One moment of my life that made a huge impact was the loss of my mother. This occured when I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington. This was obviously the saddest moment of my life. I think that experience made me really appreciate life. When I started undergraduate school, I began as premed. I always wanted to be a doctor. My father was a real estate developer and that began to influence me. During my first year, I switched majors to start to concentrate in Business. I was accepted into the School of Business and started going to classes. After the passing of my mother, I had a rejuvenated desire to return to medicine and did a total switch into that route. That eventually led me to Tulane medical school in New Orleans, Louisiana. I choose this school because it was located in a city that was totally different from Seattle, Washington. It was a complete culture shock there but an amazing experience. While in medical school, I was fascinated by the anatomy of the Head and Neck region. This influenced my concentration of my studies toward Otolaryngology, which is the specialty of Head and Neck Surgery, commonly known as ENT, or Ear Nose and Throat. I was then accepted into the residency program at University of Southern California, which is one of the top schools in the country. During residency, I had a broad range of experience in this field. I originally thought that I would go into the treatment of Head and Neck Cancer. While learning this particular subspecialty, I was introduced to the reconstructive aspects of this specialized field. Coupled with the very difficult role of diagnosing and being the bearer of bad news for people with cancer, this interest in the reconstructive aspect motivated me to learn more about the subspecialty of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. As I learned more about the field of Facial Plastics one element of this field began to fascinate me more and more. One thing I noticed while in Los Angeles were the less than optimal results from plastic surgery that was occurring for many Hollywood stars. I thought that if the most rich and famous people were getting these results that something must be missing in this field. This lead me to gradually concentrate my interests into the field of beauty and specifically the ideas of beauty. The question I wanted to answer was ” what makes a face beautiful’? Surprisingly, I found that no one really knew. Our ideas of beauty were based on what is known as the neo classical canons. These are rules of beauty that were brought down through the ages but originated during greek times. The were termed “neo” because they were revised during the renaissance and by Leonardo Da Vinci in the 1400’s. I was shocked to find out that our rules of beauty had not changed much since the 1400’s. If you read my paper you can find out about what some of the rules were at http://www.drphilipyoung.com/pdf/circles_of_prominence.pdf. But essentially they are dogmatic rules based on external landmarks that I found occupied very little time when a viewer looks at a face when it analyzes it. This question lead me to this journey of finding what beauty is and how to attain it for my patients. During residency in Head and Neck Surgery, I applied for a Facial Plastics and Reconstructive Fellowship. I was chosen among many candidates to train at Shreveport, Lousiana under the famous Dr Frederick Stucker, one of the grand masters in this field.
Thanks for reading, Dr Young
Dr Young specializes in Facial Cosmetic and Reconstructive Surgery and is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washington