Dr. Mladick is retiring. - Associates in Plastic Surgery

6 FALL/WINTER 2008
LIFESTYLE
If by retiring you mean continuing to speak at medical conferences and advising
other plastic surgeons on conference calls, then, yes…
Dr. Mladick is retiring.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BOB ALLEN
Richard Mladick was all of four
years old when he decided he
wanted to be a doctor. A surgeon
to be specifi c. His mother and
aunt were quick to see the possibilities.
“They said when you become
a doctor, we want you to be a plastic surgeon so that
some day you can work on us,” Mladick laughs.
Mladick did indeed become a plastic surgeon – an
endlessly innovative, internationally respected plastic
surgeon with an impressive list of fi rsts on his resume.
“Dr. Mladick will certainly be remembered as a
pioneer, not only here locally but around the world,
in developing many of the standards in cosmetic surgery,”
agrees Dr. Michael Denk, a partner at Associates
in Plastic Surgery in Virginia Beach.
Mladick was completing a general surgical residency
at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in the
early ‘60s when he discovered an abiding fascination
with plastic surgery. “Near the end of my residency, I
started watching a very well-known plastic surgeon,”
he recalls. “I saw the delicacy and the intricacy of the
work - it was intriguing.”
The gift of a plastic surgery textbook from a friend
absorbed him. “I read it cover to cover,” he shares.
“Then I said that’s what I want to do.”
Mladick spent the next several years at Duke
University School of Medicine in a plastic surgery
residency program and even taught there as an associate
professor. The fi eld, with its delicate balance of
science and art, proved a perfect fi t.
“One of the things about plastic surgery is it’s sort of
like building models,” Mladick says. “You work on it
and the end result is so much fun, but getting there is
fun too, because it’s a challenge to do it very perfectly.”
A plastic surgery group in Norfolk lured him away
from Duke in 1969, and he opened his own Virginia
Beach-based offi ce in 1975, then the Mladick Center
for Cosmetic Plastic Surgery a few years later, tapping
the considerable skills of the remarkable Elly, his wife
and best friend, to run his practice.
“It was Elly’s idea to put in overnight rooms in our
offi ce,” he says, admitting he initially dismissed the notion.
The post-operative hair-washing rooms? “Elly’s
idea.” Ditto the on-site pre-operative testing. “We
would send patients across the street to the hospital
for a chest x-ray, an EKG and blood work and Elly
said we should start doing it all right in the offi ce, so it
would be one-stop for the patients.
“And I said Elly, we don’t want to be drawing blood
or doing those other tests – it’s just easier to send them
across the street. Well, I lost that argument too,” he
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laughs.
“And it turned out to be such a convenience for
the patient to provide them with all the pre-op care,
do the surgery at our center, then provide them with
overnight post-op care in a very safe, monitored environment.”
Mladick was the fi rst plastic surgeon to offer overnight
rooms in Virginia Beach – in fact, not many plastic
surgeons in the country offered them at the time.
It wouldn’t be the fi rst time he introduced something
new to the area.
In the mid-’70s, Mladick began working exclusively
with the more time-consuming saline breast implants
rather than the popular silicon gel implants. “I saw
an advantage with saline because I could make my
incisions much smaller,” he explains.
He developed the No Touch Technique, a new
method of inserting the implant without contamination.
“It avoided one of the worst complications in
plastic surgery – 99.9 percent of the time we did not
get what is called a capsule, which is heavy scar tissue
around the breast implant. I gave that course many,
many years at our national meeting, at different state
meetings and in Canada. There are a lot of my friends
that use that technique and they have told me they
have eliminated capsules with it.”
Because he was already using saline implants, his
practice was unaffected when silicon implants were
recalled, and women from across the country fl ocked
to his center.
When Mladick got a call in the early ‘80s from Dr.
Yves-Gerard Illouz, a plastic surgeon practicing in
Paris, inviting him to learn a new procedure called
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liposuction, he fl ew over. “When I talked to him on
the phone, I was skeptical,” he admits.
Seeing was believing, however, and Mladick
debuted the procedure here in 1982. “It was absolutely
an amazing step forward in plastic surgery,”
he says, and the Virginian-Pilot sent a photographer
and a freelance reporter to cover an early operation.
“The article came out in the paper with a humorous
title – ‘Escape from Fat City.’ But what happened
next was really funny. I didn’t realize the reporter
could sell the story somewhere else because he was
freelance. And sure enough, about a week later I
was checking out of the supermarket, and I looked at
the front of Weekly World News.” There, splashed
across the cover of the tabloid, was a woman who
had just given birth to an alien.
“A 300-pound Martian,” clarifi es an amused
Mladick. “And I did a double-take because right
underneath was ‘Escape from Fat City’ with my picture.
And I thought, holy smoke, they’ll think this is as
bizarre as a Martian baby.”
That didn’t stop him from continuing to perfect the
procedure. “I was the first to publish a technique that
described how you could contour heavy legs, particularly
calves and ankles, with liposuction,” he notes. This
attracted patients from all over the world and he was
asked to teach his technique throughout the United
States, in Canada, Mexico, South America and Japan.
Another procedure that gained him widespread attention
was his technique for incorporating liposuction
with other types of surgery. “I helped develop a way
to do liposuction before a tummy tuck, or if you’re
tightening up arms, you could do liposuction fi rst and
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then tighten the skin even more. As a
matter of fact, the New York Society of
Plastic Surgery just called me this week
to schedule me for a talk in April to discuss
my technique for using liposuction
in contouring sagging arms.”
Even after performing thousands of
surgeries and mentoring countless other
doctors, Mladick was frequently up late
at night before a procedure, studying
just one more book, checking one more
chart. His phone number remained
listed so he’d be accessible,
and if allaying
a patient’s concerns
meant making a house
call in the middle of
the night, off he and
Elly would go. Clearly
the idea of the plastic
surgeon as demigod is a
foreign one to him.
“You’d meet some of
these fellows at a conference
and it was as if
they felt you should part
the seas for them when
they walk into a room,”
says Mladick, “but I
think at all times it doesn’t hurt to be a
little bit humble. For me, this has been
a great opportunity and I feel extremely
fortunate.”
And now, after accumulating enough
accomplishments to fi ll several people’s
lifetimes, Dr. Mladick is retiring.
“I still enjoyed my practice very, very
much and I enjoyed my patients. But
this was my 48th year in surgery, and my
40th year in plastic surgery, and I had a
goal of working until I found I was sort
of satisfi ed that I had made my contribution.
As I started to give it more consideration,
I told Elly the hardest thing is
I just don’t like to drop my patients like
that. I want them to have a way to be
cared for, to receive follow-up.
After 40 years of practice, Dr. Mladick
passes the torch to Dr. Denk and his
partners at Associates in Plastic Surgery.
“Well along came the opportunity to
talk to Doctors Jonathan Jacobs, John
Alspaugh and Michael Denk. They
were interested in more space for their
practice,” he says. The Associates in
Plastic Surgery partners were also willing
and ideally suited to take over care
of his patients. “All of a sudden, I had a
solution,” says Mladick, pleased.
“One of the nice things was that
Dr. Denk shared an interest in what I
was doing and had come to my offi ce
repeatedly to learn
techniques from me. I
was satisfi ed I was leaving
my practice in good
hands.”
Denk and his
partners are currently
remodeling the space
to add an extensive spa
that will offer skin care,
laser hair removal, laser
facial treatments and a
number of non-surgical
cosmetic services, along
with more surgical
procedures.
The newly expanded
center will be open in mid-January. And
Mladick will be contentedly looking
back on forty years of plastic surgery,
without a single malpractice suit, while
the fi eld radically transformed before his
eyes – and with a great deal of his input.
He still moves with fluid grace, thanks
to a lifetime of athleticism, engages those
around him with a trademark personable
warmth and laughs readily. There
are grandchildren to visit in Arizona, feta
cheese and spinach omelets to whip up,
conferences to address, fellow plastic surgeons
to advise and the lure of pick-upand-go
travel with Elly calling his name.
And so the closest thing Virginia
Beach has to an international medical
celebrity retires.
Clothes don’t make the man but they do
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At the Cosmetic Surgery Center, they
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