Beauty Knows No Pain

With all of the practice-building, it's no wonder that many patients have trouble paying for their surgery. Booth 8A offers the answer -- the AMS Patient Financing Program, which allows patients to go under the knife and into hock all in the same day. Patients receive "competitive interest rates" (which, at 18 percent, is competitive with the crappiest credit cards) entitling them to the surgical procedures they want "when they want them." As a pamphlet explains to surgeons: "The Program offers you the potential for 100 percent payment prior to surgery, which could be a real boost to your office cash flow!"

Even with generous financing, some patients are deadbeats. The Conomikes Reports, a medical management newsletter making the rounds at the convention, presents these suggestions for plastic surgeons trying to collect outstanding bills: "Ask for the payment in full, no matter how big the bill"; "Create urgency. Let them know they need to pay the bill now."

Hippocrates had it all wrong: First, get the money up front.

The cleanup after a major convention resembles the pack-it-up-and-tear-it-down following a rock concert, except that no one plays Jackson Browne, thank God. After the last plastic surgeon drifts from the exhibit hall, a team of long-haired roadies working for that minimum wage begin dismantling the booths. All of the merchandise is packed in huge wooden crates for the next show -- tiny piles of plastic chin implants, stacks of company pamphlets crammed with practice-building tips, boxes of plastic syringes, heaving mounds of chalky white breast implants, and all of those before and after photos. The McGhan exhibit booth, so impressive during the show with its colorful illuminated panels proudly announcing three major breast-implant studies, is partially dissembled, revealing a cheap plywood backing.

A trash can in the front of the hall bulges with the nasty dregs of the convention -- plastic coffee cups, smeared napkins, a half-eaten cookie, a discarded name tag and -- hold on, what's this? A small uncooked club steak? It's the steak still bearing the scars of the surgery inflicted by the savage cutting power of the Surgitron radiosurgical scalpel. It isn't hard to guess why it was left behind. These days, plastic surgery can always find another piece of meat.