surgeon or where it was done really puts you at a disadvantage if something happened in the post-operative period or if you had a complication.”
Such complications can include a change in the appearance of wounds as well as discharge of blood or pus, according to the MD, who has nearly a decade of experience under his belt. He states that severe pain is the biggest sign that “you probably need to be checked out.”
