How Instagram May Be Affecting the Price of Your Plastic Surgery in Turkey

The Instagram Phenomenon & Its Impact on Prices

Prices for plastic surgery have dramatically increased by as much as 30% compared to just 5 years ago. Despite this world-wide increase in prices, some surgeons still manage to charge 15 times the average price for their geographic location. This is true in North America, Europe, the UK and, to a larger extent, Turkey.

These megastar Turkish plastic surgeons who charge 15.000 euros for a procedure that a regular surgeon in Turkey would barely charge 2.000 euros for, have made their fame and fortune on Instagram.

The Surgeons who have mastered Instagram have created feeds that are often so magnetic, it can feel almost impossible to look away. Informative and digestible reels, bursts of personality, and practically mind-blowing before-and-afters have caused some surgeons to skyrocket to legitimate celebrity status.

The truth of the matter today is that if a provider isn’t active on Instagram, they’re going to be invisible to a large percentage of the population of patients looking for the services they provide. But though the work of plenty of high-end providers merits their booming success, as any pop culture junkie can tell you, not all idols are worthy of the hype.

There will always be luxury goods and services, plastic surgery included; understanding what you’re paying for and why is the key to a successful procedure. Here, we dive into exactly what can affect the pricing of plastic surgery, whether it’s considered ethical for surgeons to charge more, and exactly how to know if the price tag on your provider’s procedures will reflect the quality of your outcomes.

What Affects the Pricing of Plastic Surgery Procedures?

Before we get into how social media is causing prices to rise, it’s worth breaking down the standard factors that can cause prices of a procedure to fluctuate. One of the greatest is location. Costs of living are higher in major metropolitan areas, which will increase provider expenses. Beyond the expenses of being in a big city, as the price of everything increases with inflation, you’ll see that reflected in the bills for plastic surgery procedures.

Plastic surgery cost is established in relation to the resources involved involved in running a practice. These may not just be consumable materials, tools, and equipment for that procedure but also the cost of the surgeon’s time, practice liability/risk, facility overhead, and level of personnel involved. These aren’t unreasonable factors in changing prices and, often, are indicative of a skilled and reputable surgeon.

After raising his prices for the first time in 2016, Dr. Amir Karam, a board-certified plastic surgeon, began to raise his prices on a more consistent basis—every few months. Historically, he’d always been booked out about three months in advance. With COVID and a booming Instagram following, which tops 275.000, Dr. Karam suddenly found himself completely booked a year in advance.

To better control his schedule, he adjusts his prices. To him this is the only way he manages to offset some of the demand. Dr. Karam assesses his schedule every few months, and if he sees that it’s gotten out of control, he raises his prices again.

Dr. Karam is applying the law of demand, where the price of a good or service is set higher as the demand for it decreases. In some cases, a steep fee may not be indicative of high demand or popularity at all—it could be a marketing ploy designed to create intrigue or hype. It could also be rooted in ego where surgeons compete to show themselves to be more valuable or in demand.

Are Significantly Steeper Procedure Prices “Fair”?

When it comes to the prices of non-essential goods, i.e, products and services that are not primary and essential for life, such as impulse purchases, dining out, jewellery, and electronics, the concepts of fairness or worthiness are entirely subjective.

In many cases, it comes down to lifestyle. We can liken pricier plastic surgeons to couturiers who have spent years of their life training, have experience, and have built their brand—no different from Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent or LVMH. They are high-end brands, and their prices reflect that.

Elective Treatments

According to this logic, a provider who delivers high-quality work should be able to charge more. “There’s so much nuance, so much person-by-person detail that goes into a surgical outcome,” says Dr. Karam. He shares that how a provider applies prior learning to new situations, to create consistently beautiful results, can’t be taught. “It only comes from a combination of technique, talent, and experience,” he says.

Cosmetic surgery is also entirely elective—it’s your decision to do it all, let alone if you want to pay steeper prices. However, as nonessential as it is, it’s still medicine. For many, this raises the question: Are high procedure prices ethical?

What Medical Ethics Says

It is commonly accepted that as long as patients are being provided with an itemised quote that is transparent, surgeons can, reasonably and ethically, bill as they see fit. However, ethical problems arise when surgeons charge very large sums for standard procedures, or when it comes to false advertisement—claims of professional superiority and lack of procedural transparency.

In this way, if a surgeons charges exorbitant amounts for top-tier results, which are simply quality results due to skill, time commitment, and the use of established, quality techniques that are done by many other surgeons, the cultivation of a ‘cult personality’ as it relates to surgical outcomes contradicts the transparent approach that is a pillar of medical care.

Social Media & Medical Ethics

Because of social media’s ability to turn anyone into a celebrity, it’s easy for followers to believe that doctors with obsessive followings offer outcomes that are superior to those of all other surgeons. In many cases, the emotional desire to achieve these seemingly exclusive results can cause patients to make illogical financial decisions. Some patients are even willing to get into serious debt because they feel that they have to go to a famous surgeon.

While it’s absolutely a patient’s responsibility to manage their own finances, it’s also important for doctors to make sure that they are not deceiving patients and pushing them to make irrational decisions. By creating an alluring persona on social media, which misleads patients into over-estimating their talent and skill, are surgeon still being ethical? Is billing inordinate sums for conventional procedures failing to safeguard the patient’s, medical or financial, interests? In medicine, under the Hippocratic oath as medical providers, we have the duty to ‘first, do no harm; but are these Instagram Surgeons really doing no harm?

Clever Marketing

Another commonly used marketing tactic of many Instagram Surgeons is coming up with clever names for the procedures they perform. Some of these clever names, such as the "Vertical Restore" for a Facelift, try to make patients believe that the surgeon has created a new radical medical technique, when in fact it is just describing what all surgeons offer during a facelift: a vertical restore. This leads to the question: if a provider cannot accurately explain the techniques they use in their work, which would allow a patient to compare their prices to those of other providers using the same methods, isn't their approach is more opportunistic than Hippocratic?

There is often the deceptive promotion of the surgery as being a unique, proprietary technique that is so extraordinary and exotic as to warrant a great sum. In those instances, the exorbitant cost is almost being used to validate this type of marketing in which nobody even knows what is being purchased. It’s harmful to the patient in that it disables their ability to provide informed consent for the procedure.

How Can You Determine if a Provider’s High Prices Are an Indication of Value?

It all goes back to doing your homework when looking into a procedure and a provider. In the case of social media–savvy doctors, you’ll have to make an effort to determine if what they do and who they are behind the scenes live up to the highlight reels you’re seeing online.

Perhaps the most obvious thing to acknowledge is that a high number of media placements or followers won’t always translate into high levels of expertise. A surgeon could hire a click farm to like everything. There are also agencies that specialise in burying negative comments, making people only see feedback from adoring followers.

Working on celebrities is also not necessarily a sign of skill. You could very well over-spend for a mediocre result with a surgeon who works on celebrities.

The Importance of Medical Credentials

That leads us to a key aspect of researching your provider—looking into their credentials. Board certification is important because it is earned through studying for and passing a gruelling exam that evaluates a provider’s knowledge and skill in their specialty. You should also look at how many years of training they have. Plastic surgeons once had to be general surgeons first, learning to take out gallbladders and lungs before working in aesthetics. Today, aspiring plastics can go directly to that specialty; some doctors also bypass the internship year, instead completing three years of a residency and perhaps a fellowship.

But if your provider has credible qualifications, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be drawn to their social media persona. Feeling like you can relate to your doctor and that you’d be comfortable working with them—in many cases, allowing them to have your life in their hands—is incredibly valuable.

Once you’ve decided to book a consultation, confirm if the vibe you sensed through the screen is authentic when you meet one-on-one. A helpful way to do this is by asking a lot of questions, no matter how complicated the answers might be.

A provider should also be honest enough to admit if they can’t work with you for any reason, such as not having the expertise required or your expectations being unrealistic—and some will even steer you toward another skilled provider who offers lower prices. Helping a patient find the best plastic surgeon is incumbent on plastic surgery practitioners acting in their role of safeguarding patients’ interests.

If you like what you hear from your provider and what you see in their before-and-afters, ask for patient testimonials. Beyond what you’ll find on Instagram and YouTube, you might find that they have some who would be willing to speak with you about their experience. At the very end of your evaluation, if one surgeon happens to be less expensive than the other, go to them, so long as all the criteria are met.

How The Right Surgery Consultant Can Help

Turkey is a country with a plethora of highly educated and competent surgeons. The lack of presence of a surgeon on Instagram does not mean that they lack skills, but that they choose to focus on their work as a surgeon, rather than on their image on social media platforms.

Professional, Ethical Surgeons

Many competent and highly skilled surgeons in Turkey choose not to enter the Instagram game either because of ethical concerns or because they lack the grandiose or narcissistic personality needed to advertise oneself 24/7.

They remain however intelligent and capable professionals who can do as good a job, if not a better job than the more famous "Instagram Surgeons". Their prices also remain affordable, and with them patients can expect to pay a descent price for an excellent service.

The Right Connections for a Seamless Experience

At GoldenSands our role is to stay up to date with industry trends, make the right connections with the best and most cutting-edge Surgeons, and streamline the whole process for you. Don’t waste your valuable time shopping around to find the right Surgeon to perform your procedure, let us do the grunt work of finding the right plastic surgeon for you.

As a surgery consultant, it’s our job to match you with a Plastic Surgeon who specifically targets your concerns—someone renowned for producing exceptional results, but who also takes the time to listen to what you want to achieve.

If you have any questions about the benefits of a Plastic Surgery consultant, or if you’d like to get your journey with us started, contact our Client Support Team.

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