Published:

11/14/2011 09:45am

Holistic Plastic Surgery

HOLISTIC PLASTIC SURGERY
by
Susan E. Kolb, M.D., F.A.C.S., A.B.I.H.M.

INTRODUCTION: I am Dr. Susan Kolb, board certified in plastic surgery and a founding diplomat of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine. I am the founder of Plastikos Surgery Center, a holistic plastic surgery organization, Millennium Healthcare, an integrated medical center, and Avatar Cancer Center, which incorporates holistic and spiritual treatment options for cancer care.

Today I would like to share some of the history of how I was guided to introduce spiritual medicine into what many people would judge to be definitely not spiritual - the world of plastic surgery. When my video production company was filming Ram Dass, we had a chance to chat in the break room. He could not understand how I could do both spiritual medicine and plastic surgery. When I explained to him that often my patients have severe hand or facial injuries that would seriously impact their self-image and their ability to earn a living, he apologized saying that he had misunderstood what plastic surgery was all about. This indeed, is a common problem. The newspaper magazine headlines announce the plastic surgeries that the rich and famous have for anti-aging effects or to change their appearance, but rarely does the press discuss how plastic surgery reconstructs people after serious accidents, cancer surgery, or birth defects.

One of the first books ever to consider the role of spirituality in our culture was written by a plastic surgeon, Dr. Maxwell Maltz, who wrote Psycho-Cybernetics. Many of the famous authors that I have interviewed on my radio and television show mentioned to me that this was their first introduction to the topic. Dr. Maltz noticed that some of his patients undergoing rhinoplasty or nose surgery had a very different mental and emotional effect from the surgery than other patients, and he set out to explore why this was so. While in high school, I started reading from my mother’s diverse library (she had obtained her Ph.D in child psychology), and had the opportunity to read books on physics such as The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Between physics and psychology, the road to the study of consciousness opens up.

Premed training and medical school were arduous and with little opportunity for exploration of spiritual topics,but I was nonetheless guided. I ended up at Washington University for medical school, where I thought I was going to go into medicine, as this was one of the best medical schools in the country for internal medicine. As fate would have it, it was also one of the best medical schools for plastic surgery. I remember distinctly having an intuitive guidance during my second year of medical school while eating a chili dog at dinner that I was going to be a plastic surgeon. I looked over at my friend Barry and said, “I am going to be a plastic surgeon.” He said, “You don’t know anything about plastic surgery.” This was not exactly true, as I had been guided to work at the Baltimore Shock Trauma unit on weekends as a premed student. There, the plastic surgeons had taught me to sew the tedious multiple facial lacerations that we see when patients go through the windshield unrestrained. I thought that my skill at this was probably due to my mother teaching me to sew, and I said to Barry “Nonetheless, I am going to be a plastic surgeon.” After this, I was offered an opportunity to do research in the plastic surgery department and spent eight hours a day putting together chicken tendons and repairing rat vessels using microsurgery.

I skipped two years of general surgery and completed my plastic surgery training in the military. I ended up in Dayton, Ohio at Wright Patterson Air Force Base for four years and to escape boredom of there not being that much to do in Ohio, started reading books on metaphysics and spirituality. I ended up taking courses in clairvoyance from a local psychic. My first experience with a spiritual healer occurred in Ohio. I had a severe allergy to cats that resulted in life-threatening