Dr. Matteo Vigo’s Journey to Excellence in Aesthetics (Ep 1)
Hello everyone and welcome to my YouTube channel about plastic surgery episodes. I’m Dr. Matteo Vigo. I’m a plastic surgeon in Dubai since 2013.
Today I’m here with my personal assistant, Sarah. Hello doctor, thank you. And we would like to share some information about plastic surgery world.
We will start with the first episode talking about myself, my career and my goals with this podcast. So I will pass the word to Sarah so she can introduce herself for you all. And then we start with the questions.
Thank you. So hello everyone. My name is Sarah, as the doctor mentioned.
I’m the PA of Dr. Matteo Vigo. He’s a very well-known popular doctor. I’m a Jordanian, half Palestinian.
I actually studied English language and literature, which has nothing to do with the medical field. However, I prefer to pursue a medical career. And I started with a team leader, customer service manager.
And then I ended up with Dr. Matteo throughout one of his colleagues who actually introduced me to him. And six years later, we’re here. Yes, I think it’s working.
Of course. Okay, perfect. So you have recently decided to start a podcast.
May I know actually what inspired you to do that? Apart from me nagging to do it? Of course. No, basically, I want to have the possibility to share with my followers some topic about plastic surgery and delve into the little details in plastic surgery, explaining different views on the common procedures and also invite some guests in the future episodes where we can associate plastic surgery with other medical fields or non-medical fields in order to have a full understanding of what is this beautiful world of plastic surgery. Of course, definitely.
So we’re going to start by you telling us a background about yourself, the career and what inspired you to become a plastic surgeon. As many of you know, maybe I’m Italian by origin. So I was born in Milan and I started at the first private University of Medicine in Milan.
In 2004, I graduated and already was following a very famous plastic surgeon in Italy, which became my first mentor. And after my graduation, I decided to move and to go to Verona, which is another beautiful city in north of Italy, where I started to become a plastic surgeon. So I did my residency for five years in Verona and I got my degree as a plastic surgeon and I started my career as a freelancer.
So I was moving around different cities in north of Italy, visiting different clinics and different hospitals where I was doing my procedures. In 2011, I came to Dubai for the first time. It was not very famous as it is now, but what I wanted to do was to visit my sister who moved here for… That’s the reason that brought you to Dubai, actually.
Exactly, exactly. I didn’t know anything about Dubai itself. Again, it was not popular.
So I just tried to visit the new country, visit my sister and I fell in love with the city. So I was driving down the Alwaza Road and Jumeirah Road and I saw all these beautiful clinics and I said, actually, absolutely, this is the place where I want to be. So I applied for my medical license.
Three, four months later, I got my license. I started working as a visiting doctor. So I was coming back and forth from Italy every month for a week.
Yeah. Well, it’s the first time I know that. Honestly speaking, you never told me that, actually.
So I was leaving my job in Italy for a week, coming here. And after two years, I was not very sure how to market myself, how to be outside in the field. So I didn’t have a lot of patients at the time.
So after two years, I decided to stop doing that because it was not bringing me anything more than what I was losing in Italy, you know, skipping one week of work. And that moment, you know, I received a job offer for a leading hospital in plastic surgery in Dubai. Where I was looking, I was working with them already.
And they offered me actually the role as a chief of plastic surgery. Nice. Just right in time.
Yes. I was very young at the time. And of course, the role scares me a little bit because I was very, you know, comfortable to do my surgical procedure.
But doing a managing role was a little bit difficult for me. Of course. But at the same time, I decided to go ahead with that.
And I took the chance to move to Dubai with my family. And I started this journey. Which works very well for me and the patients in Dubai.
Of course, they can say the same. So at the end, a few months later, they offered me the job title as a medical director of the facility. So I found myself to manage 95 employees just in one go.
And I think it was a very beautiful experience for me. I learned so much. Challenging though.
Challenging because I didn’t have any experience. Management. But really, really taught me a lot of things.
And at the end of the day, I’m here after many years. I’m still a medical director in a smaller facility, but still, you know, knowing what I’m doing. And I think at the end of the day, this helped me a lot to develop not only my surgical skills, but managing people and how to deal with people and also grow up as a doctor towards my patients.
That’s very important. So apart from the challenges that you had going back from Italy to Dubai, there are absolutely challenges and opportunities that actually occurred and happened to you in Dubai. Can you just tell us briefly a little bit about it? Yes, for sure.
You know, these opportunities were offered me. I think that Dubai compared, for example, to Italy, most of Europe is a city of possibilities. So if you have the basic skills in your field, you have some willingness to succeed and you have some strength to go ahead down your road, you can do what you want in Dubai.
And this is what happened to me. I was very young the moment I was starting my career here. And through the difficulties and the challenges, etc., I grew up a lot.
So the opportunities also, even when I left this first hospital where I was working for, a lot of opportunities came along my way. And I was able to grab some of them to grow even more in the field and to become one of the lead plastic surgeons in Dubai at the moment. Which happened? Yeah, you know, it’s been a long journey, again, full of upside down, a lot of things that are not really easy to face.
But at the end, everything, you know, let you grow. And I’m very happy where I am at the moment. Definitely.
So we’re done with the background. Now I’m going to start like plastic surgery wise. What is the main, I know the answer, but just for the patients, for reassurance, what is your main area of expertise and how did you actually find the way to go to this kind of specialization? Like, why did you focus on such a specialization? So when I was becoming a plastic surgeon in Verona, as I said before, I was working in the major breast reconstruction center.
So we were having like 15, 20 surgeries per day on different theaters, of course, about breast reconstruction. So this helped me to understand the anatomy of breast, the approach to the breast surgery from a different perspective, what I’m doing now, because it was a reconstructive part, which means also more psychological for the patient. You have to correct the defect that has been created because of a cancer, because of malformation.
But that helped you actually understand women even more psychologically, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Women more, but also the breast itself.
Exactly. Of course. I decided going along in my career to focus even more on the breast itself.
So my main field is breast procedures. So I do from breast augmentation, breast lifting, breast reduction, breast reconstruction, still some cases of breast reconstruction. We’re going to talk about that in details for sure.
Definitely. Yeah. But this is why I decided to focus, because I had the chance to learn from very good, my second mentor about, you know, breast surgeries.
And I think I understood every single step of this beautiful part of the body. And I can now give my attention to this kind of procedures and give the best to my patients. Well, I’m pretty sure your mentors are very proud of you, honestly, when they see you, how actually you are one of the lead plastic surgeon in Dubai now.
They’re really pretty proud. Well, we know that there is ups and downs, you know, good, bad days for sure, working in such a field. But I want to know, actually, the memorable kind of experience that you had and how huge impact it had on you.
Like if you had one, you know, can you can tell us about it? Well, definitely I have a lot of patient stories that I can share. But one comes to my mind as the main one. I had this lady who came to me, suggested, recommended from a neurosurgeon friend of mine who works in Dubai.
This patient has several hernias on the cervical spine because of the weight of her breasts. So her breasts grew too much. You remember the case, right? Yeah, of course.
Yeah. And this patient was refused by five other plastic surgeons because her anatomy, her case was really very complicated. When I saw her, I said, I can do this procedure for you.
And I decided to go ahead with the breast reduction. The surgery went extremely well. I think it’s one of my best cases.
She’s so happy till now, honestly. And what really impressed me is that the first time she came back to the follow up after the surgery and this patient really could not exercise because of the pain. She could not lay down because the weight of the breast was compressing the chest.
She couldn’t breathe properly. So she entered my room and she said, you changed my life. And that is such a huge impact because not only we are making people beautiful, but we really can change the life of some patients.
So this is one of the most impressive cases. And I still remember her with very, you know, pleasure. Before jumping to the next question, we actually had recently a very amazing case, actually from one of the patient came from India.
You did an earlobe correction and construction, actually reconstruction for the whole earlobe. Can you tell us more about it, please? So a very young boy, he found me online. I researched about me and all the way from India came over to Dubai to do this kind of procedure, which is something that differs from my main field.
But of course, he likes to do kind of different, weird, unique surgeries. Honestly, he loves challenges. He doesn’t like to go to the same rhythm of routine procedures, breast liposuction.
He loves to do a new, unique kind of outcome, actually, after the surgery. So I accepted the case. This guy was born without the earlobe on the side and with a deformation on the ear itself.
So I performed the surgery to reconstruct his earlobe and replace the ear in the correct position and correct some cartilage deformation. The result was really good. The patient is extremely happy, still thanking us every day.
He went back to his country now. Actually, he went to another country. If I remember right.
Sydney, I think. But it’s another happy ending story for me, because again, it’s not only making a breast bigger, making a breast smaller, make a new body contour for the patient, which is, you know, of course, important for me. That’s what my business is based on.
But it’s also helping them to really achieve some self-confidence, which is nice to have a change every now and then, you know. What’s it’s your what do you believe says your approach to plastic surgery, not any other fields? Well, I think what makes me stand out of the crowd is that my approach is a patient centric, which means that everything I do is around the patient itself. My patients need to understand that they’re not coming to buy a pair of shoes and that they are making a big change in their life.
So I want to make sure that they are guided hand by hand by me and you, because, of course, you need to know that Sarah is a very important role in my practice, because without her, I don’t have the time to follow up with the patients because I’m busy doing my job. So I when I hired her, my main goal was to have someone who can really pamper my patients. It’s happening, it’s happening.
It’s sure, I’m sure. And I, I was very lucky because I was able to transfer to her my vision on the patient journey itself. And she acquired my same vision and now she can translate it to the patient.
Thank you so much. So what is important for me is the patient feels at the center of the whole process. So the journey should be effortless for them.
All the questions should be answered. All the doubts that they have, they need to find an answer from us, me or you or whoever else on our team, because also we train our nurses to be, you know, comforting the patient. Sometimes they do maybe addressing change on my behalf, et cetera.
So they need they’re very well prepared and a very well conscious experience of what is the process of healing after the surgery. So that is what really makes, in my opinion, importance about the patient itself. But also I start from the consultation.
So the consultation is the moment where I listen to the patient. And if you read my Google reviews, most of them say, apart from the results, which are happy, that I listen to them and I answer to all their questions. And some of them said we will really pat on to the doctor.
We are asking a lot of questions. It took the time to answer to all of them because I know how the patient feels. I always tell to my collaborators, like you and nurses and the reception in the clinic, put yourself in the shoes of the patient.
Of course, you are scared. Always facing a surgery. Of course, you’re scared.
Of course, you need to be reassured. So you need to be guided and to be listened and to be answered to all your questions. We go back to the roots.
You’re from Milan, the city of fashion. So that’s why you care a lot about details as well. Yes, of course.
A lot of patients tell me that he’s so charismatic and very stylish as well. So now you know why and what’s the reason. So we’re done with the background.
We’re done with your personal and career wise. We’re going to go to the podcast. What are the topics and the themes that you’re going to actually have in your podcast? So my idea is to have a few intro episodes where I introduce myself like this one.
I introduce the world of plastic surgery in general, and then I will have a single topic for each single procedure. I might have some patients who want to share their experience with me, so they will be invited here to discuss. You will encourage them, actually, as well.
Absolutely. And because also it’s important for the patients out there to understand how my real patient feels, because we can say a lot of beautiful things, but then the experience of the people who tried us can really speak for them. I will have also some other guests which will be other colleagues, other doctors from different specialties can be psychologists, can be anesthesia, anesthesiologists, anesthesia doctors, can be general practitioners, physiotherapists, nurses, etc.
Because I really want my listener, my followers to understand the whole world of plastic surgery. So I will have some simple podcasts where I will answer questions. Maybe you will interview me again, ask me the question that you receive from the patient about a specific procedure, liposuction, tummy tuck, whatever.
But then it’s important to have also some other people that gives their side of the story, not only me talking. So I want to be me interviewing somebody else. Of course.
And have their point of view on this big world of plastic surgery. After working with you, honestly, for six years, I actually came to understand that plastic surgery is not about only doing the surgery. So having physiotherapists, having anesthesiologists, they all play a very big role in your surgery.
So connecting the dots somehow to have a group of doctors to interview them, to make the patient understand more. About the journey that they’re having. And as I said before, the patient is the central point and then all these other professional figures rotate around them, OK? From the reception in the clinic, from your role, from the nurses, the other doctors that I might refer them to.
Sometimes we need a consultation on a specialist, for a sinologist, for breast surgery. So I need to have this kind of team of doctors that will really help me to deliver the best service to my patients. Definitely, sure.
And just coming back to the podcast, how do you think it’s going to be beneficial for potential patients? I want them to have the chance to listen to me, OK? Gain confidence in what I’m doing. So knowing that I’m experiencing this or that topic, but also have some of their answers already revealed during this podcast. And when they come for a surgery, for example, if you have the podcast already recorded, we can share with them the link, they can go and see the video and have all the answers.
So it’s like a tool to give the patient what they need and to make them feel really comfortable about how… Not to have cold feet, of course. Yes, exactly. And then how the whole process will develop and what are the main doubts that they have? Because we will also ask, you know, my patients through our social media network.
What is the question? What do you want to know from me? And then I will introduce this into the next episode of course, podcast in order to give them the answers. Definitely, definitely. How do you see it, doctor, the podcast evolving over time? What’s your long term kind of a goal for it? The goal is creating a library of videos where really patient can have access to anytime and build a trust in the patient, become like a point of contact.
Even some patient, maybe they are not in Dubai, they are abroad, they want to ask me a question about their surgery for something. So becoming in a certain way on the web, like a person, people can trust and can approach for the doubts, for the surgery, for their complications, management, for whatever, and be there for the patients. So the long term goal is to have a real big number of episodes where people can listen to me and they can really understand what is plastic surgery about.
That was very, really informative. Thank you so much, doctor. This is it for today.
It was really amazing to know more insights about your personal and career wise to get to know you. I didn’t know some stuff I had to know. I actually came to know it today and I will leave the last word for you.
So if you enjoy this first episode, please stay tuned, follow my YouTube channel. OK, we’ll leave the description down. And it’s I hope you will enjoy it.
I hope you can spread the word towards a lot of surprises coming. So stay tuned as well. Yes, exactly.
And thank you so much for following the first episode. And again, stay tuned. Thank you so much.
Because you deserve the best.