Why Being Board Certified in ENT is Important

Audio Transcript:

Dr. Undavia:

Hey guys, it’s Dr. Samir Undavia with NJENT and Facial Plastic Surgery. lately I’ve been getting a lot of patients wanting to make sure that I’m board certified in ENT as well as facial plastic surgery. And I wanted to talk to you guys about why that is important. So first, I’m a facial plastic surgeon, which means I don’t do any breast or body. I don’t work on limbs. I literally only work on the neck and the face.

That’s important because nowadays everybody super specializes. So that’s our area of super specialty. We only work on that area. And so why is it important that I did ENT or ear, nose, and throat or otolaryngology prior to becoming a facial plastic surgeon? And the reason is those two areas coexist completely. And in fact, as an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, I do many of the same things that we do in facial plastic surgery. The two overlap in most of my practice. And during training, we did a lot of facial plastic surgery during ear, nose, and throat surgery.

We also only worked on the head neck at the same time. So many of the functional things that we did during ear, nose, and throat were working on the cosmetic things for facial plastic surgery. It wasn’t like I did several years of general surgery working on the body and the belly and the breast and then switch to the face. This is what I’ve been doing the entire time. And the reason that’s important is because, and especially with the nose, the nose is a very complicated place.

Most people say that the nose is the most difficult thing to operate on from a rhinoplasty perspective or a cosmetic perspective. And many of the patients that we see for revision rhinoplasty that have had surgery done, they’ve had it done by a general plastic surgeon where there wasn’t a whole lot of experience and they didn’t take into account some of the breathing issues that might happen. And so when we do a rhinoplasty, we’re taking care of the breathing issues as well as the cosmetic issues. And listen, even in my hands, there are patients that will still have some breathing issues afterwards. It’s sometimes an unanticipated issue, but we can always address that because of our training.

There’s, you know, when we do a rhinoplasty, sometimes we’re looking at the structure of the internal cartilage in the bone, but we don’t necessarily know about its resiliency, and that’s not something that we can really test while we’re in the OR. So occasionally things happen where areas aren’t as strong as we anticipated, so then we have to go back and we have to assess and strengthen them. However, if you’re not even in tune with those things, you might skip over a deviated septum or a turbinate that’s still quite large or a nasal valve that’s collapsed.

So being an ENT, we can try and take preventative steps to make sure that that happens less often. So that’s the main reason that being an ENT helps from a facial plastic perspective, we can always address the functional aspects as well as the cosmetic aspects. But it helps on the face too. During training, we would do parotid tumors, that’s salivary gland tumors, in the neck, in the face. We would be working on all the same structures that we would be for a facelift.So essentially, during all of our training, we were getting facelift training as well as tumor resection training. And that’s been incredibly helpful in my and in training just to understand all the how the structures interrelate with each other and what to expect post-operatively. So there isn’t anything that I feel that would be a surprise to me afterwards. We really can handle everything that comes our way with our patients. This dual expertise allows an ENT surgeon to maintain nasal function during a rhinoplasty while still achieving the best possible cosmetic outcome.

So I hope that helps. If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll see you next time.