Dealing with unhappy patients

More often than not, patients who have unrealistic expectation will always be unhappy with their plastic surgery results. Especially when the patients brings in a photo of her favorite celebrity and tells her surgeon to make a her an exact clone, the plastic surgeon will always be at a disadvantage of not fulfilling her requests.

So how we deal with a disgruntled patient? Dr. Richard Goode of Stanford University School of Medicine says the best defense is a good offense. He is the author of the article, "The unhappy patient following facial plastic surgery: What to do?" which appears in the May issue of the journal Facial Plastic Surgery Clinics of North America.

Dr. Good says that the best way to deal with unhappy patients is to have never operated on them in the first place.

"There are some patients you just want to avoid," said Goode. "If you can pick them out before surgery, that's the best."

Patients can get very angry, says Goode. There is even a death rate of plastic surgeons killed by unhappy patients. “They call you repeatedly, write you harassing letters, leave notes in your mailbox. They talk about you (not in a good way) at every bridge party, every social event. They may sue you. They go see other doctors and say how terrible you are."

Goode also shared that even though he was quite happy with the postoperative results of a certain patient, the latter can still get extremely angry since he or she may not really have realistic expectations in the first place.

It is very important that the patient goes through an initial interview since this is where the plastic surgeon can gauge if the patient has realistic expectations or not.

"Listen carefully to what they say," Goode wrote. "If you think they are unrealistic, tell them so.

"None of us wants to turn away patients, but I can give testimony that it is far better for your peace of mind to do so than to operate on someone you can never satisfy.”