Lloyd Krieger, MBA'92, MD'94, knows that elective plastic-surgery patients
are different from other surgery cases. They're there to look better,
not to get better. "They don't want to come into a hospital with all
that implies," he says: "the waiting, the inconvenience, the expense,
sitting next to someone waiting for a liver transplant." Dr. Lloyd Krieger
Enter Krieger's Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery, the first and only plastic-surgery
clinic on the glam Beverly Hills shopping strip. According to its Web
site, the fully certified facility boasts "crafted leather" exam chairs,
"incredibly comfortable" operating tables, sherbet-shaded suites, and
bamboo flooring. It also, he says, "takes the retailization of medicine
to a very logical extreme." Krieger, who interrupted his medical studies
to earn an MBA, was the first resident in UCLA's combined general/plastic
surgery program and now is an assistant clinical professor there. He
opened Rodeo Drive in 2003, two years after completing his residency:
"That's a very aggressive way of beginning to practice plastic surgery."
Boutique medicine: I see it as building a new approach to health care-bringing
retail medicine out into the open, taking concepts from my retail neighbors
and applying them to plastic surgery. It is designed to be more like
a boutique than a doctor's office. People come here to improve their
appearance just like they step into one of our neighbors, like Armani
or Chanel, to improve their wardrobe. Complementary goods: We might
do a big liposuction on a man and change his suit size, then send him
across the street to Hugo Boss or Barney's, set him up with a personal
shopper, and help him get started on his new wardrobe. We have relationships
with some of the gyms and personal trainers. We work with personal trainers
so that we can get people back in the gym very quickly after surgery,
in as little as a week, at the same time protecting the surgical area,
so they're not at an increased risk for complications. Demand and supply
curves: I don't really have any trouble dealing with people who are
shallow. If somebody comes in and says, I want bigger breasts, and maybe
they don't have a sophisticated reason, you might say they're shallow,
or you might say they're goal-directed and have reasonable expectations.
The Rodeo Drive belly button: Tummy tucks used to be purely debulking
and damage control. Forty or 50 years ago, sometimes the belly button
was just removed. We've changed the technique slightly-it actually creates
a somewhat better hood at the top, for piercing, and throws a bit of
a deeper shadow, so it looks more natural in a bikini and lowrider jeans.
Smiling faces: Some patients are not going to be happy, no matter what
the result. There is an emotional and psychiatric overlay to changing
your appearance. For almost everyone it's very difficult to objectively
analyze a change. It's like any other customer-service industry. There
are people who have an excellent outcome, but they're still disappointed.
Elasticity of demand: Beverly Hills is ground zero for plastic surgery.
If I'm going to change the way plastic surgery is perceived-more than
an acute surgical interaction, it's about a whole lifestyle interaction-I
have to be here. Why you won't see him on a reality TV show: The Swan
is a very tacky show-it's built with a contest as the premise. I was
not impressed with the clinical results. Or on MTV's I Want a Famous
Face, they're remade to look like somebody famous. I would never get
involved with that. Do-it-yourself: I have not had plastic surgery.
I'm going to get some liposuction in the next year-and-a-half or two
years. The big thing is taking time off. You do have to take a certain
amount of time to have a good result.