Dr. Kenneth Hughes, Harvard-trained, board-certified plastic surgeon in Los Angeles, has an Instagram account.  Dr. Hughes has maybe 5,000 followers.  He does not pay for followers or likes and he does not advertise and has never advertised with Instagram.  Rather, he has been on the receiving end of numerous censorship campaigns from competing plastic surgeons and his account has been deleted and penalized and banned many times out of spite and jealousy.  Dr. Hughes now uses his Instagram account to spread the word of God and Jesus.

The truth is that Dr. Hughes has never recruited patients from this forum.  However, he has gotten thousands of direct messages with questions for information and evaluations.  That means the conversion rate for a patient who actually gets surgery with Dr. Hughes is virtually 0%.  So this platform is virtually worthless for attracting patients as far as Dr. Hughes is concerned.

So why do other doctors put so much effort and expense into Instagram?  Hard to say.  Maybe they get the majority of their business from Instagram.  Dr. Hughes gets hundreds of patient inquiries for consultation each month through one of his websites alone, so Instagram is not really useful.  What does it mean to have a lot of followers on Instagram or to be Instagram famous?  Probably nothing at least as far as the surgeon’s skill or patient outcome.

Maybe less than nothing.  Many famous Instagram plastic surgeons are merely posing as plastic surgeons.  Many are not board-certified plastic surgeons.  Many are not fully-trained plastic surgeons at all.  Many are not plastic surgeons with any training.  Some may be in family practice or internal medicine or gynecology.   There is no such thing as a board-certified cosmetic surgeon.  Many of these individuals are practicing outside their scope of training – way outside their scope of training.  So the bottom line is do your research and be discerning.  Almost everything can be bought.  Many things can be manipulated.  Look for manipulation of photos and camera angles in before and after pictures.  Look to you tube videos to get a better idea of surgeon skill and competence as well as the nature of surgeries performed and the results that can be anticipated.