Patients Scrimp for Cosmetic Surgery
00.0.00 12:00 AM
Patients scrimp for cosmetic surgery
Survey finds women economizing to pay for operations
LONDON, Nov. 5 - Family vacations and home improvements are being cancelled or postponed to finance facelifts, nose jobs and breast surgery, according to a survey released on Wednesday.
The urge to look better and younger and to improve areas where nature may have skimped is so strong that people are willing to economize in other ways, dip into their savings or to take out loans to pay for cosmetic surgery.
“Household expenditure, such as holidays and home improvements are being put on hold in preference for funding a procedure for only one member of the household,” said Dr. Glenn Wilson, of the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London.
In a poll, conducted by NOP Healthcare, of 100 women who’d had cosmetic surgery in Britain, 20 percent of patients who had liposuction chose surgery over home improvements. Thirty-three percent decided a new nose was more important than a holiday and 31 percent took out a loan to pay for breast work.
If money was in short supply family and friends sometimes chipped in to pay for the procedure.
“I decided I wanted to go ahead with the surgery for my 40th, my family clubbed together and paid for it as a birthday present,” said one unidentified patient in the poll.
A desire to improve their looks was the motivation of a nearly third of the women who took part in the surgery. Thirty percent of breast surgery patients said they wanted to boost their confidence.
The most worrying aspect for most of the women was getting the results they expected. But most said they were happy with their new look.
A quarter of the patients had thought about surgery for up to two years before going under the knife.
Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
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