HAIDEH: Thank you, Joni. It’s a pleasure to be here.
JONI: We’ve heard about you for years and now to have you on the show is wonderful. I should say to our audience that Dr. Hirmand is in private practice right here in New York City. She is clinical assistant professor of surgery at the Weill-Cornell Medical College. She is a member of the attending staff at the plastic surgery departments of New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center, Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat, and Lenox Hill Hospitals. Her practice focuses on what is known as aesthetic plastic surgery, especially specializing in eyes and facial rejuvenation – something our audience has no interest in, Dr. Hirmand! So we hate to bother you.
HAIDEH: Oh, my gosh. I think that everybody this day and age is interested in that topic.
JONI: You’re absolutely right. Let me ask you, how did you get into this business? I happen to know that you were the valedictorian of your class. I don’t know whether it was at Harvard or whether it was the JFK School of Government.
HAIDEH: It was actually at the University of California.
JONI: And you were studying molecular biology as a major?
HAIDEH: Yes, that was my undergraduate degree.
JONI: And then what brought you to Harvard?
HAIDEH: I did my medical degree at Harvard, and I did my Master’s degree at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in international health development-related issues; it’s a Master’s in public administration.
JONI: How spectacular. So how does this happen to end up in plastic surgery?
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HAIDEH: This is a great question and actually many people wonder about that and ask me. The short answer is that I’ve had a love for surgery, for aesthetics and for international health issues, especially as they relate to women, independently. And so in plastic surgery I found a way to really combine them. That’s the short answer. The long answer is my parents are both physicians. My mom comes from a very long line of doctors. In fact she’s now 82 and she was the first woman who became a gynecologic surgeon, or doctor or surgeon in her family. But most of her brothers and uncles and great uncles and great, great uncles were physicians. So I sort of grew up with medicine and sciences and I had a love for it as a child. I also loved clinical medicine and patients because, again, I sort of grew up around it. My father was really involved in international health and health policy, which is where that sort of background came in.
I happened to have had a very, very bad accident when I was about 13 years old and I had a very bad head injury. I should have decidedly died, and I lived, which is already a miracle. But I had a very disfiguring injury to my face at that time. And at a very young age I experienced the traumatic effect of looking in a mirror and really looking like someone else – not looking like yourself. And I remember this distinctly. Of course, I never knew at that time that it had affected me consciously or subconsciously. It was very disturbing and is something that I needed surgery for, and I had several surgeries for it.
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Today I don’t think there is a real big visible mark of that injury, but I think, and I know, that subconsciously it affected my decision making down the line. When I decided to go into sciences and then eventually into the clinical side of sciences and to bring that research side, the interest I had in technology and biology, into my clinical practice, I did a number of years of research in immunology and transplant tissue rejection during my training as a surgeon. And then when I was looking for a specialty within surgery where I could combine new technology, research, clinical practice, ability to work in the international arena and make a difference, but at the same time, you know, entertained this idea (I guess it was maybe a subconscious idea) of how form and function can be restored and what is the importance of that for a person, I think plastic surgery just brought it all together without me even really looking for it. It just was there, I experienced it and it just gave me the opportunity to really combine all these varied interests. So that’s really the long answer. But that’s how it happened.
JONI: Well, it’s fascinating and it’s really almost like it was meant to be because you’ve had the sensitivity, the personal experience – it’s just an amazing story.
HAIDEH: Yes. I sometimes think that. Sometimes I actually think, "Gosh, this was just meant to be." I always loved aesthetics. I always had deep thoughts about the importance of aesthetics and life; why it is that it’s boundless and it’s just across cultures, across time. Why is it that people are drawn to it? Why is it that functionality and the form are so inter-related? But I think that it just came together, and sometimes I think, "Yes, it was just meant to be. That’s just the way life works."
JONI: Exactly. It’s a rare profession in any case, is it not, for a woman? How many women are plastic surgeons? What kind of percentages?
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HAIDEH: Definitely surgery is not a profession where you find a lot of women. Now, plastic surgery – it’s about ten percent women. The last documented data is from 2001, that was actually measured – and it was seven percent then. Now it’s a little bit more than that and it’s probably around ten percent. That’s not a huge number.
JONI: Do you think it’s about the physical strength one needs?
HAIDEH: I think there are a few reasons actually. The training is quite long. My combined training in medical school was five years. I then did a year of cancer research, so that’s six years. And then I did another seven years additional to that in surgery, general surgery and plastic surgery. So if you add all those up, it’s probably about 18 years. It’s a long training.
JONI: Oh, my God, that certainly is.
HAIDEH: It’s long. It takes many, many years. And also surgical training is quite demanding. It’s by nature demanding – it’s physically demanding and it’s psychologically demanding, and it does take a certain kind of personality. So I think traditionally – and this is changing over time – traditionally those elements have not made it necessarily a friendly specialty to women.
JONI: I see.
HAIDEH: And that’s across the board in surgery, and plastic surgery being a surgical sub-specialty falls into that. I think that’s slowly changing, and especially in plastic surgery we are seeing more young women go into the field, which is delightful, which is great.
JONI: What about the subjects themselves? I’ve always had the impression that 90 percent of people who are engaged in plastic surgery are women; that women are the ones who really want plastic surgery, more than men.
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