Anti-Aging Documentary: Youth Knows No Pain

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A plastic surgery documentary – seen through a pair of very myopic glasses – will air for the first time on HBO August 31st and then be seen whenever you can catch it.

Youth Knows No Pain runs under HBO’s America Undercover series.

Even though the documentary was made by Mitch McCabe, the daughter of a reconstructive plastic surgeon, the film maker puts cosmetic plastic surgery into a catch-all, anti-aging box.

Ms. McCabe’s father was a trauma surgeon who began his surgical career in Vietnam. He later went into reconstructive surgery – as do many cosmetic plastic surgeons – and then offered more cosmetic surgery as the demand grew.

Nonetheless, Ms. McCabe dedicated two years touring the USA, interviewing and filming anti-aging enthusiasts, surgeons and hundreds of men and women from teens to the hyper-elders in their 90s.

Along the way, the viewer meets people like Sherry Mecom, a Texas housewife, who in childhood grew up dirt poor as one of 10 children.

Later on in life, she must have struck oil in her backyard because she spent $35,000 in one year on plastic surgery.

Yet another featured character is Norman Deesing, California actor and sculptor, who dropped a cool $50,000 on cosmetic surgery and looks a lot like Jack Nickolson.

The other anti-aging devotees run the gamut from colorful to cantankerous.

But Ms. McCabe’s biggest miscast may be the field of plastic surgery itself.

For, if you look at annual statistics and patient interviews, you’ll see 99.9 percent of plastic surgery patients are not anti-aging faddists or devotes, but ordinary working men and women who want to change one disliked – indeed, hated in many cases – feature on their face or body.

Meanwhile, anti-aging devotees are eating an exclusive diet of carrots, macrobiotics, yogurt or taking up some near starvation scheme or living in a sealed dome to ward off the toll of the years.

If you go to a good plastic surgeon, he or she will tell you upfront that the aging process continues after rejuvenation surgery.

You may have turned the clock back ten years with a face lift, but your face will look older in another decade.

Your bust line will no longer sag after a breast lift (given a competent, well trained surgeon) but in another 10 years, those same breasts won’t be quite so perky.

It appears to us, Ms. McCabe did not listen too well at her father’s knee.

admin @ August 24, 2009