Peter Abramson, MD describes what takes place during a rhinoplasty consultation:
A rhinoplasty consultation is probably the most important part of the nose reshaping procedure.
Rhinoplasty is one of my favorite procedures that I do because the patients are some of my most educated patients. They usually know quite a bit about the procedure, even the anatomy, and they ask very intelligent questions. My teenagers tend to be some of the most intelligent patients because they have to convince their parents that it’s the right thing to do.
When we sit down for a rhinoplasty consultation, there are a number of things we do during that time period. First of which, is to discuss you, your goals, as well as to go over, with the patient, a complete medical history, and make sure that an elective procedure is appropriate and if there are some medical challenges, that we can address those appropriately and make sure that the patient is as safe as possible to undergo the procedure. We usually do our procedures at our outpatient center, and I’ll mention that a little bit later.
The rest of the consultation we do, involves an examination, where I look at the outside of the nose as well as the inside of the nose to make sure that if we are going to change the shape of the nose that we’re going to maintain a really good airway, or even make it better than it had been before. Sometimes there are baseline difficulties with breathing either because of previous surgery, trauma or just difficulties breathing from a medical condition such as allergy and those need to be evaluated well prior to surgery. Some patients also have noticed that they have difficulty with sleeping at night or other issues that either they or their family has noticed.
After that’s completed, what we’ll do is usually a imaging consultation. And in the imaging consultation we’ll proceed with taking photographs and looking at the nose and the patient’s facial proportions from side views, frontal views, and other views as needed. Many times patients aren’t used to seeing themselves in very clinical pictures, but it’s really telling and we can discuss things very objectively. We also have a computerized program that allows us to change the shape of the nose right in front of the patient’s eyes so they can see and help me with communicating their goals and their efforts, in terms of what they would like to see as a final result. Many times the objectives are exactly as I see them to be. Sometimes they aren’t, and we need to discuss more so that we both meet the goals that we feel are appropriate and match the patient.
Afterwards, at that point, my patient care coordinator will sit down with the patient and go over some of the time scheduling and other issues and if there’s insurance involved then she can help with that as well.
Peter Abramson, MD is board certified by the American Board of Otolaryngology, and the American Board of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
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