"This is a very scary finding," Robert Dorfman, the first author of the study and a third-year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a statement. "Providers — ranging from physicians who are not licensed in plastic surgery to dentists, hair salon employees and barbers — are doing procedures for which they do not have formal or extensive training. That's extremely dangerous for the patient."
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Board-certified plastic surgeons are those with more than 6 years of surgical training (at least three specifically in plastic surgery).
This is the first peer-reviewed study that has quantitatively looked at plastic surgery-related posts on Instagram.
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