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Top 3 Plastic Surgeons

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The Lead · Industry

A Cold the Week Before Surgery: Why the Airway Is Still Reactive After the Symptoms Are Gone, and How Long the Postponement Actually Needs to Be

Every practice has a version of the same phone call: the patient has a runny nose or a cough four days before a scheduled facelift or abdominoplasty, and wants to know whether to say anything. Most say nothing, because the deposit is paid, the time off is booked, and the symptoms feel minor. The anesthesia literature disagrees with that instinct in a specific way. A viral respiratory infection leaves the airway abnormally twitchy for weeks after the patient feels well, and the risk it carries under general anesthesia is not about the cold itself but about what an inflamed airway does when a tube goes through it. Here is what the data say about a cold, the flu, and COVID before an elective operation, where the postponement rules come from, and why the honest version of the conversation is one the practice should be starting, not the patient.

August 30, 2026

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By The Editorial Desk

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14 min

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Industry

Ibuprofen After Cosmetic Surgery: What the Bleeding Rule Actually Rests On, Why Aspirin and Advil Are Not the Same Drug, and Where Celecoxib Fits

Every pre-operative packet says the same thing: no ibuprofen, no naproxen, no aspirin for two weeks before surgery and for a week or two after. Patients follow the rule without asking why, and most surgeons could not tell them where the two-week number came from. The answer is that it was borrowed from aspirin, a drug that disables platelets permanently, and applied to a class of drugs that do not. Here is what the anti-inflammatory bleeding rule is built on, what the plastic surgery literature has found when it actually tested the question, why the COX-2 drugs get a pass, and how the choice between ibuprofen and an opioid on the first night after surgery is a much bigger decision than the packet suggests.

August 30, 2026 · 11 min

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Industry

Sex After Cosmetic Surgery: The Timeline That Never Makes the Instruction Sheet, What Blood Pressure Does to a Fresh Surgical Site, and the Procedure-Specific Rules That Actually Matter

Every post-operative packet covers showering, driving, and lifting. Almost none of them mention sex, and patients are left to guess, ask a forum, or quietly extrapolate from the exercise rules. The physiology is not mysterious: sexual activity raises heart rate and blood pressure in exactly the window when a fresh surgical site is most likely to bleed, and it puts mechanical stress on whichever part of the body was just operated on. Here is what the activity actually does hemodynamically, why the first two weeks matter more than anything after, and the honest procedure-by-procedure timeline, from rhinoplasty to tummy tuck to the one procedure where surgeons finally say the word out loud.

August 30, 2026 · 8 min

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Industry

Dental Work After Breast Implants: Where the Antibiotic Prophylaxis Habit Came From and What the Evidence Says

A surprising number of women with breast implants are told to take antibiotics before every dental cleaning for the rest of their lives, sometimes by the surgeon, sometimes by the dentist, sometimes by a forum. The instruction was borrowed from heart valve and hip replacement medicine, and those fields abandoned it for most patients more than a decade ago after the evidence failed to show that dental procedures cause implant infections or that pills prevent them. Here is where the habit came from, what the bacteremia data actually shows, why a breast implant is not a knee, and the narrow set of situations in which the question deserves a real conversation instead of a reflexive prescription.

August 29, 2026 · 9 min

The City Guides

Top surgeons, city by city.

Short, considered editorial picks for the cities where aesthetic medicine has the highest concentration of practitioners doing distinct work. We add a city when we have done the reporting, not before.

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§ 01 · Editorial Standards

Choosing a plastic surgeon is among the few decisions that cannot be appealed. It deserves real reporting, not advertising dressed as a recommendation.

Top 3 Plastic Surgeons is an independent publication covering aesthetic and plastic surgery: the procedures, the advances in technique, and the surgeons doing the most considered work in the field. We report on it. We do not sell placement within it.

We do not accept paid placement, and we do not rank by advertising spend or by the volume of five-star reviews a practice can solicit. Our reporting draws on board records, peer interviews, outcomes data, and direct patient testimony, revisited as the field changes.

§ 05 · The Letter

One letter, every Sunday.

Each issue carries one new surgeon profile, one dispatch from the reporting desk, and an editor's note on whatever question we could not stop thinking about that week. No sponsors. No partner content. No reason to exist except the subject.

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