Worried that your breast implants won’t be the size that you want when you wake up after surgery? Then just don’t go under anesthesia in the first place! This shocking article that I read in the New York Times exposes a new method of breast augmentation in which the patient is awake during the entire surgery!

Foregoing anesthesia allows the patient to watch the progress of the surgery and to decide if the implants are the right size before they start the recovery. If I were the kind of person to want this kind of surgery in the first place, I’m pretty sure that watching it take place would make me sick to my stomach, but some people prefer to have control over the situation I guess.

The problem is that some of the doctors performing these awake surgeries are not cosmetic surgeons. One doctor has developed a two-day seminar that some ob/gyn and family doctors have taken. A board-certified plastic surgeon typically does between five and eight years of training after medical school.

There are also issues with the concept of giving patients a choice during surgery. Although they are awake, patients are still heavily sedated and their judgment is definitely impaired. Also, the article doesn’t talk about how accurate decisions are based on seeing the implants during surgery. With any cosmetic surgery, it often takes weeks before the swelling goes down and the patient can see full results. I would imagine that how a patient sees herself on the table would be very different from the end result.

Source: New York Times