Last week I attended the Advances in Rhinoplasty course held May 14th-17th at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers. This is the longest-running rhinoplasty course in the world, bringing together plastic surgeons from across the globe to discuss and debate their newest and favorite techniques.
If you are anything like my wife, you might be wondering, “how can you talk about rhinoplasty for 4 whole days?” To many patients, rhinoplasty might seem like a very simple operation. Yet most plastic surgeons consider it the most difficult procedure they perform. Rhinoplasty is hard because it embodies not only a 3-dimensional sculpting problem, but also a structural engineering problem. Perhaps the most important thing we have learned over the past 25 years is that you have to make the nose stronger. After rhinoplasty, the skin “shrink wraps” back onto the underlying cartilage and bony framework. Just like if the frame of your house isn’t strong, if the framework of the nose isn’t strong, it will collapse, thereby making the nose look unnatural and often making breathing through the nose almost impossible. Dr. Tolan and I perform a fair amount of revision rhinoplasty for patients who have undergone rhinoplasty by a different surgeon and now don’t like their “pinched” nostrils and/or inability to breathe.