This interview segment features a patient (Saya) describing her rhinoplasty experience and Dr. Shervin Naderi discussing his rhinoplasty-focused practice. Saya chose surgery to improve wedding photos, reporting the operation took about two hours, a cast for ~7 days, minimal pain (no pain meds needed), and a quick recovery allowing good results by her wedding after a steroid injection to reduce tip swelling. Dr. Naderi states that 90–95% of his practice is dedicated to nasal surgery (about half revision rhinoplasty), offers free initial consults of about 1–1.5 hours, receives referrals from other plastic surgeons, and emphasizes personalized, doctor-first care.
Questions this video answers
About two hours.
About seven days.
No — she said she did not have to take any pain medications.
About 90–95%.
About half of his practice.
Chapters
Welcome, Saya.
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Oh, thank you for coming down. I wanted to begin by asking you what made you choose to come to Dr. Naderi?
It all started with getting married and doing plans, planning for the wedding and stuff, and starting to think about wedding pictures. And I've always, you know, had some issues with my nose. I didn't like my side profile as much. He definitely made me feel very comfortable. He made the procedure sound like it was going to be simple, not like I was having some major surgery. He also told me that most of what he does is rhinoplasty. And me being a doctor myself, I know that in surgery, a lot of the times it's important to have a surgeon that does the same surgery over and over and over again. So that really made me feel good.
And.
And one of the things I was really worried about was there was probably a four month time span between the wedding and scheduling the surgery. And I was really nervous about what I would look like, would everything look good by the time of the wedding. So that was kind of the reason why I went forward with the surgery.
Well, it has a quick recovery time. And in your case, how long, if I may ask, did the procedure take and what type of a recovery time were you experiencing?
Sure. The actual surgery probably took close to maybe two hours. The recovery was much quicker than I thought it was. The first day was probably the toughest. And the main thing was that you have this cast on your nose, which you're not used to. So breathing through your nose, if you do breathe through your nose at night when you sleep, comes a little difficult, like the first night. Otherwise it took about a week until the cast was off. And one of the things I was worried about was pain. I'm not too, you know, I don't handle pain too well. And I actually didn't have to take any pain medications. It didn't hurt at all, which I was pretty surprised with.
That's significant. So basically you just wore the cast on your nose for what, like a day or two after the procedure?
The cast I wore for about a week, it took like seven days until that was off. But, you know, really after the first day, from then on, everything was really easy. I actually had an appointment with my primary care doctor. Like maybe it was day 10 after surgery, and I told her that I had just had the rhinoplasty. She couldn't believe it because there wasn't any sign of bruising. And like the tip of the nose, there is a little bit of swelling, but compared to what? The nose that I had to start with, it wasn't bad at all. So it just, it healed very nicely. And to kind of speed up the swelling to go down before the wedding, he did a little bit of a steroid injection at the tip of the nose and that went down real nicely. And nobody could tell. My wedding pictures came out nice. I was really pleased with the results.
Well, on that note, thanks again for joining us and being a guest.
Thank you.
We're now back with Dr. Naderi. I must say both the patients seem very pleased with the results.
They are. And that makes me happy.
It's like you become a new you, so to speak, with the confidence and the beam that one can see, right?
Absolutely. And it's important to get it beyond you and move on with your life, not become focused on it. There is no such thing as the perfect nose. It's not like operating on a piece of marble or sculpting on a diamond. The fact is the nose will heal, it will go through changes. But the post op results should be significantly better than pre op. The nose should basically fit the rest of the face and the patient moves back to their regular activity, regular life within about a week after surgery.
Now, we've only got a few moments left, Dr. Naderi, and I have to ask you, before I let you go, what separates you and your practice from all the other plastic surgeons that we're familiar with and have heard about over the years in this region, and particularly when it comes to the specialty of rhinoplasty? Because you're certainly recognized for excellence within facial plastic surgery and in rhinoplasty in particular.
Certainly there's plenty of excellent plastic surgeons locally as well as nationally that concentrate on the nose. But what separates my practice in this area is the fact that over 90 to 95% of my practice is dedicated exclusively to the surgery of the nose, the cosmetic surgery of the nose or rhinoplasty. And about a half of that practice is comprised of revision rhinoplasty. These are patients who've had unsatisfactory outcome by going elsewhere, getting rhinoplasties. Now they're not happy the rhinoplasty was done poorly and they come in for revision surgery and correction. And I've written textbook chapters on this matter. And patients do searches, they hear from word of mouth. I get referrals from about 8 or 10 other general board certified plastic surgeons in this area that actually prefer to send the rhinoplasty patients to me. And we'll often work together. If a patient's interested in a rhinoplasty as well as another procedure. We'll do a co case together. We'll all take care of the nose and the other plastic surgeon takes care of the other part of the body. But basically the practice has really turned into what I wanted it to always be, which is exclusively dedicated to surgery of the nose functionally and cosmetically.
I find the revisionist mention that you touched on a few moments ago, doctor, where patients who've gone to other plastic surgeons did not get satisfactory results. As far as the rhinoplasty procedure goes, they come to you and you actually correct and fix other people's mistakes. And the patient leaves here, obviously with the nose that they always wanted originally.
Right. And what happens is a lot of these patients there was either poor communication beforehand, imaging wasn't done, nobody really knew what the results were going to look like until the cast was lifted off. And it was a surprise. And some patients have had decent jobs done, but the fact is they didn't really like it because the proper pre op dialogue was not carried out. And then there's also patients that have gone through surgery with very poor technique. The nose has been compromised, it's collapsed and the tip is pinched and the whole area has to be revised and rebuilt to get a real nice, beautiful, natural looking nose that actually works well too in their breathing.
Now I understand you also offer free consults to all people. As far as coming in and not charging them for the free consult.
I don't want them to be scared with wondering if I'm going to go spend some money and not get anything out of this. I want them to come here, be relaxed. I spend about an hour to hour and a half with each patient on the first visit. We'll sit down, we'll talk, we'll get to know each other, examine them and perform the imaging. I actually a lot of times will spend an hour talking a patient out of surgery. If a patient I feel is not best suited for surgery, I will take my time and I'll try to basically convince them that this is not the best thing for them. Sometimes they'll listen to me, sometimes they won't. But I try to do my part.
Certainly a very personalized and caring approach based on what you just said here.
Thank you. You have to always be a doctor first and a surgeon second. And the third part of this, which is about business of beauty, that always takes the back seat. But at the end of the day, we're all doctors first.
Well, on that note, I certainly want to thank you, Dr. Naderi. This was quite an informative and very enlightening interview. Indeed. And on that note, thanks again for joining us and being a guest on a new me.
