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Understanding the Other Side of Cosmetic Surgery
By Jennifer Burns
Another issue is related to harm to the health of plastic surgery patients. Interestingly, even though laser procedures are generally regarded as being one of the most dangerous methods of plastic surgery, as much as 20 percent of all operations are carried out using this method surgery. The recovery process lasts for 10 days including the first 48 hours when face is burned. This simple, but effective example once again proves that people who decide to have a plastic surgery fail to objectively realize all potential health risks and long term consequences for their health to be realized in the future after the surgery.
Possible consequences of a plastic surgery include abnormal heart rhythm, brain damage, heart attack, stroke, blood clots, airway obstruction, temporary paralysis, and death. Other complications also include permanent loss of sensations and skin death. Going even further then this, when it comes to speaking about long term adverse effects on health, women who have had a plastic surgery in the past are very likely to need one in the future not just to keep the shape, but because there is no way back and situation only worsens as time flows. They loose health, time, money, but importantly, they loose own individuality and uniqueness.
The question that remains unanswered is how far can plastic surgery go? Are there any limits to self transformation? The controversy first swept across the world when a Swedish surgeon had amputated the limbs of two absolutely healthy men, who, in their words, had suffered from a medical condition widely known as apotemnophilia. The patients later on claimed that since birth they had desperately dreamt of living as amputees and felt psychologically uncomfortable in own bodies. Even though any surgery of a similar kind has been banned in the hospital, where Robert Smith worked, the effective legislature against such acts is still only to be passed in the future. The question is where the desire for self modification ends and the desire for disability starts? And is there actually a difference between the desires for self transformation at the cost of loosing self and a desire for disability?
Even though cosmetic surgery has traditionally come to denote non-therapeutic methods of changing appearances, cosmetic concerns are the very ones that constitute a desire of some people to have an amputation. The present tendency to view the body not as something given by nature, but barely as means for self expression of own individuality. Even though patients who are seeking cosmetic procedures now are not normally regarded as being mentally ill, yet I tend to support the view of many physicians that plastic surgery violates the basic principles of medicine – to not do harm to own body.
It should be further pointed out, that in the instant quest for happiness through self transformation patients, who are seeking cosmetic surgery, embrace virtually the same paradox as those people wishing to have their body parts amputated. Both groups of people are seeking to find the way to their authentic self or at least as they imagine themselves to be. Both, patients wishing to have their body part amputated and those in need of face transformation, are seeking beauty as an end in itself – so, is there essentially a difference between the two but, perhaps, in a way they perceive own beauty? I still wish to believe that there is.
We are ready to lose own identity and interchange it with an artificial one that does not exist in reality. So, is there any logic behind the decision to make a plastic surgery at all?
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