What Country Has the Best Plastic Surgeons?

No country holds an official title for the best plastic surgeons, and no medical organization ranks nations by the skill of their surgeons. Excellent plastic surgeons practice in the United States, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Türkiye and many other countries; what changes from one to the next is how long surgeons train, who certifies them and whether you can check those credentials yourself before you book a flight.

I am a plastic surgeon in Medellín, and I wrote this guide for patients weighing Colombia against other countries. Below I rank the six countries patients most often consider, explain why Colombia comes first on my list and show you how to verify any surgeon abroad, starting with me. If you are comparing prices, recovery settings and travel logistics instead, our guide to the best countries for plastic surgery covers it.

The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS) is the main global source on the specialty, and it counts things rather than judging them. Its 2024 survey estimates how many plastic surgeons each country has, how many procedures they performed and what share of their patients came from abroad. None of those numbers measures how good an individual surgeon is.

The figures are also estimates. ISAPS projects them from the answers of 2,975 plastic surgeons, so they describe the size of each country’s specialty, not a census of operations (ISAPS, 2025).

Brazil performed more surgical procedures than any other country in 2024 (2,354,513), and the United States has the largest workforce. Neither fact tells you whether the surgeon you are considering is well trained. A small specialty can be very rigorous, and a large one can include doctors you should not trust with your body.

Every country on this list trains plastic surgeons for years after medical school, so I do not rank them by talent. I rank them by what matters to a patient flying in from the US: whether you can verify the surgeon’s specialty from home, how much surgery the specialty performs, how used it is to foreign patients, the infrastructure of its clinics and how easy it is to keep the follow-up going once you leave. This is my professional view, not an official ranking.

The cards give the short version. These are the details worth knowing before you trust a surgeon in each country; Colombia, where I trained and practice, has its own section below.

Board certification is the standard American patients know, and it is demanding: a surgeon completes an integrated six-year residency, or at least three years of plastic surgery after general surgery, and then passes written and oral exams from the American Board of Plastic Surgery. It is voluntary and must be renewed. ABPS only certifies surgeons trained in the United States or Canada, so a surgeon abroad who says “board-certified” should tell you which board.

Mexico’s General Health Law (article 272 Bis) requires anyone performing a specialty surgical procedure to hold a specialist license issued by the education authorities and a current certificate from the specialty council, which for plastic surgery is the CMCPER. Article 272 Bis 1 adds that cosmetic and reconstructive surgery must be done in licensed facilities by surgeons specialized in it. Search the license in the Ministry of Education registry and ask to see the council certificate, with its expiry date.

Brazil has one of the world’s largest plastic surgery communities, and one rule worth knowing: any physician registered with a regional medical council may legally practice medicine, while the registered specialist title (RQE) only controls who can advertise as a specialist. The federal council’s online search lets you check both by name.

South Korea trains plastic surgeons through a one-year internship and a four-year residency, after which the Ministry of Health and Welfare grants the specialist license. Türkiye requires five years of specialty training. Both have public society directories, but only in Korean and Turkish, which makes checking harder from abroad.

Because it is where, in my view, a patient from the US can best combine three things: a surgeon whose specialty you can verify in public records, a specialty with high surgical volume and long experience with foreign patients, and a trip short enough to plan proper follow-up. None of these makes every Colombian surgeon good, but together they make Colombia the easiest place to find one and confirm it.

A Colombian plastic surgeon completes medical school and then a university specialization in plastic surgery. I studied medicine at Universidad Industrial de Santander and trained in plastic, maxillofacial and hand surgery at Universidad de Antioquia, where I now teach postgraduate students. The state lists every authorized professional in ReTHUS, the national registry created by Law 1164 of 2007, and anyone can search it for free. Membership in the Colombian Society of Plastic Surgery (SCCP) adds a peer-reviewed layer, and some Colombian surgeons also belong to international societies such as the ASPS or ISAPS.

One thing patients rarely hear: Colombian law does not yet limit cosmetic surgery to plastic surgeons, and a bill to regulate it was still in Congress in 2026. That is why I put verification first. With the registry and the SCCP directory, it takes a few minutes, and it separates a trained plastic surgeon from anyone else offering surgery.

Colombia’s roughly 960 plastic surgeons performed 321,408 surgical procedures in 2024. On average they reported that 30% of their patients came from abroad, about double the world average of 14.3% and above Türkiye (29.6%) and Mexico (23.4%) (ISAPS, 2025). For you, that experience shows up in the details: consultations in English, surgical plans built around a travel date and teams used to patients who fly home afterwards.

In 2024, Medellín’s clinics and hospitals treated 23,323 international patients. Plastic surgery accounted for about 10% of the services they received and was the second largest by revenue (Cámara de Comercio de Medellín, 2025). The city also has clinics accredited by Joint Commission International, the international arm of The Joint Commission, which accredits most US hospitals.

I see patients at Torre Médica Oviedo in El Poblado, and InterQuirófanos, a JCI-accredited clinic, is one of the facilities where I operate. For a patient, that means the consultation, the surgery and the checkups happen within a short distance in the same part of the city.

Medellín has direct flights from several US cities, and Colombia shares the US East Coast time zone in winter and Central Time in summer, so video calls with your surgeon before and after the trip are easy to schedule. You can start with a virtual consultation before buying a ticket, and plan your stay with the margins the ASPS suggests: five to seven days after body surgery and seven to ten after facial surgery before flying. Costs are usually lower than in the US, but I would not choose a surgeon on price alone; it belongs at the end of the decision, after the checks in this article.

If you want to hear it from a patient, Todd, who came from New York, explains in his own words why he chose facial surgery in Colombia instead of the US. And if you are comparing destinations, costs and recovery more broadly, our guide to the best countries for plastic surgery goes into that.

No. A country gives you a training system and a set of rules, but the person who operates on you is an individual, and so are the team and the facility around them. The risk that experts describe in cosmetic surgery abroad is not one specific nation; it is surgery performed by doctors who are not trained plastic surgeons, sometimes called “specialty tourism” (Iorio et al., 2014).

The way care is organized matters as much as the passport stamp. A 2026 study of patients treated in the US for complications found the same types of problems whether people had traveled within the country or abroad. Those who stayed five days or fewer near their surgeon were admitted to hospital far more often, 88.9% compared with 36.4% (Deivasigamani et al., 2026). How long you stay, and who follows you after you fly home, are part of choosing a good surgeon.

They show that the most common problem is infection, and that it often needs further surgery once the patient is home. A systematic review of 214 patients treated in the United States after cosmetic surgery abroad found that about half of the complications were infections and that 51.8% of patients needed an operation to treat them (McAuliffe et al., 2023). The CDC also warns that standards for accrediting facilities and certifying professionals vary between countries (CDC, Yellow Book).

None of this means you should not travel. It means the follow-up plan has to be agreed before surgery, and you need to know which signs require help right away.

Verifying a surgeon takes about an hour, and you can do most of it from home. Do it before you pay a deposit or buy a ticket, and use official databases rather than screenshots or certificates sent to you by the clinic.

I tell international patients to verify me the same way I would verify a colleague: through records that I don’t control. Everything below is public, and I would rather you check it than trust a profile written by me.

• My specialty training: medical degree from Universidad Industrial de Santander and a specialization in plastic, maxillofacial and hand surgery at Universidad de Antioquia, where I also teach postgraduate students.
• My national registration: I am registered in ReTHUS, Colombia’s national registry of health professionals. Ask my team for my ID number and search it in the public registry yourself.
• My Colombian society: I am a full member of the Colombian Society of Plastic Surgery; the link opens my profile on their site.
• My US society: the American Society of Plastic Surgeons lists me as an International Member in its Find a Surgeon directory. I am not certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery, because that board only certifies surgeons trained in the US or Canada.

If Colombia is on your list, start with the checks in this article, and apply them to me too. I treat facial, breast and body procedures, and you can review my training and career and real before-and-after cases. The first step is a virtual consultation in English, so we can talk about your goals, your health history and how long you would need to stay before you plan any trip.

McAuliffe, P. B., Muss, T. E. L., Desai, A. A., Talwar, A. A., Broach, R. B., & Fischer, J. P. (2023). Complications of aesthetic surgical tourism treated in the USA: A systematic review. Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, 47(1), 455–464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00266-022-03041-z · PubMed 36315261

Iorio, M. L., Verma, K., Ashktorab, S., & Davison, S. P. (2014). Medical tourism in plastic surgery: Ethical guidelines and practice standards for perioperative care. Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, 38(3), 602–607. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00266-014-0322-6 · PubMed 24797678

Deivasigamani, S., Khaw, K. L., & Bonawitz, S. C. (2026). Passport not required: A comparison of plastic surgery complications from domestic and international medical tourism. Annals of Plastic Surgery, 96(Suppl 5), S220–S224. https://doi.org/10.1097/SAP.0000000000004651 · PubMed 41587442

Data and verification sources: ISAPS International Survey on Aesthetic/Cosmetic Procedures 2024 · Cámara de Comercio de Medellín, international patients report 2010–2024 · CDC Yellow Book: Medical Tourism · ASPS: Cosmetic surgery tourism · American Board of Plastic Surgery.