What is Plastic Surgery?

The term plastic surgery often raises eyebrows and attracts shakes of the head or frowns from people from different classes of society. This is mostly because when we usually hear the term plastic surgery, the first thing that comes to mind are those people who are so unsatisfied with their appearance that they go to great lengths to change the way they look just so they could look attractive by their own standards.
We usually see celebrities changing their appearances drastically, sometimes wrongfully even, and we think that plastic surgery is evil. That it tolerates people’s crazy ideas of becoming someone they shouldn’t.
However, think again. What about the child who got her chin rebuilt after a dog bit her? Or the 15-year old girl who underwent laser surgery to lighten the birthmark on half of her face? These cases are also under plastic surgery, but we don’t usually pay attention to these because they are outnumbered by those who are undergoing plastic surgery for aesthetic purposes.
The word plastic in plastic surgery doesn’t refer to the synthetic material, nor was it used because it incorporates the use of plastic in any of the plastic surgery procedures. The word plastic comes from the Greek word plastikos which means to form or mold, as what happens in a plastic surgery.
Plastic surgery doesn’t only affect the aesthetic aspect of the patient, but more importantly the function as well. It’s just saddening that over time, its connotation has evolved—or devolved?—into something evil, superficial, and unnecessary.