Meet Dr. Bahman Guyuron

Speaker 1 (00:00):
To help avoid triggers for migraine sufferers, Head On is available in three formats, audio, video with captions and written transcript. You are listening to Head On with your host board-certified plastic surgeon, Dr. Bahman Guyuron, the pioneer of a life-changing surgery for permanently eliminating migraines and a specialist in plastic surgery of the face, head and neck. 

Dr. Guyuron (00:31):
I'm Bahman Guyuron. I'm a plastic surgeon from Cleveland, Ohio and my practice is primarily facial cosmetic and reconstructive surgery. The name of my podcast is Head On and we are going to deal with the facial procedures, nose procedures, and migraine surgery head-on. There are many patients who suffer from migraine headaches and they have been to everywhere and they have no other place to go. One of the purposes of this podcast is to let them know there is a solution and this a solution that we've been working on for a long time and have operated on thousands of patients and we know that it is effective, it works, and also we want to let them know that the recovery is most of the time very simple. And often we can do these procedures through minor incisions as an outpatient operation and commonly the patients actually go back to work if they're working. 

(01:49)
But unfortunately, many of the patients that I operate, they don't go back to work actually because they cannot work until we do the surgery. And I also want to disseminate this information to make sure that actually what is available to everybody and discuss a variety of recovery possibilities and the costs. Most of the information in this podcast is going to come from me, but occasionally we're going to invite patients to give testimony as their experience with the surgery that they have undergone. And also on some occasions I'm going to have some other experts to be working with me and telling you about their expertise and how they have learned and what is their experience with this type of surgery. I've been practicing for forty-three years, and for the last thirty-five or so, I have limited my practice to the plastic surgery of the face and the neck area. 

(02:57)
Even in the area of the face and neck, I have passion for two procedures. One is the nose surgery and the other one is a technique that I have developed for treatment of migraine headaches. Two groups of patients look for my advice. One is patients who have had nose operation but they're unhappy about the results or those who actually are seeking to change the appearance of their nose. The other one is a group of patients who have migraine headaches because that is one of my area of expertise. In fact, I pioneered a number of procedures and I've been doing these procedures for the last twenty-three years. The name of the clinic where I practice is called Zeeba, and Zeeba is the Persian word for beauty. After I finished my residency and all of the training and facial procedures beyond the plastic surgery training, I initially worked at the Cleveland Clinic and I opened up a craniofacial team there to deal with the facial deformities to rearrange the bones of the face that they were not in the right place. 

(04:15)
After being there for two years, then I moved to private practice and opened the clinic that we call the Zeeba. I have a really deep interest in teaching what I know, and in fact, there has not been an occasion over the last forty-three years that I didn't have either residents with me or I have not been traveling to teach plastic surgery nationally and internationally. When I was trained in plastic surgery throughout the process, it was extremely demanding. We had a general surgery training for five years and plastic surgery training for another two years. Those five years I was on call every other night. And you can imagine being on call every other night for five years. Today that's not the case. In fact, the residents and the residency programs are watched very closely to make sure that critique is not part of the training and part of the judgment process. 

(05:22)
And when the training is so hard and so intense and also demands again every other night being on call, sometimes you're tired enough that you may not absorb everything that it needs to be absorbed and the training may not be as efficient as when you're fresh and your mind is clear, you are able to register everything that is said. It. Desire for teaching is something that you're born with and it goes back to your childhood mentoring the others as a high school student, college student. And I always felt good about sharing what I knew with everybody else. And during the residency, I always spent a lot of time with the medical students and junior residents and made sure that I'm making their times with me worthwhile. Throughout my exposure to the medicine, I have always had individuals that I respected them and learned a lot from them. 

(06:33)
Actually, my first rotation in residency in plastic surgery was with a gentleman named Dr. Robin Anderson, who unfortunately has passed away. And his practice was mostly nose meaning as a surgery, meaning rhinoplasty. And most of his practice actually was limited to the face area. And he actually inspired me about rhinoplasty. And then I spent some time visiting a doctor from France named Tessier, who was the father of the craniofacial surgery surgery that deals with the bones of the face and head and neck area. And he also stimulated my interest in craniofacial surgery, and I did that for many years, actually dealt with facial deformities that they were very, very significant and was able to help these patients to have a better quality of life. Craniofacial surgery is a subspecialty of plastic surgery that deals with the correction of deformities of the face, and it is a very intense training process for that. 

(07:52)
We go through a fellowship and it is very strenuous time-consuming, very detail-oriented, and also on the other hand gives us expertise to deal with the face, nose, eyes, and the neck area without any fear or limitation. Obviously not being cavalier, not taking any undue risks, and gives us opportunity to be more comfortable with any kind of difficulties or difficult situations that come across in the head and neck and face area. Craniofacial surgery deals with the children and adults deformity. Most of the adult age deformities are result of serious accidents or ablations, meaning removal of tumors or even large benign tumors that can sometimes be invasive. And in the patients in a young age, we deal with the variety of congenital deformities or again, on that group of patients. Also, occasionally we see accidents that has seriously altered the structures of the face. I don't personally recollect this, but I've been told my parents, my sister, older sisters, my older brothers that since age four, whenever anybody asks me, what is that I want to be when I grow up, the answer was I want to be a doctor. And that actually came from the enormous respect that I had for my pediatrician. And in fact, when I started my training in the medical field, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. But soon I discovered and I got remarks about my mentors that I had good eye-hand coordination for surgery. And gradually I migrated towards the surgery rather than other fields like pediatrics or internal medicine or psychiatry. 

(10:14)
As I was finishing my internship, I was interested in neurosurgery and in fact, I started neurosurgery residency. But what happened, I discovered that actually most of the patients were not really talking to me. They were in coma, they weren't recovering. Obviously neurosurgery has changed over the last 50 years. We're going back now 50 years ago, and there are a lot more positive outcomes that they experienced, but at the time, it wasn't the case. So I decided that this really is a sad field and I'm more interested in producing immediate positive results. So at that point, I changed the direction and I applied for general surgery. And even up to the mid-portion end of the general surgery training, I wasn't sure what is that I was going to do. I was interested in vascular surgery, cardiovascular surgery, but finally settled on plastic surgery. And if I have to decide all over, I wouldn't do anything differently. This podcast is going to be broadcasted everywhere, predominantly in YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcast. 

Speaker 1 (11:38):
Links to learn more about Dr. Guyuron and anything else mentioned on this podcast are available in the show notes. Head on is a production of The Axis, T-H-E-A-X-I-S . I-O.