TED Talk: "Saving faces: A facial surgeon's craft"

In his TED talk entitled “Saving faces: A facial surgeon’s craft”, Ian Hutchison describes the facial reconstruction surgical techniques used in the UK and how it changes lives.  Hutchison begins by pointing out that different age groups have reconstruction done for different reasons and the process they go through.  For example, Hutchison showed a young girl with a benign blood vessel tumor coming out of her nose that was slowly killing her by essentially soaking up all the blood from the rest of her face.  The only reason she had facial reconstruction surgery was to save her life.  On the other hand, a girl in her early twenties, with an extended lower jaw, had facial reconstruction surgery because everyone was continually asking her if she was angry.  For her, facial reconstruction was the only way to be seen as the person she really is.  Hutchison then explains the effects that can happen to a person having facial surgery.  Not only is there a significantly large risk for infections within the body, there are also psychological side effects.  After having reconstructive surgery, your face doesn’t look exactly how it did before.  As Hutchison says, “facial reconstruction [and transplants] is not live saving surgery; it is a quality of life surgery”.

Personally, I really enjoyed the angle Hutchison took when talking about facial reconstruction.  I like how he mentioned body dysmorphic disorder to differentiate between elective facial plastic surgery and facial reconstruction.  Even though this was only a side note made, I believe it is very important because body dysmorphic disorder is a physiological disorder when people only see the flaws in themselves so they seek out surgery to change their appearance, where facial reconstruction is mainly for people who have a life threatening tumor, or have had an accident to try to get their quality of life back.  For example, in the TED talk, there was a man who had the center section of his lower jaw shot off of his face.  To fix this, Hutchison made a jaw implant to attempt to give the man his life back.  The reconstruction was successful; however, because of the lack of skin on his face, the surgeons had to use a patch of skin from the man’s back to patch up the incision.  Because of this, the man has a darker, rougher piece of skin on the tip of his chin.  Because of the reconstruction this man was able to get his life back, besides the side effect of the skin patch.  All in all, I really enjoyed Hutchison’s view on facial reconstruction and the process he goes through to achieve the best end result possible.

http://www.ted.com/talks/iain_hutchison_saving_faces