Why the cheapest flight can be the most expensive decision

Medical tourism is exploding. Open any app and there it is, a price that looks too good to be true, a before and after, and a comment section full of people asking how to book. I have seen posts that read like a menu board, a mummy makeover with everything listed out at some ridiculous price, and underneath it, comment after comment of “how do I book”. Surgery booked the way you would book a holiday. Plenty of those people turn out fine. But a lot of them are making one of the biggest decisions of their life on the two things that should count for the least, which are how cheap it is and how many followers the surgeon has.

Followers are not a credential

Start with the followers, because that is what fools the most people. Just because someone has a huge following and a glossy profile, that is not a reason to choose them. Someone can have hundreds of thousands of followers, operate live on camera, be the name everyone is booking with, and still be the last person who should be near you. There was a surgeon in the US who built exactly that kind of audience doing live operations online, people could not get enough of her, and the reputation behind the scenes was nothing like the one on screen. She does not hold a medical licence any more. The following was never proof of anything. It was marketing, and being good at marketing has nothing to do with being good in theatre.

Who is actually holding the knife

Then there is who is actually holding the knife. There are people online promising results they are not qualified to deliver at all. The one that stuck with me is a physician assistant in Las Vegas advertising that he can get you the same result as a tummy tuck with liposuction. He can't. If you need a tummy tuck there is no amount of lipo in the world that gets you there, and the only person who should be operating on you is a plastic surgeon. Not a physician assistant. Not a dermatologist who has started calling himself a cosmetic surgeon. A low price and a confident caption are not qualifications, no matter how good they look side by side.

The expensive street

People also read far too much into where a surgeon works. There is this idea that if a surgeon is on a famous, expensive street they must be safe, and that a whole country can be written off as risky. Neither one is true. There are superb surgeons in places people dismiss without a second thought, and very ordinary ones working out of the most prestigious addresses money can buy. A prestigious address is a rent cheque, not a credential.

The surgeons you have never heard of

And here is the part that catches everyone out. Some of the most sought-after surgeons alive are people the public has never heard of. Think of the surgeon the famous actually use, the one who turns out to be nobody anyone in the industry had even heard of, passed quietly around on private referral. Most of those surgeons are invisible online. They are brilliant at one thing and hopeless at being found. Type “best surgeon” and a city into a search bar and they will not be there, because being easy to find and being any good are two completely different talents. On top of that the whole space is now full of beauty brokers and people building businesses around sending you somewhere, which only adds to the noise.

A prestigious address is a rent cheque, not a credential.

What this is for

Cutting through all of that is the point of this. Not to sell you a surgeon, not to hand you off to a partner, because we have neither. To check that the person you are considering is genuinely a specialist in your procedure with nothing in their history that should worry you, and to put the quiet experts in front of you, the ones the feed will never show. You are the one who decides. We just make sure the loudest option is not the only one you ever get to see.

When it is your body, the cheap flight and the big following are the wrong things to trust. The right surgeon is worth the trouble of finding, and finding them is the whole of what we do.