Interview with Dr. Jon Turk
In this interview with Dr. Jon Turk, we learned that most people seek surgery because they are unhappy with one of their physical traits that they were born with or that occurred as a result of the aging process. He told us that plastic surgery can boost self esteem because the patients who undergo successful surgeries feel better about the way they look. When people have a trait that is not aesthetically pleasing, it may deter their confidence, causing them to doubt their identity. Dr. Turk said that more people are coming to him with a request to retain their ethnic identity by not altering a culturally characteristic feature of their face too much. The most common surgery that he performs is rhinoplasty, commonly known as a nose job. Surgery can be inadvisable when a person has a false perception of an abnormality regarding a physical trait. In this case, the trait might not even need correction. Dr. Turk also said that a person's actual identity is rarely changed through surgery. His patients will not question who they are after a procedure. However, by improving a characteristic, the way a patient perceives them self and the way others perceives him or her can lead to a better sense of self worth. He went on to say that teenagers are affected more by surgeries. This is mostly due to the fact that they had not yet established an identity of their own so they were previously unsure of themselves. Dr. Turk told us an interesting story about when he was approached by the FBI to completely change the appearance of a woman who was entering the witness protection program. However, this type of procedure is very rare. Patients today do not want to be turned into someone else. Because the nose is the central part of the face, rhinoplasties can completely transform the way a person looks. This type of procedure has lost popularity due to peoples' desire to improve their appearance without looking like a totally different person. His advice to people who are looking into surgery was to seek counsel with a plastic surgeon to decide whether a physical trait that could use improvement or if there is nothing wrong with it.