The AAMC team (as part of our Specialty Perspectives series) recently sat down with Anthony Youn, MD, FACS, to learn more about his work. Dr. Youn is a board-certified plastic surgeon, award-winning author, and anti-aging expert. Learn more about Dr. Youn and his specialty below.
Can you give a description of your work?
I am a board-certified plastic surgeon that performs mainly cosmetic surgery in the Detroit suburbs.
What attracted you to plastic surgery?
I became a doctor to help people, and I knew that I wanted to do something with my hands. I was an artist my whole life, so I naturally gravitated toward a specialty where I could continue using my hands. Plastic surgery combined the science of medicine with art into one specialty. That’s what really drew me to it.
How would you describe a typical work week?
My schedule has changed a lot in the last few years as I have gone further into content creation, but I am still a full-time plastic surgeon. Every Monday and Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. I see patients. These are new patient consultations, post-operative patients, and pre-operative appointments. I spend every Tuesday and Thursday from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. in the operating room performing operations. In the late afternoon on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I am usually doing paperwork, seeing some post-operation patients, and doing some minor content creation. On Fridays, I’m in meetings and doing content creation like podcast interviews, YouTube videos, and TikTok/Instagram Reel videos.
What’s one thing you wish you would’ve known before going into plastic surgery?
Make sure that you take care of yourself throughout the training process and watch your health. Good health doesn’t start when you are 50 or 60 years old, it begins in your teens. There was a lot of time I spent as a medical student and resident where my health and taking care of myself took a backseat to academic pursuits and expectations put on me by the medical system and myself.
I think the important thing is that life is short, you never know when it’s going to end. Even if you are in a tough medical school or residency, try to take moments to enjoy life. Life is precious and you never know what the future will hold for you.
How would you describe someone who would excel in plastic surgery?
Some people say that plastic surgeons are like psychiatrists with a scalpel. Your patients and their outcomes must be your number one priority when you are practicing plastic surgery. That being said, there are doctors out there who don’t have this as their top priority. They could be focusing more on making money, garnering fame, or getting more followers on social media. To be a successful plastic surgeon, your patient's outcome must be your main priority.
Secondly, you need to have a good eye for symmetry, which is a huge part of what we do. Being able to see if a line is straight or jagged or if something is symmetric from one side to the other is very important in plastic surgery.
Can you share a case you found especially impactful?
When I was in my early training, I was an intern in the burn unit of a hospital. We had a young man come into the unit who was burned on approximately 90% of his body. When he came in, he was awake and alert but was in severe pain. The doctors cut off his smoldering clothing, assessed the extent of his burns, began dressing his burns, and hooked up IVs to replace the fluid he lost from the severe burns. With the loss of a lot of fluid from the burns and the filtration of a lot of fluid to try to keep his blood pressure up, the patient began to show signs of third spacing, which is when the lungs fill up with fluid making it hard to breathe.
With the extent of this patient’s burns, we knew he had a small chance of survival, and we would have to put him on the ventilator sooner rather than later. The nurse told me that the patient’s wife and young daughter were in the waiting room. I conveyed this to the attending physician and asked if we should have the family come in and say goodbye since there was a high chance he would never wake up once he was intubated. The attending surgeon thought about it and said no. We needed to give the family hope. As an intern, I followed the attending physician's instructions and said nothing to the family. The patient was sedated and intubated, and then the family was let in to see him. He was unresponsive now because he was sedated.
The next morning, I learned that the patient had died overnight. To this day, I always remember that as a time where I should have spoken up and disagreed with the attending’s instructions, even though I was only an intern. The wife and child should have been able to say goodbye to the patient while he was awake for the last time, but they were not given that opportunity. This was a time early in my career where I learned that even though I was “only an intern,” my opinion mattered. If you feel strongly about something, you should speak up for it and put out there what you believe in.
Are there any resources that focus on plastic surgery that our audience should be aware of?
There are so many physicians on social media showing what it’s like to be a physician. For people interested in learning more about plastic surgery, I recommend following Dr. Subbio. Outside of the field, I also recommend people follow Dr. Betsy Grunch, a neurosurgeon, and my friend Dr. Tiffany Moon, an anesthesiologist who was on the reality television show, The Real Housewives of Dallas. There are a lot of great physician influencers who create content that is both entertaining and educational.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with premeds?
I get a lot of messages from premeds and high school students saying they followed me because they want to be a plastic surgeon. I didn’t decide I wanted to be a plastic surgeon until my fourth year of medical school. Plastic surgery as a surgical subspecialty may look glamourous, but that’s not why you should choose it as your specialty. The best plastic surgeons are the ones who got into this specialty and the field of medicine because they wanted to help people.
My recommendation to people who say they want to be a plastic surgeon is to spend time with doctors in family medicine, OB-GYN, pediatrics, and general surgery. Those are the basic specialties that comprise the core of medicine. Plastic surgery is such a small subspecialty, it’s important to first learn to be a doctor and understand why you are going into medicine before you focus on subspecialties.
To learn more about Dr. Youn and his work, follow him on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. You can also find his podcast, “The Doctor Youn Show,” on various podcast platforms. Dr. Youn is also the author of a coming-of-age memoir titled In Stitches, which details his journey growing up as an Asian American kid in a small, midwestern town to becoming a doctor, and Playing God: The Evolution of a Modern Surgeon.