Board Certification Is the Floor. Here Is What We Look for Above It.

A reader emailed us last week to ask why we list board certification on every profile if every surgeon in the directory has it. The honest answer: we list it because patients ask, and because we want to be explicit that it is the minimum we require, not the standard.

Board certification by the American Board of Plastic Surgery (ABPS) is the legitimate credential. It is the only certification that requires completion of an accredited plastic surgery residency, written and oral examinations, and ongoing maintenance of certification. A surgeon who is "board-certified in cosmetic surgery" by some other board has not completed plastic surgery training. The distinction is not a matter of marketing. It is a matter of clinical training hours.

But board certification answers a single, narrow question: did this person complete the training program? It does not answer:

• How many procedures have they performed since certification?
• What is their re-operation rate?
• What do their peers say about them off the record?
• How do they handle complications?
• What is their volume in the specific procedure the patient is considering?

What we look at above the floor

For every surgeon we consider for the directory, we look at:

Volume in the specific procedure. A surgeon who performs 500 breast augmentations per year and 4 rhinoplasties is a breast augmentation surgeon, regardless of what their certification says. A patient considering a rhinoplasty should not see them.

Revision and re-operation rate. Every honest surgeon has a revision rate. We are skeptical of surgeons who claim a rate of less than 3 percent without published outcomes data to support it. We are also skeptical of surgeons who refuse to disclose.

Peer interviews. We talk to other surgeons in the same market. This is the single most informative source of information about a surgeon's actual practice, and the source patients have the least access to.

Patient interviews, at scale. We interview, on average, twelve patients per surgeon before listing. We do not rely on Google reviews. We do not rely on surgeon-curated testimonials. We talk to patients directly.

Complication management. Every surgeon has complications. The question is whether they manage them in-house, refer them out, or hide them. We look for the first.

What we do not list

We do not list surgeon-selected before-and-afters. We do not list "best of" awards purchased from publication brands. We do not list social media follower counts. None of these correlate with outcomes.

If a surgeon's profile in our directory feels sparse compared to their marketing site, that is the point. We are listing the information that, in our reporting, matters. The rest is noise.