Ethics and Plastic Surgery/What is Plastic Surgery?

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Introduction Cosmetic surgery is a surgical expertise that aims at correcting or improving body imperfections. These may be congenital, acquired, due to illness, or due to traumatic or para-physiological events such as aging. Cosmetic surgery also includes surgical procedures requested by patients to improve their appearance. In this regard, cosmetic surgery differs from reconstructive surgery, which deals with the treatment of morphological alterations that can be related to pathological conditions; in the specific nature of their respective areas, cosmetic surgery and reconstructive surgery both belong to plastic surgery. The aim of this discipline must be to keep the same aesthetic and scientific approach both in the resolution of body imperfections or in voluntary modifications to appearance [[ 1 ]]. If, on one hand, the aesthetic dimension cannot be ignored in reconstructive surgery, then on the other hand, reconstructive surgery is strictly required in any cosmetic surgery [[ 2 ]]. In the last few years we have witnessed the use of medical treatment and cosmetic surgery more and more frequently in line with the continuous evolution of modern society, where individuals' well-being also depends on the attractiveness of their physical appearance, according to the various standards imposed by society [[ 3 ]]. Publication History Received: 18 March 2016 Accepted: 15 June 2016 Article published online: 20 April 2022 © 2017. The Korean Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, permitting unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) Thieme Medical Publishers, Inc. 333 Seventh Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA