Dead Textbooks, 3 DIEP Complication Tips, & Surgical Studio Updates

They’re not. They’re outdated — and in some cases, outright wrong.

What’s Broken

Here’s the honest truth.

• Techniques evolve. Textbooks don’t. You’re learning from operations that aren’t done anymore. Or worse — missing the ones that actually are.
• They never get corrected. An error in the 2014 edition is still sitting there in the 2023 one. We’ve normalized reading around the mistakes.
• Outdated copies never go away. You can still buy a textbook from 2007 on Amazon. That’s what students are studying from. That’s what trainees are downloading as PDFs.
• It’s a closed system. No transparency. No accountability. And definitely no way to challenge what’s written, even when it’s obviously flawed.

This isn’t just a publishing issue. It’s a training issue. And it’s making us worse.

So We’re Doing It Differently

We're building a new textbook — Foundations by The Plastics Fella — and here’s what we’re refusing to replicate:

• Every chapter gets reviewed annually. Not in theory. In practice. A full update cycle every 12 months, with tracked changes and transparent version control.
• There are no outdated versions. You can’t buy an old edition. Everyone sees the same current version. If something changes, everyone benefits.
• Mistakes get fixed. Fast. There’s a feedback system. If something’s wrong, unclear, or outdated, it doesn’t sit there for another decade. It gets addressed.
• It’s built by the community. Trainees and surgeons contribute, review, and refine it. It reflects how people actually learn and operate, not just how they publish.

This Isn’t About Innovation. It’s About Necessity.

Plastic surgery moves fast. The resources we learn from should too.

We're not trying to be clever. We’re just done accepting that a textbook published in 2012 is still acceptable in 2025.

This is the fix. And it starts now.

👉 Join the waiting list if you want early access, or if you just want to see what a modern textbook should look like.

P’Fella ❤️

tk - below is the usual waitlist tally form