I was sent an interesting article written by Katherine Rosman in the Wall Street Journal published December 29, 2011. The article is called Happy New Year: The Busiest Season for Cosmetic Surgery.
The articles describes many patients as wanting to “go underground” during the recovery process and using the holiday season to be able to avoid work, school and friends.
Every year I see patients schedule surgery often in February or March for December of the upcoming year. They know when they will have time off and schedule early for these weeks. I see this in my New Jersey Plastic Surgery practice every year.
I don’t know that this is absolutely necessary especially with rapid recovery procedures such as breast augmentation where I tell patients in my NJ cosmetic breast implant practice to take 3 or 4 days off from work and that this is all that they will need. Even for facial resurfacing procedures such as my fractional Smartskin CO2 laser the recovery is only 5 or 6 days.
Still, I see this phenomenon every year and it is interesting to see it in the Wall Street Journal. In contrast the slow time of year is usually the last week in August or first week in September when kids are home from camp and school is about to start.
