Plastic Surgeon Michigan

Dr. Ali In Oakland Press

“2009 brings in business for plastic surgeons”

By JERRY WOLFFE
Of The Oakland Press

Many Oakland County residents want to regain the look of youth for this new year.

“This is an unusually busy time of year for me this year because it is the holiday season and people want to look fresh,” said Dr. M. Azhar Ali, a board certified plastic surgeon with offices in Bloomfield Hills and Troy.

The cost of a nonsurgical face lift ranges from $300 to $1,500, depending upon what is done, he said.

He injects Botox and facial fillers to get rid of unwanted facial lines.

“Botox is a muscle relaxer in small doses,” Ali says. “It relaxes muscles that create wrinkles in the forehead or around the eyes.”

Many of his nonsurgical procedures are done in his office, but more complex ones such as breast surgery, including implants, reductions and reconstructions after a mastectomy, are done in a hospital, said Ali, who has had extensive post-doctoral training in plastic surgery.

The Pakistan native says he has been in practice for 10 years.

He is a resident specialist at Providence Hospital and North Oakland Medical Centers.

He received plastic surgery training at Providence. He also had a year of pediatric plastic surgery training and six months of training in microsurgery at the University of Toronto.

Microsurgery is when a surgeon takes tissue from one part of the body and attaches it to another part.

“If someone has had a slashing wound on the leg down to the bone, you can take tissue from the back, upper thigh or chest and transfer it,” he said.

The surgeon then has to connect the small blood vessels at the original wound site to the transplanted tissue.

“I spent a lot of time learning,” said the 46-year-old physician, who lives in Rochester with his wife, a hand surgery specialist, and their three children.

He said the procedure using injections instead of a scalpel “are a low-budget measure where we can do something to reverse the effects of aging. “We can give someone a touch-up for a fresh look,” he said.

Ali said he does the more simplified plastic surgeries on both men and women.

“Men don’t want to talk about it, but they get them, too,” he said.

The procedure usually takes about 45 minutes but can take longer if it is more extensive.

A traditional face lift that must be done in a hospital by an accredited surgeon and takes from two hours to 4 1/2 hours, he said.

“People can tailor their needs so they don’t have to spend too much money to look better in these difficult economic times,” Ali said of the simpler injection face lift.

“We do an analysis of facial tissue and also make a patient’s expectations realistic before we do anything,” he said.

He suggested that physicians who do plastic surgery procedures only in their offices aren’t accredited and aren’t allowed to operate in hospitals.

“The general population is misinformed. Why go to a plumber when you need electrical work?”

After some 250,000 people died in an earthquake near Kashmir in Pakistan three years ago, Ali went and joined a U.S. mobile army surgical hospital unit and operated on survivors for no cost.

“I shut down my practice and went over there for three weeks and did procedures from morning until night until I couldn’t stand anymore,” Ali said.

“I was so impressed by the U.S. Army MASH units. I take my hat off to them,” he said. “They take such good care of the patients.”

He said he had feared many of his patients would have left his practice since he was gone for three weeks, but the opposite occurred.

“When I came back, I got nice letters from all my patients here because they knew what I did and appreciated my humanity,” Ali said.

“I want to travel all around the world and take care of the less fortunate.”

But for now, Ali is making some Christmas wishes come true.