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Sorting Through Cosmetic Surgery Board Certifications

By Mark Bakr

You've probably heard that you need to find a doctor who is board certified (vetted by their specialty board) to perform your cosmetic surgery. And you'd think that having gone through at least 13 years of schooling beyond high school, surgeons would automatically become board certified upon completion. But that's not the way it works. They still have some very big hurdles, including spending a specified time in practice, demonstrating surgical quality, and passing comprehensive written and oral exams.

Doctors are certified by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS). According to the ABMS, about 89 percent of physicians are certified by one of its member boards. For more details, see the section "Relying on the American Board of Medical Specialties".

Understanding medical specialization

Medicine is so complicated that all doctors can't possibly know everything about every topic. So doctors specialize, or focus on narrower areas of medicine and surgery. For instance, internal medicine is a medical specialty, and plastic surgery is a surgical specialty. To become a surgical specialist, a candidate must first graduate from college and then spend four years in medical school. After that comes the specialty training (residency), which involves a several-year commitment during which the young physician works at a hospital with senior staff and progresses from minimal responsibility to eventually having essentially complete responsibility for the care of patients.

Becoming a plastic surgeon requires six to eight years of training beyond medical school. Becoming a facial plastic surgeon requires five to seven years, and dermatology training can range from three to five years.

When doctors complete their training, they must apply to the state in which they practice for a license to practice medicine. That's a different process from board certification, which, once achieved, is a specialty status that is recognized in all states.

Checking out the process for certification

After doctors complete their residencies, they can enter practice but still aren't considered board-certified. For a specified time (one to several years, depending on the specialty), doctors are designated as "board eligible." Board-eligible surgeons have completed all their training, but they're not yet able to "sit" (qualify) for their boards.

Boards are usually a combination of written and oral exams focused entirely on the combination of medicine and surgery knowledge associated with a particular specialty. Passing the boards is a very big deal. For essentially all surgeons who have completed their surgical training, passing the boards is a matter of medical life and death. Not everyone passes. Some good plastic surgeons are not board certified, but I recommend going with the odds and choosing a board-certified surgeon.

To become board-eligible, surgeons must begin to practice on their own, operate on patients, and keep records of the results in order to be able to prove their competency in a wide variety of surgical cases. A board-eligible surgeon has completed all her training but hasn't met the time-in-practice or experience criteria required before she may take her boards. She may be the best or the worst surgeon in your community. If you wish to use her services, you need to check on her skills in other ways.

If you think about it another way, all board-eligible plastic surgeons have had more training than any of the surgical specialties that require only one residency. So a board-eligible plastic surgeon may be as good or better for your surgery than a board-certified head and neck surgeon who has met the time-in-practice criteria but has one less surgical residency. Laser hair removal also has certifications and it's good to check the web for your states board certifications for laser treatment procedures.

Mark Bakr is a specialist in laser hair removal in Los Angeles and has performed 45,000 body hair removal procedures.

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