You're probably stretching the limits of what North American society finds "tolerable".

BME: Yeah, that's a safe assumption. But these things are acceptable in some places. Subincisions for example -- They are accepted in Australia.

STUBBS: By whom?

BME: Well, Aboriginal people.

STUBBS: Precisely. But we're Judeo-Christian... although in the Old Testament there are passages that say if a woman can be beautified, in that it helps her find a good match, and reproduce, and be a productive member of society, then that's OK to do an operation on her body, the "sacred temple".

BME: So beauty is on a cultural rather than personal level?

STUBBS: A cultural, societal, and maybe a personal level. You're coming to a surgeon who is a bit eccentric, pushing the frontier of plastic surgery, because I've been around the world, and I've seen many cultures. I don't know how long you have been in my office, but every ethnic group is seen here, and so I have to appreciate what people want -- What they consider acceptable, and what I consider safe surgery.

But the subincision destroys a certain element of the penis, the spiral valve, which allows you to urinate properly.

STUBBS: It sprays.

BME: Well, people can sit down.

STUBBS: Exactly.

You don't need a penis. These days penises are redundant! You can have needle aspiration of sperm from your testicles, you can have your child by artificial insemination of your female partner, and in a sense, you can do away with the penis.

BME: Well, the motivation behind a subincision is that it opens up the urethra to more stimulation; it feels better. That's why -- people who are doing them are seeing them as enhancing procedures.

STUBBS: No one has come and asked me for that. In this society, if someone did ask me for it, I wouldn't do it, because I would be judged by my colleagues. The College of Physicians and Surgeons are fairly -- radically -- conservative.

BME: If a surgeon did go ahead and do subincisions, what sort of professional risk would they be at?

STUBBS: They'd lose their license probably.

BME: If you went to them with the idea of a subincision, and said, "here's this procedure, I think it's a good idea for these reasons", what would the steps be for getting "authorisation", since you went through a similar process with the penis lengthening surgery?

STUBBS: Precisely. With that I showed through a twenty five year search of medical indexes (MedLine), that this operation had been done in North America for thirty five years but for different purposes. So the operation was not brand new. I also showed them what's called an informed consent, a list of potential risks that could occur, and I told the first two hundred patients it was experimental. The fee I charged was about half what was being charged elsewhere in the world, so it was not perceived that I profiting substantially from it.

BME: But I can show an equally long history of subincisions, albeit not a medical one.

STUBBS: And you know what would happen? The person that did that, if there was an infection, because there are bacteria out there that we don't have antibiotics for, or some complication such that the individual that was having it performed died or developed severe complications, the practitioner would be charged with manslaughter or assault. The laws of the land are here; they're in place.

BME: Most of the people doing it are doing it on themselves. I can walk into any drugstore and buy anaesthetic, scalpels, and anything I need to do surgery on myself.

STUBBS: Well, you can also buy a gun and shoot yourself! You can also go to Canadian Tire and buy a nail gun. You can basically do to yourself whatever you have the intestinal fortitude or the imagination for. When there's another person, if it's a medical professional, you're asking someone who is following the rules of the land to do something which is, if it's brand-new, has to be authorised by committee after committee after committee after committee and whatnot so he doesn't get charged with manslaughter or assault and doesn't lose his license.

STUBBS: I think he's probably at high risk, because in our society, certainly here [in Canada], only nurses, dentists, and doctors can violate the skin into the deeper layer (into the subcutaneous). That's a boundary past which the law starts acting. You can be tattooed because it's going into the dermis. You can have hair removed by electrolysis because that again is in the skin, but you go under the skin, which is what some of these things are, and you're into that grey area.

BME: But piercing goes under the skin in some cases.

STUBBS: It goes under or through the skin, but because it has been socially acceptable to have pierced ears, and you can go to a department store where they'll put a stud in your ear. It's one of these that's been "allowed", but if people were all getting HIV or hepatitis through a common piercing then you know what would happen: Eaton's if they were doing it would be sued, and lose, and certainly if the Blood Commission, or Red Cross here is going to get nailed, and they were trying to do it professionally, then a retailer that's doing piercing is going to get nailed.

BME: At least professional piercing studios have got autoclaves and operating at some basic level of sterility.

STUBBS: Maybe they do, maybe they don't. These people that have the autoclaves, are they checked routinely? We have special tests that we send off and they're checked to see whether it's reaching the right heat and actually killing organisms. People who are not terribly ethical can decide that they're not going to put distilled water in, he'll put tap water in, and everything calcifies and the heat's not high, and a few of the bugs survive. Maybe these people are going and putting themselves at risk.

A woman, one of her tests came back Hepatitis C positive, and I had to turn her down for surgery.

BME: Why is that?

STUBBS: Because we have no cure for HIV and Hep C, and no immunization. I'd be at risk, and my staff would be at risk. We test people beforehand, and I don't think piercing or tattoo parlours test their clients before to see who may transmit something.

BME: When you're charging forty dollars for a piercing, that's not really an option.

STUBBS: That's right. Nor are they able to draw the blood to send it to the lab. Nor would the public lab accept something from a layperson. In a sense, doctors have a monopoly on a certain element of care, protection, treating people. The monopoly was given to them on the basis of thirteen years of university education, and an element of trust, and an element of responsibility.

BME: It's certainly a very small subculture.

STUBBS: That's like taking the penis off -- You may split the penis, but removal is beyond anyone's acceptance of modification. That is basically amputation and you lose the function that goes with it. To get back to the female circumcision, what I was doing, the cutting around (circum-cise), because that word signified what was being done in Africa which was an ablation, I had to send the college some pictures and say, "here's a mature lady, she works in a medical facility, she's grossly redundant, very unhappy with her appearance, the things are too floppy, and I am taking them off but I don't want to be caught up with the laws of the country that say that female circumcision is a criminal offence."

That's not a law that doctors passed, that's one that society has passed and doctors are expected to enforce. Any woman that comes to my office and has had an African circumcision and it's done in Canada, I have to report that woman to the Officer of Health, the College, and the Police. Just like if you have HIV, I have to report you. Or if you are sexually abused I have to report you.

BME: Right now, that "line", as far as operations go, is drawn only at female genital mutilation?

STUBBS: Well, each sex has its own limitations, but I think the only legal one on the books is female circumcision in the African style. Male circumcision is actually something that everyone's still debating, whether it should be done or not done, but because we are so steeped in Judeo-Christian history and no one wants to take that one on. They're not going to put doctors in jail that do circumcisions. They're not even going to put lay-people in jail that do them because in the Jewish community it's often a Rabbi or a Rabbi-type that comes in and does it with an old rusty knife. Scary, but it's done.

BME: Like if I started doing surgery out of my home.

STUBBS: Sure. If you buy a cannula and a vacuum machine, you can start sucking some fat out, then these are the guys that are going to come and say, "I'm sorry, you just don't have the training for public safety, and come down to Kingston [Penitentiary] for a while and we'll pay for your room and board."

BME: I know there are people (not doctors) doing castrations in Toronto on a client basis.

STUBBS: I did one on a chap who's testicles were non functional because he was born with a condition where they weren't producing anything anyway. They're done if you have a disease, but you do them on a normal healthy male, again, that would be crossing the line.

BME: But there are some people (in the US) who have managed to convince their doctors to perform it for psychological reasons.

STUBBS: The laws are slightly different in the States. Criminals can have it done. I think there's legislation where someone who's a sex offender or obviously high testosterone output can have it done.

BME: In most of the cases it's done in a fetish environment, or because the people feel out of control due to the testosterone, or due to fear of various cancers.

STUBBS: You appear to be mentally competent, realistic, and part of a subculture that is pushing the boundaries of what one can do based on expression. But there's a whole group of humanity who's brain doesn't function adequately, and they will gravitate towards what you're doing, and they gravitate to what I do.

BME: Do you get a lot of people coming to you with unusual requests?

STUBBS: I've had unusual requests, but I get people who know what a plastic surgeon can do, and come with unrealistic expectations. And so therefore I have to segregate those that do have a psychiatric problem, or what's called a "dysmorphophobia" where their body and their mind are not matched and never will be matched. They'll have procedure after procedure after procedure, never getting satisfaction. What I do is more of a one-shot deal in a sense. Someone comes in with a specific problem, I fix it, and they're happy... goodbye.

As far as evaluation, I've been a doctor for longer than twenty-five years. It's almost like a driver: He knows when that person's going to pull out in front of him - You just know it's going to happen, so you turn. I can get a pretty good clue beforehand which patients I feel comfortable accepting for surgery.

BME: I was asked recently about penile reduction. Is that an option?

STUBBS: One request in over two thousand patients. It was a request of a young chap that wanted a smaller penis, and because it was so unusual, in that where most men would agree that bigger is better -- not most women, but most men -- we felt that he should definitely have psychiatric counselling.

He was within the range of normal (normal is a bell curve). I turned him down. The risk is too great. When you do a surgical procedure, there is risk there. The patient has not got enough education, experience in life to understand the limits of that risk.

To make one smaller, I'd just reverse the process of the lengthening. There many operations that accidentally make the penis smaller. One is putting rods in it; there's fibrosis, there's scarification. But I did not want to do an operation which in a sense I felt was too risky for someone that was within normal limits. But you can turn around and when someone else comes in, and they have small breasts, but I think the risk to benefit ratio is better in their interest. There's no black and white -- If there was, it wouldn't be a very interesting world.

STUBBS: Probably long before they did that, the Orientals were into that. I'll show you. [Shows me a C-shaped piece of a rubber- like substance]. There. That's what I took out of one man, and that goes around the neck of the penis. That was put in in the Orient. Just a standard thing they do over there.

BME: And that's something you could only get away with there?

STUBBS: Yes. It's not available here. As a society we've said it's OK to put that in a nose [showing me a blue rubbery bridge- piece, looking very much like the genital implant] to build the bridge of a nose up, but to put this in a penis is not. Same substance.

If I put the genital implant in here, and he developed a complication, I would probably in a court of law lose, and I might have a problem with my license.

BME: Could you even refer someone to a doctor in Asia that could do it?

STUBBS: I wouldn't do the referral because the referral means a certain level of acceptance and responsibility. That's normally for specialists, it's the family doctor that refers someone. If I refer to someone else, there's a certain amount of feedback and collaboration. If I knew there was someone in the Orient that was doing something that over here was not entirely acceptable, I would not feel so comfortable in referring someone. I even have difficulty referring to doctors in Toronto if I don't know the quality of their work.

Four or five years ago I had men calling me that wanted penis enhancement and I said that I was not aware of anyone doing it, I had never been trained in doing it, and I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable doing it without adequate training. But I had access to the medical literature and I looked it up. There are two things that I felt might help people, and one was girth. And because I'd been aspirating fat out for many years and injecting it back in women's faces and other areas to plump up things. I told one patient who was crippled by the size of his penis that this might help, but he'd be the first. I didn't feel that putting part of his body back in his body was a major risk and he accepted and the result was good. But with others we found the fat might shift, or wouldn't live, and there were irregularities and unpredictability. We have an improvement on that now called dermal fat grafting. So that area there hasn't been much of a kafuffle about.

BME: I was told that it's primarily average or larger than average men coming in?

STUBBS: The average length in the first two or three hundred was about five inches, which may be slightly less than national average, but you know, what's national average? If you look at the United States, a group from Washington DC, they may be 80% black, and black guys are a bit bigger than Europeans, and Europeans are a bit bigger than Chinese, so your statistics are skewed. Some of the men that we've seen have been on the small side, but some have been on the bigger than average side. I have men who's father was one race and mother was another, and the brothers were a mixture, and one brother got a bit more African in him, and the other brother's got a bit more Asian in him, and they're very unhappy because of the discrepancy.

Plastic surgery traditionally has been a problem solving speciality. When there is a problem out there, but no one seems to know what the solution is, or a complication, then there is a group of artistic, creative doctors that say, "OK, my training is a broad basis of things. I'm not just a bone doctor, I'm not just a kidney doctor, I'm sort of a doctor that's been trained in all those specialities, and looks at problems." Plastic surgeons seemed to be the group that during the war, guys would get pieces shot off, and we've saved their life, but how can we integrate them back into society? In come the plastic surgeons and they take a piece here, a piece there, they put the person back together with a result that does not look too bad.

[At this point Dr. Stubbs shows me a portfolio of photographs -- the following comments were in regards to those photos] For ten years I taught academic plastic surgery, which was trauma, reconstructive, and cosmetic. Here's a drug addict that shot up in the wrong vein; that's gangrene. He got the boots put to his face, broke all the bones. He got his hand in the machine that makes the shingles for the roof and couldn't find the off switch -- That's his groin [grafted onto his wrist]. In the past, his hand would have been cut off. There's no way of saving that when you've got no coverage. Chainsaw that jumped back. More cancers. The scars are there. His scar is better because his skin is looser. He's got sun-damaged old tight skin, but just the same, he can now go out in public, whereas that fungating cancer there certainly gave people a bit of indigestion at the meal table. Dog bite - now he could put a ring in that, but again, his mother wasn't happy about that.

Worst skin cancer, melanoma. Ear. Now you see, some of the things that your group are doing would be considered by Western standards deforming. And a plastic surgeon looks at something which is a cancer which to you looks like a little scab, but under a microscope this eating well away part of his ear. I could just cut it out and it would leave a hole. Now, if that was someone from your subculture, they'd be happy with that. But 99.9% of the people in North America would not be, and so they ask me, please, can you make my ear look acceptable again? You see, you disturb a lot of people. I don't have to tell you that.

You see, some of the risk of what you're doing, or what people similar to yourself who are fully aware of what they're doing at a time in their life that they think that that's great and a form of expression, later on their circumstances change, and then they ask me for help. I had a man who was a genius, he dropped out of school early, he ran with the drug culture, he was in a motorcycle gang. He just didn't find enough stimulation in life, except sort of on the wild side, and then he realised that there were other things that were equally stimulating, and that was academic pursuits. He went to university, did well, and got into medicine, which is an unlimited field as far as stimulation. Unfortunately he had "69" tattooed on his earlobe. I cut it out because in those days we didn't have a laser that was specific for that pigment and I took some skin from behind his ear and put a patch on it. It looked a little bit like a burn but that was socially acceptable. He was fully aware that that tattoo, in that location, would severely limit his advancement in now his new profession.

What you do is irreversible. You can never make it normal again. You can try and put it back close to normal, but you can never make it normal again. Some of the things I worry about, the sterility and the transfer of disease, that can be circumvented with the appropriate precautions. But other things are permanent that may become a problem later in life you have to seriously consider.

I have a patient who is an executive, he was a handsome guy. He looked mesomorphic, fit, tailored suit, Armani, the works, everything. When he was on the football team, they were drinking and he decided to get his ear pierced and although he did not wear anything in that and hadn't for five years, he now had short cropped hair and was moving up the ladder in the corporation, and he was bright and they were wanting to move him along, but was entering the rooms and talking with his head turned a bit because he was very self-conscious about these two little holes. I cut them out and patched them up. Now it blends in. Some people have a crease in that area, fortunately, so it looks more like a crease. If someone really looked, they could see something had been done. Even the stigma of having had a pierced ear was more than he could tolerate in his ascent up the corporate ladder.

BME: I think that's a very important warning for people.

STUBBS: Sure. [Showing me an extended consent form] I'll show you what I warn people about. Start off at death and move down.

STUBBS: It's a form of adornment. But just as what I do can be carried to an extreme, and I'm the only one that can determine the limit, because I have the right legally to do that. I can refuse a patient. What you do, or the body modification subculture does, could be carried to an extreme to the detriment of the person. And I don't know where that limit is. In our society, it's over there, and in other societies, it's way over there.

Time will tell. (Five years from now...) I sort of joked to one of the staff here, maybe we should open one of the rooms for piercing and tattooing so at least we can supervise the sterility and how it's done. It's like abortion -- if it's being done to the detriment of people, that they're dying of haemorrhage and infection, it was legalized and then done in hospitals.

BME: What's the difference between street LSD and medical grade LSD?

STUBBS: Street LSD is produced in an illicit lab somewhere, and may be impure. Anything that's produced in a non-controlled lab may have impurities.

Medical grade LSD can have the same psychedelic effects, or it can have bizarre effects if it's a mixture of things or impure. We use pure grade LSD. The patient is floated out for five minutes so we release their mind from their body and freeze the area we're going to work on with a local. They drift back into awareness, but now they're frozen. The LSD is a quick trip out and back and by then they're frozen. The freezing is painful -- the long-acting freezing is unpleasant and may involve a lot of needling or needling in areas that people aren't accustomed to. This allows us to get a part of the body numb so that things can be done to it.

STUBBS: I would think so.

BME: Outside of just saying "don't do it" about warnings would you offer? If it's something that they really want, and there isn't a mainstream medical avenue for achieving it...

STUBBS: The risks that I tell people for my procedures probably apply to many of the things you're talking about. [Reading from his consent form] Death, swelling, bruising, no guarantees, infection, sensation, function, late healing, revisions, healing process, bleeding, blood clots, skin loss, chronic persistent problems, asymmetry, complications, and unpredictable problems. So if you're going to cut off a piece, or cut into a piece, those same problems can occur.

BME: In all the people that I know, I don't know of any serious medical problems arising directly from one of these procedures.

STUBBS: You wouldn't know. How could you know? You only know if they die, because that what hits the paper. But you don't know if they had a massive haematoma or some other complication and then went to a hospital. That's privileged information.

All the doctors in Toronto knew when I had a massive complication because I personally went with the patient from here to the Toronto General when he returned the next day with a huge haematoma. He was a Chinese chap that took oriental medication that was probably spiked with Aspirin or something that caused a bleeding problem and didn't tell us. But there was obviously something going wrong when he came back the next day. Everyone in Toronto heard about that through the medical grapevine, and if they hadn't heard, I publicised it, as it was totally unexpected. Patients now are grilled, we ask them now about garlic, because there's a component in garlic which may affect bleeding, we ask them about ginseng, we ask them about high dose vitamin E.

STUBBS: Well, liquid silicone is uncontrolled. It was never approved for general use. It was authorised among ten or twenty doctors for experimental purposes so they could follow it over a period of time but some people got hold of it and started injecting it for the purpose of building up chins, lips, or noses, and because it had impurities in it, it caused phenomenal allergic fibrous reactions, which literally destroyed the tissues that it was put into.

BME: Since that was due to impurities, if you got pure, medical grade silicone, would these problems go away?

STUBBS: Not even the pure substance was relatively safe because you could never purify that particular synthetic totally. It's a chained molecule which has impure chains in it. It's the same thing as gasoline. When oil comes out of the ground, you can distil it into kerosene, benzene, gasoline, naptha, all sorts of things.

BME: So basically for safe implants in polymers you're limited to Teflon?

STUBBS: No, Teflon's not even all that safe. It has limitations, but there's a whole field of implant science that people with PhDs and MDs go into. Solid silicone which is polymerised with tighter bonded molecules is considered safe for the majority of people. Liquid is a different polymer; the chains are looser. Not even if it's medical grade, made to the purest they can make it, if it's injected it may move and then you have no control over it.

BME: It doesn't bond to the tissue?

STUBBS: No, it moves through the tissues, and that was the big concern. The silicone that was put in breast implants was a medical grade but, when the implant broke, what happened to it? That's where you got all these gooey pictures that were on W5 and Connie Chung. They weren't actually necessarily causing sickness in the patient, but they were certainly were dramatic. [showing me a photo of an inflamed face] This was sickness -- it was done with the stuff you buy at Canadian Tire for caulking windows. There's a beautician just across from Canadian Tire that uses it.

The problem is we can't catch them in the act usually, and it requires a person to complain. Often the person who's had it done feels somewhat responsible because they said all right and feel terribly foolish. If someone dies then the coroner, society, takes over. If the person stays alive, very few will go out and turn it into a big court case because they are partly responsible for their own illness.

STUBBS: It's called skin expansion. We do that to cover defects. It didn't take a genius, but the guy that discovered it I guess watched his wife get pregnant and said, I need to close a defect from a burn patient, and if my wife can stretch her skin over nine months, maybe I can do the same thing.

BME: Right now those are Teflon, but he's planning on putting in coral to have it bond to the bone.

STUBBS: It will. Coral is a biological hydroxyapetite crystal which is similar to bone, and I believe purified coral has been used for bone replacement with some success.

BME: Sometimes bone spurs creating horns occur in humans through accident?

STUBBS: Sure, I've taken them off. It's called an exostosis. They form by chance sometimes, or after trauma. You get some blood collecting there, and the bone in its attempt to heal produces more bone.

BME: I'm not asking for instructions, but is that something this guy could do?

STUBBS: It's not controllable.

Implants have been put in the scalp before by people that want to hold a hairpiece on, and they invariably get infected. The scalp is one of these multi-layered tissues that if you get infection in one of the layers it spreads.

BME: Dr. Anthony Pignatora, a doctor in New York is putting titanium snaps in to hold on toupees.

STUBBS: That's called osteointegration and there's been a lot of research done in that. Most of the research was done by dentists because they want to append dental implants to the bone, but they're not foolproof and unfortunately in the scalp.

BME: Do they offer a direct line for infection into the skull?

STUBBS: Yes.

BME: [Showing photos of the "Metal Mohawk"] He's successfully healed and it's been about a year now.

STUBBS: You can heal, and then it can flare up. You're taking something out of time or context, and saying "here it is." Medicine looks at thirty or forty or fifty years. This is why for the breast implant procedure, where they took some individual who had problems, then society, who doesn't analyse things statistically and scientifically, said, "aha, cause-effect relationship, all women with implants are going to be sick and obviously we have to compensate these people because there was a legal screw-up here." Doctors took those women, and took the general population. They said, 10% of women get breast cancer. The group of women that got implants? Less than 10% had breast cancer. Interesting. Do implants cure cancer? No. Maybe because they had smaller breasts to begin with they had less of a chance of cancer. The media was saying implants may cause cancer. Well that isn't what we were finding, but that didn't scare people, so it didn't get printed. Arthritis and all these autoimmune diseases; again, you take the average population, and say two percent of women are going to get arthritis or scleroderma or something. Take women who get implants; also two percent. Interesting. Implants aren't increasing the incidence. There is no cause and effect relationship, because if there was there'd be a higher group there. But when you get a hundred women that show themselves crippled like this and they're in pain every day, and they can get two or three million dollars, because they've had some augmentation, wow, but nothing has come of it. We think that there may be implants in some people that have an allergic tendency or may get the disease anyway, it may speed up the process.

BME: When doing implants, do you do something like a spot test, implant a little piece of the material to check that?

STUBBS: It's a great idea. I offered it to one woman. She didn't want to do it. I wish there was a legal obligation to do that. In fact, Dow-Corning before they went bankrupt made me baby little implants that were used in animal research because the woman who developed problems in each side who we believe had an allergic reaction, her own body's intrinsic allergic reaction, just like some people are allergic to peanuts, she was a model, and it was very important to her to have a safe and good result. I said, based on what you had happen to you, people that are high-risk, in the sense that this implant means so much to their career, I would then offer them this test.

BME: Are breast implants your most common procedure?

STUBBS: They used to be. Of course they dropped in popularity, people thought they were going to die from them. It's come back though, simply because people do read the back page, and read between the lines, and when the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Med. School and U of T Med. School and a number of other Ivy League facilities that were not sponsored by Dow-Corning's research funding or anything else came up with independent statistically irrefutable scientific evidence that there was no cause-effect relationship, people started saying, well, what was the problem?

BME: But the lawsuits were still successful.

STUBBS: Hey, OJ was found not guilty. There was irrefutable DNA evidence, but because there was a jury of twelve people, non-scientific minds that were swayed by emotions and other factors, because they're human, they could find someone not guilty. It's scary. DNA is irrefutable to doctors. It's your blueprint. There's no one else in the world that has your DNA. If you spill it around, and leave your semen everywhere, they're going to trace it back to you.

STUBBS: Liposuction may be the most common. Certainly for women it's the most common procedure I do. As far as the penis lengthening, I've been analysing my statistics since I got back from China and of course when I got back it was a novel and new procedure and men were rushing to sacrifice themselves no matter how experimental they were told it was. That volume went up and came down and now it has probably stabilised at the true need and desire level. We did patient 395 or 396 yesterday, so probably by the end of the month we'll hit 400. I do two or three a week. We're probably closer to sixty to eighty per year.

BME: You mentioned you don't do girth and length in one operation.

STUBBS: Dangerous.

BME: I've seen other surgeons that are willing to do that.

STUBBS: Sure, because it's market driven. It doesn't make sense. If both length and girth are done simultaneously, you're taking a big hunk of the body, putting it in there, asking it to survive, and you're causing swelling because of the lengthening and putting weights and traction on it. It's like strangling a baby who's just struggling to live.

STUBBS: He wasn't my great grandfather, but you follow the family tree back, there's old George sitting up on one of the branches. It wasn't anything that people kept saying, "you're the spitting image of that guy two hundred years ago." Art was my major all through high school and I taught it as a summer job.

BME: I guess that gives you an advantage as a plastic surgeon?

STUBBS: I think in some courses in the States it's a prerequisite. If you don't have the artistic background before you come in, they teach it to you along the way. Anyone can stick a knife up a nose and call it a rhinoplasty. That's what's happening in Toronto now with the government squeezing all the doctors. There are many family doctors who have started to do surgery. Anyone that comes to the office you can tell them you're going to make them beautiful if they are gullible, and there's big money, relative to what the government pays to do something there, and so they buy a laser, or ultrasonic liposuction machine, or something else, and put an ad in the paper. Next thing you know, people are trouping in, thinking that they're getting the best care.

BME: In relation to that, how does your Cosmetic Surgicentre serve people?

STUBBS: I turn more people down than I accept. I only operate on individuals who are good candidates -- healthy, realistic, and have a good indication for the procedure in question.