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Liner Notes
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Body
& Soul
Facial Plastic Surgery and Its Effects on the
Voice with Babak Azizzadeh, MD
Dr. Azizzadeh is a Board Certified, Harvard trained Facial Plastic Surgeon,
specializing exclusively in facial plastic surgery. As a clinical faculty of the UCLA
School of Medicine, Dr. Azizzadeh is actively involved in teaching facial plastic surgery
to residents and medical students. In addition to his busy surgical practice, Dr.
Azizzadeh has also been actively involved in several humanitarian causes such as the
Medical Missions for Children (MMFC) and the R.O.S.E. Fund (Regaining One’s
Self-esteem), a national non-profit organization committed to ending violence against
women and children by assisting survivors in regaining their self-esteem. He has operated
on many famous faces. Dr. Azizzadeh's website is http://www.facialplastics.info/
COSMETIC SURGERY AND TEENS OR CHILDREN
MBADC: What are your recommendations for teenagers who want to have
surgery? I always heard don’t do anything until you’re maybe 19 so that all the
structures are finished growing. But what is the recommendation now?
BA: That’s not necessarily true. The two main common procedures
teenagers do are the ears—actually they’re not teenagers, they’re between
like 5 and 10 year-olds that get teased, they get called names in school, socially
they’re outcasts…I mean, it really affects growing up for them, and it really
affects them at school and their social structure. So I highly, highly recommend kids that
are being teased or unhappy to do surgery on them. They’re really low-risk
operations, they’re short operations, and patients almost uniformly do well. The
other big operation that teenagers do is rhinoplasty. That’s when I think you need to
wait. For women, you need to wait probably ‘til they’re 14, and for boys until
they’re about 16, and at that point the cartilages of the bone don’t really
change anymore and won’t have any effect on their growth or on the way they look. So
in terms of physiology, at the age of 14 for girls, 16 for boys.
When it comes to the reason why they want to have the surgery, is it that the kids want to
have the surgery, or their parents want them to have the surgery? And that’s why I
spend not just one consultation, I spend three consultations with both the teenagers and
their parents, and sometimes I even ask the parents to leave the room so that I can get
more information from the teenager. Because a lot of times it’s the parents who want
their child to have the surgery and the child is not bothered by it. Definitely when it
comes to teenagers, you have to be very, very careful. But it makes sometimes a lot of
difference. Like myself--I was teased so much—I actually broke my nose. I had a
really crooked nose. And I was teased so much in high school, but I didn’t do
anything about it ‘til—I was in medical school when I finally got my nose
straightened.
MBADC: What percentage of your patients are teenagers, would you say?
BA: For the rhinoplasty population, I’d say 30 to 40 percent are
teenagers. That’s generally the time period when most people have rhinoplasty.
They’re between 16 and 20. Overall, I would say about 15-20 percent are teenagers.
It’s not an insignificant number.
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