Drs. Terry Dubrow and Paul Nassif are hitting the road.
The stars of the hit series Botched are rolling out a spinoff with the new Botched By Nature, premiering on E! this Wednesday, August 3—and this time, they’re stepping out of their offices and into people’s homes for the consultations.
Another thing that makes this go different? These patients aren’t coming in because they need revision plastic surgery; instead, they’re people who have either been born with a defect or have a deformity as a result of an accident.
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Between racking up the gas miles and digs with Dr. Dubrow and running his two skin care lines (he has Nassif MD Bio-Rhythmic skin care at Macy’s and Nassif MD Bio-Clock Dermaceuticals at HSN), Dr. Nassif sat down with us to share the inside scoop for what we can expect this season, and the moment that sparked the idea for the series.
“The idea came about to do this crazy show, Botched, a couple of years ago. I was having dinner with the executive producers of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and we were talking about revision surgery and I said, ‘You know, this is a really difficult type of surgery and no one has ever shown it before.’ And as we were sitting there talking about it, that’s when the idea came about,” Dr. Nassif recalls.
His next step: Give Terry Dubrow a ring. “I said, ‘You can do the body, I can do the face. Terry said I was crazy—why would take the hardest patients and show it on TV?”
But it was that moment of craziness that spawned a whole other idea, one that Dr. Nassif gives Dr. Dubrow full credit for. “While we were talking, Terry had the idea to do a show about patients that were born with trauma or congenital deformities. He mentioned this right from the beginning, and now, as we have it, we’re doing Botched By Nature.”
So what can we expect from this latest installment? “First of all, you’re going to see a lot more fun and a lot more of Terry teasing me since we are on the road. As we go to different states, we will be enjoying the local flavor of that area, but more importantly, we are seeing patients—and they are not the ones who just wanted elective plastic surgery—they were born with trauma. One person was struck my lightening, one had a bad medical problem that destroyed the inside of their nose, and some of them have been born afflicted and it has affected their lives dramatically.”
“They’ve been bullied, they’ve been teased and we are going into their homes with their families,” Dr. Nassif explains. “When you talk to someone in their homes, it’s very cathartic.”
During the process, the doctors will visit with potential patients, talk to them, and if they feel they can help them, they then fly back to Los Angeles to have the surgery.
“We can’t make them perfect, but we can make them better. And, sometimes we can’t help them at all. Some of these patients didn’t even know surgery was possible; and when you help these patients, when you take them and improve them, you have happy people, and that makes us feel fantastic.”
One thing you won’t see on your TV, Dr. Nassif says, is the fact that some of the patients need five or six surgeries to help them—and it’s not always as simple as a one-episode before-and-after. “You don’t see everything. We are traveling across the country in the middle of the night, we need to get to the next place, we have a tight schedule, we have 30 people in a crew—it’s hard to pull this together when you’re traveling. It’s kind of crazy.”
“But what’s most inspiring is how strong these patients are. They are born with these horrible diseases and they are teased all their life but they are so pleasant—that inspires us. We have small issues that are nothing compared to what these people go through. I aspire to be like these people, but I don’t know if that will happen. We are all very lucky. To mirror these people when we have a problem, we are all very fortunate.”
