Ask Dr. Pane: 200th Episode Special!

This week’s Ask Dr. Pane segment marks 200 episodes of great questions and answers with Dr. Thomas A. Pane, founder and chief medical officer of Atlantic Coast Aesthetics. To celebrate the occasion, we decided we wanted to do something different than the usual cosmetic surgery questions. We sat down with Dr. Pane to discuss a few questions we’ve received from viewers about his career path and the reason he chose cosmetic surgery as a profession. We hope you enjoy it, and the insights we gained into the man behind the knowledge!

Today, Dr. Pane, we’re going to turn the focus more on you. We’ve had some questions from the Facebook audience and Instagram, so a couple of different questions here to ask today. The first one is, what have you been up to?

Well, yeah, we’ve been busy. Essentially, working throughout Palm Beach County, from northern Palm Beach County where we have our ambulatory surgical center privileges to Miami, a couple of days a week there. So, we really are encompassing the whole gamut of South Florida, and that’s been pretty busy.

We also did a lot of work on getting a paper published, looking at fat transfer procedures like the Brazilian butt lift specifically, the high-volume fat transfer procedures. There’s a lot more to say on that as we go forward, but that took a lot of my effort over the last several months to get something published and written to the standards that the journals expect. So, we were glad to do that, and like I said, we’ll talk about that more moving forward. That’s pretty much it.

I didn’t realize it was 200 episodes until you sent me an email saying we were at 199, I didn’t realize it was that many, but I guess they add up over time. 

Second question here that we got was, what actually got you inspired to enter the medical field, and what you’re doing now?

 It’s a good story! I mean, there’s much more to it than we can really cover here, but basically, you know, it started when I was like high-school age. A friend of mine had read a book about surgical training, written by a now-deceased author who had talked about his general surgery training which took place decades ago. And that was really interesting to me, and I always kind of had it in the forefront of my thoughts as I went through the educational process.

I didn’t know I’d be doing this today. We kind of got a lot of different twists and turns along the way. When I started off in medical school and residency, I was aiming more at organ transplants and cardiothoracic surgery. Those were the things that were most interesting to me, and as time went on, I started to see some of the appeal of the plastic and reconstructive field.

As [my] practice evolved, it’s been leaning more toward the cosmetic, although not 100% cosmetic. We will do reconstructive surgeries, it’s just that we don’t tend to participate with insurance plans. Again, you’re getting into an entire, big topic that has a lot of facets to it. But as it is now, we’ve kind of gotten there gradually, over time. It wasn’t really visualized at the beginning of the process, if that makes sense.

Yeah, it totally does! Now, Dr. Pane, the last question here, what advice would you give to aspiring medical students or those folks interested in starting out in a career in medicine?

Well, again, it’s a huge, huge field, and there are a lot of things going on with the way the field has been reorganized over the years. When I started off in the educational process, the people who were the current attending physicians in different specialties had largely, I would say, different practices than what most people experience today. Again, that’s another huge topic we really couldn’t get into right here, but because of the way the medical economics has evolved, say when Medicare was passed in 1965 and didn’t start paying for claims until the early ‘70s, that really led the way in how not only plastic surgery, but all the different fields have evolved. That’s led to some changes in how things work.

What I will say is, it depends on what you want to do. Because it’s such a huge field, you can do almost anything. When you talk about clinical medicine, again there’s all sorts of different specialties, but there are going to be different ways that your practice is organized, in most cases depending on what it is you want to do. 

 People also sometimes go into medicine and then do something [like]…working in policy areas, they might work actually in insurance, they could do research. There’s a lot of different things that can be undertaken. What I will say is, like any field, it’s always undergoing some change. You can’t go into it thinking 100% this is what it will be at this time period in the future. It may be that, but more likely, it will be different in some way that may or may not be predictable depending on what happens.

So again, it’s a great question. I can’t give you a definitive answer, but that’s kind of a basic flavor and overview of things to keep in mind if you’re heading in this direction. 

On behalf of Dr. Pane, the staff of Atlantic Coast Aesthetics and the people who bring you the Ask Dr. Pane segments, we’d like to thank you for your continued interest and keeping these great cosmetic surgery questions coming! With our 200^th episode behind us, we’re excited to see what comes next, and we’re looking forward to the next 200.

If you have a question about any aspect of cosmetic surgery, Dr. Pane and the staff of Atlantic Coast Aesthetics are always happy to discuss the areas of interest or concern to you. Simply follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn; call us at (561) 422-4116; and/or email us through our website’s Contact page. Your question might even be the focus of an upcoming Ask Dr. Pane segment, helping us to inform and educate others who share your interests with real talk and honest answers to your questions. Remember, at ACA we believe the only bad question is the one you don’t ask!