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CHRISTOPHER GOFFARDReluctance to consider (or admit to) plastic surgery is fading, say area doctors, as patients seek the "South Tampa look."
SOUTH TAMPA - Not long ago, Dr. Herbert Stern's wife was introducing herself to her Ballast Point neighbors when her husband's job came up. It turned out many on the block were well versed in his brand of medicine.
"Everybody had a plastic surgery story," said Stern, who runs the Premiere Center for Cosmetic Surgery on Hyde Park Avenue. While some had not had the surgery themselves, "they certainly had friends who had, and could name everybody in town who does it."
"Definitely there's no local stigma."
If the story suggests the ubiquity of plastic surgery in Tampa's tonier neighborhoods, the numbers put the point in italics. There are more than a dozen members of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons south of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, giving an area of some 150,000 people one of the country's highest plastic surgeon-to-population ratios. And that doesn't include innumerable uncertified practitioners.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the confluence of sun culture, disposable income and youth worship in a town crowded with competitive professionals, South Tampa has become a mini-mecca of plastic surgery.
The Botoxed forehead and the stretched face, the tucked tummy and the augmented bust have become as inescapably embedded in South Tampa culture as Bayshore Boulevard and the minarets of the University of Tampa.
The city "seems to be very accepting of it," said Mike Reeves, the 45-year-old co-host of the Nancy & Mike Show on WMTX-FM 100.7 (Mix) and one of Stern's patients. In summer 2002, he underwent liposuction to eliminate the love handles that exercise alone couldn't slough off.
A quart and a half of fat later, he said, "I can wear a bathing suit now and not feel people are looking at my belly."
"I had localized fat. I was very thin otherwise," Reeves said. But "if I was to lose 60 percent of my love handles" by losing weight, he said, "I'd also lose 60 percent of my face, and I'd look like a skeleton."
Stern considered Reeves a good candidate for surgery because his goals were modest and manageable. Every plastic surgeon, however, has seen the opposite extreme.
"Someone I turned down was 200 pounds and a heavy smoker, and he was asking me to sculpt a six-pack on his abdomen," Stern said.
While women still form the bulk of plastic surgery customers, doctors say, the percentage of men has increased steadily over the years. Helping to fuel that trend in Tampa is the number of professionals vying to advance their careers - or hold onto them - in a job market where perceived vigor is often conflated with a youthful appearance.
"In general, it is an affluent community, and plastic surgery is mainstream. It's no longer for the stars," said Dr. Ernesto Ruas, whose office is on S Boulevard. "Tampa has plenty of plastic surgeons, and compared to lots of other big cities, I think the quality is overall better."
It is also a city where, the saying goes, there are only two seasons: summer and Christmas. That leaves months of strutting sun worship, from Bayshore to Hyde Park, among bronzed and gym-hard bodies. To keep up with the Joneses, sometimes nature needs a nudge.
"The South Tampa look is a young look, it's an active look," said Dr. David Halpern, a plastic surgeon who practices on S Fremont Avenue. "A lot of people come from outside of South Tampa to get the South Tampa look."
Male pectoral and calf implants can also be bought, though they are still fairly rare. Doctors say they're most often sought by bodybuilder types who are dissatisfied with the proportionality of their muscles.
But many doctors don't perform such procedures. Stern said those implants seem to appeal to an "overly perfectionist type of person" who might be unhappy even if they are implanted expertly. Why should doctors risk a lawsuit?
The quest for surgically enhanced beauty seems to be starting earlier and earlier, doctors say, as images of teen pop stars pervade the culture.
Teens are more comfortable talking about plastic surgery than they used to be, said Dr. Francis Rieger, who has a S Magnolia Avenue practice, and their parents are more comfortable supporting their decisions.
"I think the Britney Spears element is out there," Rieger said. "We've had patients come in because their favorite stars have had plastic surgery. Unfortunately, there are many young girls who are influenced by that."
Few doctors have had as good a perch from which to observe the city's changing attitudes to plastic surgery as Dr. Lewis Berger, who has been practicing on Saint Isabel Street near St. Joseph's Hospital for 27 years.
When he started out, he said, "You never saw an ad, you never heard anybody on television" advertising plastic surgery. "Today, the magazines and newspapers are inundated."
As the stigma and secrecy attached to the practice continue to decline, the public's savvy has skyrocketed. "Twenty years ago, someone would come in, maybe they'd heard of raising your brows," Berger said. "Today, they'll come in and tell you about the 16 Web sites they've seen. The public today is extremely well informed."
Berger, 60, said he has never taken out an ad and relies on word of mouth. For most of his career, he logged 80- to 90-hour weeks, though recently he has scaled back. He's operated on personal trainers, the wives of Bucs and Devil Rays and Lightning players, and retired sports stars seeking to look young for their second career as an ad pitchman or sports commentator.
He has also been, to some, a multigenerational family doctor. In one family, over the decades, he has done breast augmentations on three generations - mother, daughter, granddaughter.
Berger said he came to his craft accidentally, when he discovered that his first dream - devoting his practice to burn patients - would be too emotionally taxing for him. Mortality rates were high. The suffering was terrible.
"That was my whole motivation to go into plastics," he said. "The furthest thing from my mind was doing aesthetic surgery."
Berger estimates that he's performed 2,000 breast reconstructions, many of them made necessary by cancer. After mastectomies, the divorce rate is high, he notes. Part of the problem is that spouses often don't know how to talk about it.
"A lot of what we do is treating the psyche," Berger said. "There's more to breast cancer treatment than just removing a lump."
Berger is one of only a handful of doctors in the southern United States who is offering cohesive-gel silicone implants on a trial basis. He has implanted them in 130 to 140 patients since 2000, the majority of them in the last year.
Unlike saline implants, they are shapeable, Berger said. They are also designed to avoid leakage, even if punctured. They can cost nearly three times as much, however. Saline implants might cost $700 a pair; the cohesive gel variety, $2,000.
"This is the future," Berger said. "In my mind, five years from now, 90 percent of implants will be cohesive gel."
- Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report. Christopher Goffard can be reached at 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com