Editorial
Front Page - Friday, August 27, 2010
Human canvas creations coming to town next summer
Erica Tuggle
Dr. Carey Nease
The new Southern Surgical Arts offices of double-board certified cosmetic surgeon Dr. Carey Nease are set to break ground within the next few weeks at the downtown location of 1405 Cowart Street.
In what is to be a three-floor stunning architectural beauty, penthouses will fill the top floor, the bottom floor with be available for commercial space and Dr. Nease will have the entire second floor to accommodate his patients in an all-in-one area that will provide the services his Calhoun and Dalton offices are currently providing.
A health spa resort atmosphere will be part of the draw along with the spa and consultation services on one end and surgical services on the other end of this 7,500 square feet space. Dr. Nease says they are anticipating that the new building will be open next summer.
Dr. Nease has been developing the talent it takes to do the artistic work on the human form before he even decided to be a cosmetic surgeon. Although, his whole family was in medicine, Dr. Nease originally attended college to be a watercolor artist. He changed his mind to attend medical school, but kept painting, sculpting and playing music and built up the dexterity and hand skills that aid his work today.
In medical school, he was exposed to many different specialties and found that cosmetic surgery fit in with the enjoyment he already recieved from artistic activities. He worked with the cosmetic surgery group at the University of Florida for undergraduate and medical school and found enjoyment in the cosmetic appeal.
“From an artistic perspective, that fit beautifully and felt really natural to me,” he says.
Dr. Nease focused his residency in head and neck surgery before going into private practice with neck surgery, facial plastic surgery and many facial reconstructions from ER trauma.
He says he realized he wanted to focus on facial plastics and aesthetic surgery and so, after three years, he quit his practice and participated in a fellowship through the Academy of Cosmetic Surgery, spending a year in Little Rock, Ark.
In 2006, he opened Southern Surgical Arts, doing facial plastics and general cosmetic surgery. Along with his two board certifications from the American Board of Otolaryngology and American Board of Cosmetic Surgery, he recently took the board exam for Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. When the board meets next month to decide on certification, he should be triple board certified, he says.
By offering non-surgical medical spa services and full body cosmetic surgeries at his practice, Dr. Nease says the two services are able to complement each other tremendously.
“If you just do surgery and don’t have any other services like skincare and Botox and laser treatments, you are really missing out on some services that really compliment what I do in the operating room,” he says. “If I do a facelift on a woman that is 60 years old and I just remove excess skin and take away wrinkles and tighten the neck and add volume, but she has a lot of sun damage and we don’t address her skin, it is not really serving her as well as I should.”
The nurses of his office help post-op patients start on the right skin care products, do laser treatments to help rejuvenate skin and do Botox to make the overall result much better, he says. During the spring and summer, the areas of most business are the bodywork, as everyone prepares for vacations, and in the fall and winter, more facial work is called for so patients can hide out while they are recovering, he says.
Dr. Nease says his philosophy in the office is to blend the medical practice with customer service.
“People don’t have to come see me, they want to. I want to make their experience really great, not only from the results they get from me as a surgeon but from the experience as a whole,” he says.
He says that from the first phone call or email a client makes to the check up visit a year later, it is critically important to make sure they are treated well in order to make the experience they have comfortable, private and satisfying.
“I want to make sure everything is done really well and right and safe and they get great aesthetic results as well,” he says. “I think that’s a problem that a lot of surgeons skip that. They want to come in do the procedure and then go, and the experience before and after the procedure may not be great or comfortable. I am trying to make that really important, and I do, and my patients love it.”
With a range of services from minimally invasive medical spa treatments to surgical procedures, Dr. Nease says he knows cost is always a concern. He realizes his procedures are elective, but sometimes advised and mostly desired. For this reason, he says, they use Care Credit for financing some cases and encourage people to call to schedule an appointment to find out what prices they are looking at.
“Everyone thinks that plastic surgery or cosmetic surgery is, for the average person, not affordable, but that is probably not true,” he says. “I always encourage people to call, come in, let me look at you and see what I think needs to be done. Then I can give you a price estimate based on that. It is relatively expensive, but I think a lot of people have a misconception on how much it actually does cost.”
Dr. Nease still plays music for his church, as he has done for the past 10 years. He plays more than he does artwork because of time constraints with his job, he says. He does plan to start back with his art in the future, he says, but for now, his masterpieces are in the work he does each day at the office.
|
|