Tucson plastic surgeon takes on difficult cases from around the world

The Tucson plastic surgeon who built a new nose for Greensboro, North Carolina, resident Alexis Dermatas this summer is known around the world for his work.

Dr. Frederick J. Menick, a surgeon in private practice, is an expert in rhinoplasty who primarily rebuilds noses after birth defects, trauma, autoimmune disease and cancer. Noses are also sometimes destroyed due to cocaine use, he said in an interview.

But the most common reason Menick rebuilds noses is cancer — when the nose has been lost due to either skin or nasal cavity cancer, he said.

Most of Menick’s patients come from outside of Tucson. On Tuesday he operated on a woman from Canada. He also has current patients from New Jersey, New York City, Miami, Brazil, Iran and China.

Dermatas lost her nose to a dog attack. Yet in terms of her future appearance, she should “look quite normal,” Menick said.

“The traditional approach to plastic surgery and facial reconstruction when I finished my training was to basically get the wound healed,” he recalled. “The aesthetic or cosmetic results were very unpredictable, if not poor.”

Since that time, Menick has helped develop approaches to improve cosmetic results with new techniques, and says he places a high priority on aesthetics.

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“If it’s done properly you can hope for some amazing results,” he said. “There’s always going to be a scar. But most scars look bad because the structure that has been rebuilt looks bad.”

If the nose structure is built well and the scars are strategically placed along the border of the nose, then “the scars become inconsequential,” he said.

Menick performs his surgeries at Carondelet St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tucson and has been practicing in Tucson since 1982. He was formerly the chief of plastic surgery at the University of Arizona and Southern Arizona’s Veterans Affairs hospital.

“When I came to Tucson I was a general plastic surgeon, but early on developed an interest in nose reconstruction,” said Menick, who has written two textbooks on facial and nasal reconstruction and routinely gives lectures on the subject.

“My practice in the last 15 or 20 years is limited to nasal problems. … I get a lot of patient referrals from other surgeons around the world,” he said.

Menick earned his medical degree at Yale. He completed residencies at Stanford, the UA, the University of California Irvine and did advanced fellowships in plastic surgery at the University of Miami and at Queen Victoria Hospital in England.