Plastic surgery is not only about seems to be people"s wellbeing is at stake | Patrick Strudwick

John Harm as The Elephant Man (1980). Photograph: Allstar/BrooksFilm/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

The well being secretary, Jeremy Hunt, whose knowledge of medicine stretches virtually as far as David Cameron’s information of jellied eels, would like NHS surgeons to end performing “purely cosmetic perform” on sufferers. He hence faces a encounter-off with facial surgeons – for they know, as I do, that there is no this kind of point. Cosmetic surgery, like racism, is by no means purely skin deep. 1 wonders of course no matter whether the prolonged checklist of Conservative MPs with financial interests in personal health, which feasts on unregulated cosmetic perform, may have applied stress right here, but let us be charitable and presume Hunt is capable of “purely” independent considered, devoid of agenda. He is right to highlight the financial pressures on our overall health service. Nevertheless, like an idiot on a sun bed, he grasps short-term gain in denial of lengthy-term harm.

I have twice lain in hospital while NHS surgeons took to my encounter – paid for completely by taxpayers. The 1st event I was 18, two years soon after I went to my GP and told her my protruding ears, sticking out at 90 degrees, have been troubling me. I was struggling from depression and, what I now know to be body dysmorphia, and had been obtaining counselling given that I was 14 to deal with these. Psychotherapy has limits. I know this due to the fact soon after four many years of it I nevertheless could not stomach my look, and right after one particular easy process, and a fetching week-lengthy turban bandage, I felt transformed. No single event in my daily life has so boosted my self-esteem. My connection with my reflection grew to become manageable, even positive at times. I did not want additional therapy to be able to cope with mirrors. How considerably may possibly that have saved the NHS in cognitive behavioural treatment or psychodynamic psychotherapy?

On the 2nd occasion, two many years later on, I had been brutally attacked in my house by burglars who beat me to a blood-soaked pulp (realising I was gay fuelled their violence), a single wound from which was my teeth cutting via the left side of my encounter. At A&ampE they could have simply grabbed a passing doctor to sew me up, but instead they recommended I return the following day when a plastic surgeon would be on duty. He did a stunning task, bringing the two flaps of my cheek collectively with skilled precision. Now when I look in the mirror I can’t see a victim, and I can’t see the detest my attackers attempted to brand on to my encounter. Again I would urge Hunt to believe of the lengthy-term cost savings in NHS psychotherapy. He does at least acknowledge “there will be times when there is a psychological overall health require” for NHS cosmetic surgery. As this kind of, far more men and women need to be supplied it, not fewer.

Final month I went to Ethiopia with the film actor John Hurt, famed for his function in The Elephant Man – about the egregiously disfigured Joseph Merrick – to report on the perform of a British charity called Undertaking Harar. Every yr it sends a crew of NHS surgeons – for the duration of their yearly depart – to Addis Ababa to carry out operations on younger people with severe facial disfigurements. These can be cleft palates, grapefruit-sized tumours, noma (holes in the encounter from a bacteria prompted by malnutrition), or scarring from animal attacks. I anticipated to be most horrified by the extreme distortions and protrusions. What struck me, and my companion who is the charity’s patron, however, was the visceral isolation emanating from patients. Young children have been shunned for currently being diverse, for getting deformed, kept within as it brings “shame” on the loved ones, locked out from schools, denied friends, sometimes sent into the wilderness, believed to be demonic.

When I clasped the hand of one particular young woman who had had a large tumour removed from her cheek, she squeezed my fingers with this kind of cautious excitement, and then with such relief to merely be touched by an additional human becoming that it reminded me, starkly, after once more that there is no such thing as “purely” cosmetic, skin deep. Our appears, judged now much more than ever, and in the west even much more so, matter just as our bodily well being does. And to deny this, to deny the social, psychological, even economic implications (excellent-hunting folks earn more) of our faces is to be blinded by the resulting impact on our health and welfare solutions. The unsightly actuality, Mr Hunt, is staring you, and all of us, in the face.

Plastic surgery is not only about seems to be people"s wellbeing is at stake | Patrick Strudwick