Is Aesthetic Surgeryan Art?

The surgical branches of medicine are, without exception, branches in which the basic techniques developed by the masters before us are learned at the end of a difficult training process.

Plastic and Aesthetic Surgery, unlike other surgical branches, is a branch that deals with a wide variety of operations in almost every anatomical region. In this respect, Plastic and Aesthetic Surgeons are at the same time good hand surgeons, microsurgeons (surgeons who perform nerve repair, vessel repair and tissue transfers) and maxillofacial surgeons. No operation performed is the same as the previous one. How the operation will be performed is shaped as much by the surgeon's surgical skill, clinical experience and aesthetic vision as by the problem in the patient itself. However, the long training we receive and the difficult operations we perform do not make us artists.

First of all, an artist does not create his art to please someone. He reflects what comes from within, what he feels. Sometimes he produces works beyond the era in which he lives. He can shape his canvas, clay or marble without being bound by any rules. The works he creates are independent of time. His works continue to exist, after artists die, in the form the artist created.

As Plastic Surgeons, we are all responsible to our patients in the operations we perform. We have a moral and legal responsibility towards the patients we shape with the operations we perform. We cannot operate purely according to our own taste. We do not have the right to apply every technique that comes to mind on a patient. Although we make our surgical decisions with our aesthetic foresight, we must always base them on scientific facts and act within the concept of evidence-based medicine. In addition, nothing we do in Plastic Surgery can resist time. As our patients age, signs of aging develop even in the best aesthetic results.

For all these reasons, we are not artists but craftsmen. We are people who are obliged to master our work and give the best service to our patients, and who are successful to the extent of our mastery.

No surgeon can achieve success with God-given talent alone. He must develop the manual skill within his talent through hard work, and, as every doctor should, renew and develop his medical knowledge by following current publications. Even though Plastic Surgeons push the limits of medicine, always taking these limits further and further, in the end they are people practising medicine. We achieve our successes not by posing in front of sculptures and paintings, but by showing our patients maximum care, producing solutions to the problems we encounter in our patients, and following innovations and developing our surgical technique. Although artistic activities shape a person's aesthetic vision, they do not develop surgical technique.