plastic surgery
Meaning of plastic surgery: Grafts and flaps are the trade's basic tools, moving living tissue from a place where it can be spared.
Definition of plastic surgery
Plastic surgery is the surgical specialty concerned with reshaping, repairing and reconstructing body structures. It has two branches: reconstructive surgery, which restores form and function lost to injury, disease or a condition present from birth, and cosmetic surgery, chosen to alter an appearance that is otherwise healthy. The name refers to shaping, not to any material.
What separates the two branches?
| Reconstructive | Cosmetic | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Tissue lost, damaged or formed differently | Healthy tissue |
| Goal | Restore function and normal appearance | Change appearance to preference |
| Examples | Burn scarring, cleft lip and palate, hand injury, breast reconstruction, repair after tumor removal | Reshaping the nose, eyelids, abdomen or breast |
The line between them is less sharp in practice than the table suggests. Rebuilding a breast after mastectomy is reconstructive surgery, yet it uses techniques developed for appearance, and operating on the opposite side for symmetry sits in both categories at once. Most surgeons in the field train in and practice across both.
What techniques does it rely on?
Two ideas underpin most of the work. A graft is tissue detached completely and laid onto a new site, where it survives by taking up nourishment from the bed beneath, which is how a burn is resurfaced with skin taken from elsewhere. A flap is tissue moved while keeping its own blood supply, either swung across on its original vessels or detached and reconnected to vessels at the destination under a microscope. Flaps allow bulky, complex reconstruction that a graft could never support, such as rebuilding a jaw with bone taken from the leg. Tissue expansion, in which a balloon is inflated gradually beneath the skin to grow a surplus, and careful attention to how scars are placed and closed, fill out the rest of the toolkit.
Where does the name come from?
The plastic in plastic surgery means moldable, from the Greek word for shaping, and predates the synthetic materials that later took the same name. Nothing in the specialty implies plastic implants; the word describes what the surgeon does to living tissue. That confusion is widespread enough to be worth stating plainly, as is another: the titles used in advertising are looser than the training behind them, so the specialty a surgeon completed is not always evident from the words on a sign.
Used in a sentence
The patient was referred to plastic surgery for reconstruction following removal of the tumor.
Good to know
The word plastic in plastic surgery refers to reshaping tissue rather than to any synthetic material, a source of confusion given how much more common the everyday sense of the word has become.
Word origin
Where “plastic surgery” comes from
Formed from plastic, from Greek plastikos, meaning able to be molded or shaped, reflecting the specialty's focus on reshaping tissue rather than any connection to synthetic materials.