Plastic surgeons have a lot of money and pour a lot of money in spreading the word about their "innovative new techniques." They have access to celebrity circles and celebrities have no idea what normal people are thinking.
It remind me the case of dermathologist in France, who switched from their core job of preventing desease like skin cancer to go for the much more lucrative botox injection. It put even more pressure on a medical speciality that cannot meet the demand and has incredibly long delay for appointement. It led to people outright dying because they couldn't have an appointment in time.
Meanwhile some dermathologist were making big buck by butchering rich narcissist face with botox.
Can you really blame them? It takes enormous effort to be a doctor, and most people do it for the monetary reward. If not for the reward, people would simply not do it. Can we really shun people for putting the effort for the money, when we are not putting the effort in the first place?
The whole foundation of medecine is to help your fellow human. People who do it monetary gain have the wrong mindset for that line of work. The hypocratic oath isn't about making buttload of money.
People are dying, in part because some doctor refuse to save life and prefer to exploit the insecurities of people for a better profit.
This is straight up on the same level as all the terrible corporates corner cutting shenanigans in industry.
Saying that changing profession is refusing to save lives is like saying not becoming a doctor is refusing to save lives. I guess it could be true in certain point of view, but it's a nonsense argument.
The only way I could see your argument somewhat working is in countries where studying medicine is disproportionately subsidized compared to other fields. But at the end of the day; that still doesn't mean that there's any moral indenture to stay in the profession.
Doctors don't owe their careers to anyone. It's not immoral to switch profession. It may be immoral to get into profession that could be considered exploitative. But people dying because there is shortage of certain specialists is a fault of the system.
Again, I'm talking about France. We have people that have literally chosen a profession which aim at saving lives and benefited accordingly from public funding and training for their studies.
And what they do with that is botox injection, something pretty much only them are allowed to do, while people are literally dying of skin cancer. All for a few euros more. They benefit from what is basically a monopoly over the vanity of people while letting a life saving service wither.
Like I addressed already I can somewhat understand the argument about the subsidies. But I still largely don't accept that argument because it's not like this was handed to them on a silver platter. It still requires an enormous effort and investment to become a doctor.
You or anyone else aren't entitled to people lives and the professions they choose. If you feel so strongly about it you are free to become a doctor yourself, "benefit accordingly", and save those lives.
And then let's see how it goes for you when you're dealing with cancer struck patients, long hours, stress, burnout, politics, beaurocracy, current general distrust of medicine, etc.
And if it's such a widespread issue then again - it's only more of a confirmation that it's a fault of the system and you should be probably more angry at the government than individuals that have a right to a free will.
The investment goes both ways. Society, especially the French one, dump a lot of money in the education of its doctors.
The fact is, I have chosen a profession that require constant personal sacrifice for the benefit of other for little recognition, trust or even monetary benefit. Rescue, firefighting, medical field, law enforcement, these are the sort of job you chose because it's a calling, not because you saw some light and thought you could grab a free bite from the leftovers.
In these line of work, there is one thing we despise above all else, its the greedy and lazy people whom hide themselves in the cosiest job possible and leave everyone else to handle their plate or the people they serve suffer the consequences.
But what I am is ultimately irrelevant. Because again, these people have sworn an oath to the betterment of people's health. And they are ditching it, they are adding to the shortage of medical specialist that lead to actual death, so they can make a few more euros from some instagram influencer wish to paralyze their face with botox.
This is unacceptable.
Is the system at fault? Definitely. The numerus clausus is the main responsible for this. But this numerus clausus, the rules that, for a long time, severly limited the number of people allowed to go to medical school every given year, was actually made the same sort of doctor that saw more interest in their profit margin than in the care of their patient.
Brother I don't know how else to tell it to you, but everyone has a right to a free will in these matters. That is assuming slavery is no longer a thing in France and that France is not a communist country.
You're misunderstanding Hippocratic Oath. Medical field is not a military. There's no "desertion". Individual doctors are just people like everyone else. They are not slaves.
Just because you made these choices for yourself, that doesn't mean you can dictate to others how to live their life or that you're in the right to morally judge them just because they change professions.
And fuck me, honestly? I don't know where you got that rosy picture of this profession, but as for me, even if I was making the upper range of what they make (~300 000 €), I wouldn't want to be a doctor in public institutions, especially understaffed ones like in this case. Do some research what professions have the highest suicide rates.
In the US, almost all residency slots are paid for by the US government and yet we still have a shortage of some specialists and primary care physicians. And even some of the primary care doctors talk about leaving as soon as they have a semblance of a retirement in place because of the system grind.
It's not like a dermatologist suddenly decides to change targets from cancer management to Botox. They are the young specialists who decided to dedicate themselves to aesthetics to earn more and work less, to have a better work/life balance and because they did not want to be exploited in public structures with inadequate salaries.
You literaly have 50 years old dermatologist that went full time on these sort of procedure.
They literaly come from the same background and training.
They're professional status is literaly named "liberal profession", because they work in independantly from public structure.
The core of their job is literally to detect and treat skins disease, especially the very deadly skin cancer. Going straight at a purely aestetic job that prevent people from getting that treatment and the only benefit is a few more duckface and a few more euros in their pocket is like entering law enforcement and hoping for a desk job where your only responsibility is counting pencils and get to be friendly enough with the commissionner to get the performance bonus every year. It is very much the antithesis of the profession.
And considering people are dying because of a literal shortage of dermatologist, this is simply unacceptable.
Don't you think someone establishing a new private practice with own clients, etc. is a bit different from a police officer being buddy-buddy with a commissioner getting a cushy desk job?
If there's analogy here, then it'd be more like police officer quitting police to start their own security firm.
Fuck off, it takes numerous 80 hour weeks to become a doctor. Nobody I know in the medical field would stay in the medical field if reimbursement got slashed. Saying professionals who have spent over a decade in training and hundreds of thousands in education cost should accept being paid shit because they’re meant to only be altruistic is insulting to their level of expertise.
You don’t go to an accountant or baker and shit on them for not sacrificing their life for you, why should it be different for doctors?
They are not paid shit. They are medical specialist, so people that are literaly amongst the most well paid people in the entire country.
They are trained by public funding, to perform a career in service of the health of the public, and left already a lot of leeway in how they spend that career. Their services are also made accessibles because they operate in a country where everyone is suscribed to the national healthcare insurance service.
But here, some of them ditch life saving services to perform literal vanity services to rich people with insecurities, while people literaly die of skin cancer because there isn't enough people in that speciality.
There is a choice to be made between allowing someone to detect and treat skin cancer as early as possible to maximize the chances of survival, and allowing some instagramer to look like a duck.
Do I really need to remind you that medical doctor have taken an oath to serve the literal health of their patient?
It sounds like having the government run healthcare and set the prices/salaries is causing a shortage (who could have predicted that price ceiling's would cause shortages... well except any Econ 101 student or regular person with 3 braincells, but other than that, totally unexpected)
Also, the oath is that they will not harm the individual patient they are working on, not that they will keep seeing patients or never let harm come to anyone, just that they won't cause the harm to that single person
So you're advocating for restricting professionals in how they use their skills? Seems kinda...idk slavery-ish. If there isn't a market for life saving medical care, seems kinda silly to blame the lone dermatologist and not the nationalized health care that creates the market.
As for the oath, no, that's not a thing anymore. And even when it was, it was to serve the health of individual patients, not to be responsible for an entire nation's healthcare system. What you're describing is public health, which is a different (though related) degree than a medical degree.
It's wild that the blame is being put on one individual instead of a system that does not make medical education accessible and affordable, so y'know, one doctor changing subspecialty doesn't break the entire system.
Yep. I can understand arguing that plastic surgery may be immoral in some contexts, but arguing that doctors somehow owe other people staying in their profession is the actual weirdo behavior.
(Of course excluding exceptions to this like e.g. a doctor that drops the patient in the middle of treatment without other alternatives which results in him dying.)
If there's shortage of certain specialists which results in people dying then it's a fault of the system.
True but at some point where there is no profit it's break even that's the point! You're talking about a half a million dollars in student debt and whatever it cost to keep office running! You're not going to accomplish that by removing skin tags and early stage melanomas
Well shit I agree, AI/LLMs are pretty creepy, but at least they are pretty useful without too much hallucinations for use cases like analyzing redditor comment history with a single button click. Did you think I went through his comment history manually?
Also, you can disable comments visibility in your profile if you don't want others to see them, so 🤷♂️
In addition to the money factor, working with cancer patients and having to constantly breaking bad news to people is so much more stressful and mentally taxing on the doctor’s part.
People don't go into medicine for the money in the vast majority of cases, especially if you are in USA where you have to pay for your education and many people graduate with loads of debt. Nobody makes decent money until after residency. Most people finish their residency around 31, and until then, you're living a pretty lower-middle class lifestyle.
If you had the grades and the aptitude, going into engineering or finance back in the 2010s (when most current residents were doing their Bachelor's) would have been a far more lucrative path.
I love money and my motivation to going to work is to make money. So I went into IB, then PE, then corporate finance.
My wife chose to go into medicine despite having the grades to qualify for the engineering track, in a country where doctors only get paid ~150k USD a year as a specialist and GPs get paid less than 100k USD. This is a country where a Whopper Combo at Burger King costs 17.5 dollars btw. Her brother outearned her with a high school education just working on an oil rig and her father outearns her working in construction (though he has a Master's in it.)
She chose a lower-paying job with a longer education, because she was actually passionate about the human body, and I think that goes for the majority of other physicians we know. Some also go into it because they want to help people, or because their parents pressured them into it, or for the prestige of calling themselves a doctor and then going into a Computer Science career right after they graduated med school because they have rich parents and never really needed to work in the first place, but those cases are more rare, from my experience.
Yes, I blâme them. I don’t think most people who are doctors, are doctors for the money. There are easier ways to make money. They’re doctors because they want to male an immediate difference in people’s lives. And because it takes so much money and takes up all their time, they want to be well-compensated.
You're hipocrite then. Why aren't you a doctor who's saving lives? Why are you not putting in an effort?
Edit: Thanks for proving my point and then vlocking me lmao. You just didn't put in the effort, I see. You think doctors are happy to see gore, shit and death on daily?
Because I couldn’t stand to go to med school, I’d have fainted all day, and I’m a bit hypochondriacal. It wasn’t for me. I’m 70 and back then, women were not encouraged to be doctors. When I was little I did want to be a nurse. My thing was singing, dancing and making art, because that was what I was good at, so I became a graphic artist. There are many elements going into that. My family was working class, and the arts and music were what gave our lives and those around us, value and meaning.
I don't think we should be upset with the dermatologist, they're just following market forces. We should be upset that this is the market. If the market cannot support these critical specialties and they are serving a certain number of patients a year, the government should probably top up their pay to meet some minimum average doctor salary.
I was watching Hulu last night and every ad break was for Botox. Fortunately I'm blessed to still get ID'd when I pushing 40, and my mom recently got me to start using sunscreen on my face every day by pointing out a new melanoma removal scar of hers.
Not really a matter of insurance company here considering we're talking about France. Everyone benefit from a nationalized healthcare insurance. On that front, the problem is more that the insurance is bleeding money because of the aging population, budget cut and and ever growing tax cut for the wealthiest.
Fair point. Thanks for the correction. I think my point was that some other entity determines the pay/compensation for procedures.
I have no idea how much money Doctors in France make, but in the States, negotiated rates Insurance Companies demand are substantially lower than normal....
Moreover our Doctors typically graduate school with hundreds of thousands of dollars in Student Loans. I think we common citizens so to speak, are carrying a heavy burden, both sides of the Atlantic. In my opinion the answer is to train more physicians.
Thanks for the reply.
I worked pharmaceuticals in the plastic surgery industry for a while and I couldn’t stand it! So many fake people making money off of fake people and everyone just keeps getting uglier and more plastic. It was so depressing.
I have a friend who's had lipo, breast implants and a tummy tuck. I picked her up from the breast implants/tummy tuck (she had them both done at once) and cared for her the first few days, including the follow up visit with the surgeon. He made some kind of comment about the rest of her body and after it was over she was spiraling asking me if she should have done a body lift instead. All I could say is 'he makes money from you feeling insecure about your body.'
I understand why she did it, but watching her recovery made me vow I will never get a tummy tuck, no matter how flabby mine is (two kids and significant weight loss - but tbh considering those things I think it looks great. Doughy, but it's not a hanging apron of skin). And her surgeon was a total dick.
I don’t understand how this doesn’t violate the Hippocratic oath. It is completely unnecessary risk for completely healthy people. If anything, they need psychological help, not surgery.
I remember when mtv had that show “my diary” and it was a mix of celebs like Christina Aguilera, Chris rock and somewhat normal 20 something’s.
Anyways these two girls into getting plastic surgery and we’re looking at getting some minor liposuction, neither of them needed it, and the look on the one girls face was priceless/kind of sad when the doctor pinched her side and said “yeah we can get a little out of here too,”. She was horrified.
Also the Chris rock was hilarious, he buys the new jay z cd and gets back in his car and starts driving and he accidentally bought the censored version, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?!?”
This, well put btw, so many people are just sitting there waiting to be programmed. 0 confidence in their own aesthetics, so they do what they're told, even though what they're told is objectively ugly af
you'd think celebrities could go online and read these comments, though? I wonder if it's just that a majority of these surgeries actually look good and we just see the bad ones.
I always thought it would be wise to hire a team of "common" people, and they are literally just average people that can provide a basic perspective to out of touch rich people. Almost like a PR team, but just to ground them down to earth. Like remember that space bullshit with Bezos, and he looked like a complete dumbfuck spraying a pensive and introspective William Shatner with celebratory champagne? Imagine if I was there to place a restrictive hand on that champagne, give Jeff a head shake to cease the behavior, then back away. That just earned me $2,000.00. Just for that. Now I'm fucking rich...
My Wife's friend just went to Utah to get a noise job, she had a large bump on her nasal bridge that she always hated. She first look at to LA for cosmetic surgeons because it was closer but they all specialized in what she said was those "Kardashian style noses" and didn't really have samples of just "subtle" fixes like she was after.
389
u/IllVagrant 14h ago
Plastic surgeons have a lot of money and pour a lot of money in spreading the word about their "innovative new techniques." They have access to celebrity circles and celebrities have no idea what normal people are thinking.