His article appeared immediately after a piece on the surgery by Dr. Kim and three other Korean doctors in the same edition. And the final look of the leg isn't perfect either. Kim Yong Oock, a plastic surgeon at Yonsei University's College of Medicine in Seoul, has conducted a few nerve-cutting operations and argues that the results are sometimes poor and that the muscle can even enlarge again. Dr. Kim's muscle-cutting procedure, he adds, creates too much bleeding and produces suspect results. Dr. Suh, the inventor of the nerve-cutting operation, acknowledges that inexperienced plastic surgeons occasionally make the mistake of cutting more than one of the three nerves leading to the calf, causing the patient to drag her leg.
Immediate surgery is needed to repair a nerve.
Dr. Suh says he has fixed about 10 such operations botched by other doctors, and all the patients recovered. None of the risks dissuaded H.S. Kim, an office worker in her early 30s, who once strode through life on chunky calves. I used to hate summer. In 1998, after watching Dr. Kim Ing Gon talk up his operation on a television program, she visited him at his hospital. She immediately trusted him and decided to have her calf muscles trimmed.