I am a plastic surgeon.
A board certified plastic surgeon.
Yes, I am a real plastic surgeon certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery. I am also a cosmetic surgeon. I do not call myself a family practice doctor, dermatologist, or ENT- though many of those specialties call themselves plastic surgeons. If you want to see how someone trained, find out what their residency and board certification is. It cuts through all the trickery and deception.
What are the boards?
Each specialty has its board. Dermatology, Internal Medicine, Family Practice, Orthopedic Surgery, etc. Trickery abounds- there is no “cosmetic surgery” board, yet I found a website saying there is. The Mission Statement of The American Board of Plastic Surgery, Inc. is to promote safe, ethical, efficacious plastic surgery to the public by maintaining high standards for the education, examination, certification and maintenance of certification of plastic surgeons as specialists and subspecialists.
I sat for my first round of board exams after residency. First for the written test, and then two years later for the oral test. The oral boards are tough. You have to be in practice for a while, collect cases, and submit those cases. Then you submit some in incredible detail (with op notes, clinic notes, photos, even how you billed). If you pass these hurdles, you sit for the oral boards. At the oral exam, you meet with leaders in the field and are quizzed on your cases and a group of unknown cases, which you had the pleasure of seeing for the first time only minutes before. During this exam in the imaginary cases, every skin graft and flap you do will fail. You are guaranteed complication after complication until the examiners see how you handle adversity. They want to see what you have done in practice. They want to see how you think. Will you be a good surgeon? A safe surgeon? The true test of a good surgeon is not how you do on the cases which go well. It is how you do on the ones which don’t. My year, 20% of the doctors failed the oral boards. 20%. These doctors went to medical school, accredited plastic surgery fellowship programs, and passed the written test. It is tough.
I can’t believe how times flies. It has already been a decade. My original certification was to expire, so I recertified. I submitted all of my cases over a 6 month period. They check your hospital status, references, and other paramenters. When you pass this, you take a written test. We all take a general test- basic fundamentals of plastic surgery we should all know. And then we take a specialized test, where they tailor this part to what you actually do in practice. Over a decade in practice, your practice evolves. So hand doctors aren’t tested in depth on breast augmentations, and pediatric plastic surgeons aren’t tested on breast cancer reconstruction. My focus is cosmetic- breast, body, face. That is what I was tested on.
I am now board certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery until 2021.
The next time you’re at the doctor’s office, take a peek at those certificates hanging on the wall. Like gallons of milk, some of them are expiring.
For the first time since leaving medical school, many doctors are having to take tests to renew board certification in their fields — 147 specialties from dermatology to obstetrics.
Any doctor can deliver a baby, treat cancer, or declare himself a cardiologist. Certification means the doctor had special training in that field and passed an exam to prove knowledge of it.
They used to do this once and be certified for life. That changed in the 1990s — doctors certified since then must retest every six to 10 years to prove their skills haven’t gone stale.
For some specialists, like the doctors who push tubes into heart arteries to unclog blockages, this is the first year many are going through retesting.
Older doctors also are feeling the heat. More than a quarter of a million of them were “grandfathered” with lifetime certificates, but are being urged to retest voluntarily to show they still know their stuff.