Zol Kryger, M.D.: Navigating the sometimes shady world of plastic surgery—understanding potential complications of common procedures and how to reduce your risk by choosing the right doctor and asking the right questions

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast, and why instead we've chosen to rely entirely on listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better.
I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives.
Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this space is overwhelming. I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. In fact, we now have a full-time person that is dedicated to producing those, and the feedback has mirrored this. So, all of this raises a natural question. How will we continue to fund the work necessary to support this?
As you probably know, the tried and true way to do this is to sell ads, but after a lot of contemplation, that model just doesn't feel right to me for a few reasons. Now, the first and most important of these is trust. I'm not sure how you can trust me if I'm telling you about something when you know I'm being paid by the company that makes it to tell you about it.
Another reason selling ads doesn't feel right to me is because I just know myself. I have a really hard time advocating for something that I'm not absolutely nuts for. So if I don't feel that way about something, I don't know how I can talk about it enthusiastically. So instead of selling ads, I've chosen to do what a handful of others have proved can work over time, and that is to create a subscriber support model for my audience.
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Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I wanna thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is my very close and dear friend from medical school, Dr. Zol Kryger. Zol's a board certified plastic surgeon and a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. He went to med school with me at Stanford, and then did his training in general surgery and plastic surgery at Northwestern in Chicago. He grew up in Israel. Actually, he was born in Canada, I think. He grew up in Israel High School back here in California, then went off to the special forces in Israel for three years before coming back for college and medical school. He specializes in facial rejuvenation with fat grafting and deep plane facelifts, abdominal plasty, breast enhancements, all sorts of complicated plastics and reconstructive surgeries. I wanted to talk with Zol at length because over the past, I don't know, a couple of years, he'd send me stories or things like that about mishaps in plastic surgery, and I was kind of shocked by them, actually. I guess I'm sort of oblivious to this world. And so I asked him, I said, look, why don't we just do a podcast together where we can go into some real detail on some of the common misconceptions about plastic surgery and above all else, provide listeners with a tool to, or a set of tools really, to help select the right plastic surgeons and to understand what the real risks are of a number of these procedures. And I will say this, I learned a lot during this episode and you'll hear it in my voice. There are at least three instances where he rattles off a statistic and I just can't believe it. And I actually have to ask him to clarify it. So we start by talking about the differences between a board certified plastic surgeon and basically anybody who can do plastic surgery, which turns out to be anyone who has a medical license, we talk about how you would pick a surgeon and what are the common misunderstandings and pitfalls that get a lot of people into trouble. But really we focus very much on breast augmentation, liposuction, the Brazilian butt lift, which I didn't realize prior to this procedure is not only as prevalent as it is, but perhaps more disconcerting than that is arguably one of the most dangerous plastic surgery procedures a person can have. I think by the end of this episode, you'll have a really clear understanding of what these risks are and how you could go about thinking about it. The other thing we're doing in the show notes to this is we're going to create a really cool checklist that you could sort of download and print out because throughout each of the discussions on, for example, a specific type of procedure, Zol would sort of rattle off a number of ideas and facts that I think are just kind of worth having in your back pocket. And then of course, the section on how you really, what questions should you be asking a plastic surgeon? I think that's also, if nothing else, if you take nothing out of this, simply knowing that is valuable. And frankly, it applies to all of medicine, especially procedural medicine, so surgical, dermatologic, et cetera. Lastly, we close with the discussion about fillers, which again, I would have thought that there is no possible way that a filler could actually pose harm to people. But it turns out, sure enough, there is a way you could be harmed by fillers, which again, all comes back to making sure that if you're going to have these procedures, you have them done by people who really know what they're doing and have spent years and years training in the anatomy of this space. So without further delay, here's my interview with Dr. Zol Kryger. All right, Zoli, thank you for coming to Malibu, man.