You Should Get to Know Who's Treating You!
Knowledge protects you. Sorry to say it, but this is the truth: The unfortunate fact is that there is a sad state of medical economy in the middle of a flourishing business economy. The HMOs have slashed reimbursements to all doctors who grapple with high overheads in the office. So doctors look for solutions. One big one is in cosmetic surgery. The field comes with cash payment with no real fee schedules and no HMO administrative expense.Welcome to the world of Newcomers, Wannabees and Pretenders. Forget about morals. Any doctor can call him/her-self a plastic or cosmetic surgeon or at least act like one. And they do, in droves. With nothing more than a sense of marketing and hiring talent. Some doctors set up multiple "profit centers" and administrate the action.
In Sonoma County, there are several doctors who come from as far away as the eastern States for a few days at a time to harvest the local largesse. Others with no real cosmetic surgery background do a variety of treatments (with the help of non-physician talent) so far away from their real fields of knowledge that it's tragic. The tragedy is with the medical consumer, the guy or gal taking the medical risks, and paying good money for the privilege.
How do you deal with it? Make an in-depth inquiry. Look beyond the brag lists and the puffery. Doctors can buy or inherit glitz and show. But they can't treat you adequately without the skills specific to treat your condition, without a trained and inherent cosmetic sense, and without the ability to handle the subtleties of problems that can arise. They have to be trained. For years and years.
Talk to multiple doctors. Look into their eyes when you talk with them. Follow your intuition and use our Comparative Checklist under the essay titled "Not All Beauty and Health Specialty Practices Are the Same!" further down on this website page. It's your appearance and health on the line. Be cautious.
Jumping off the pedestal
Contrary to what anyone tries to sell you, doctors do not have control over nature. We do study what nature and tissues are all about in beauty, health and disease. We surgeons apply non-surgical treatments and create controlled surgical wounds over the years in thousands of patients. We set up the best healing environment before and after treatment. We deal skillfully with the expected minor events which follow most treatments. We use a variety of time-tested techniques to guide the process. But, honestly, beyond that, the process is out of our hands. That's why you need an expert from the start.
Trumpet blowing
Non-plastic surgeons have skills that approximate ours but with less predictability. How can we say that? The answer comes from a little trumpet-blowing. Credentialing and experience gives Dr. Kivett a particularly wider perspective over issues related to the beauty and health of the skin and its contents in depth. Dr. Kivett is one of only a couple of physicians jointly American board certified in plastic surgery and dermatology. He also is board certified in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery. Dr. Kivett was a busy cosmetic dermatologic surgeon in the 1980s with the skills and yet the limits of a dermatologistís background. He had a certain set of manual and intellectual tools that he could only use with narrowly selected patients.
The Dream
After additional thought, then, two life goals began to emerge as The Dream. One was for Dr. Kivett to offer his community the full range of cosmetic and reconstructive surgical treatments. This would allow him to meet his second goal. He had left behind many children and adults with harelips, cleft palates and other birth defects during four years dermatology practice in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. He knew he didn't have the skills to help them. To do that he had to get the full training experience of 120 hour work weeks for eight years. Thus, his wife and he gave up a busy Santa Rosa practice. They devoted those years of their lives to bring the Dream to reality. And so the Dream became real. The full range of high quality treatments were now there for patients locally, right in Sonoma County. This allowed Dr. Kivett to travel overseas to surgically improve the lives of afflicted poverty-stricken children and adults. So, everybody won.
Skill upgrades
We all predict our own futures by creating them. We continuously evolve and improve. It's no different in cosmetic and reconstructive plastic surgery. Dr. Kivett makes it a habit of visiting cosmetic and reconstructive specialists whose skills are very good and very narrow in specific areas where Dr. Kivett desires extra knowledge. Over the past years he has taken time out of a busy office to visit the operating rooms of several internationally acclaimed cosmetic and reconstructive experts. That's at least as good as, if not better than, sitting in on a seminar.
Credentials
Is your cosmetic and reconstructive surgeon/specialist certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery? It's the bottom line and gold standard for cosmetic and reconstructive surgical care in today's world. It's one of the few reliable ways you can be assured of at least a certain basic quality of care.
Training name-dropping
Almost all doctors train in university centers, so don't let a list overly impress you. Dr. Kivett's list? Stanford, UCLA, UC Irvine, Dartmouth, New Jersey, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, etc. The whole point is that there is a standardization of training across the U.S. as a basic minimum and necessary requirement. Most good doctors meet, and then exceed, that minimum. And it's a lot of work.
Qualifications
You have got to be careful with the true qualifications of your doctor in today's times. With the HMOs and their cutbacks in reimbursements, doctors in specialty and even general practices have fled to cosmetic surgery to keep up their mortgage payments. It's not unusual for doctors (and we know quite a few doing this) to take a few days training or a weekend course or "change the focus" of their practice to cosmetic surgery from what they were really trained to do. Buyer beware! We could tell you some stories.
