Leg Lengthening Surgery Available in Russia : At What Cost?
I remember hearing about this controversial surgery way back when, but I thought it was only for patients who had legitimate need for lengthening their legs, such as an asymmetry in leg length, or some other disproportionate and medically challenging attribute where one leg grows longer than the other. Well, it seems that now a clinic in Russia is offering a leg lengthening procedure for anyone who wants it, no matter what the reason - mostly for cosmetic reasons.
The remote Russian clinic employs interpreters for it’s foreign customers, which are plentiful since most other places, such as in the US and Britain, will not perform such a radical , risky surgery if there is not legitamate medical need. They use a technique (brace yourself, it’s kind of gruesome), where the legs are broken just below the knees, and a device is inserted between the bones which prevents the bones from naturally generating more bone tissue and fusing the bones back together.
By tricking the bones into believing they need to generate more bone between, they keep moving the contraptions so that the body keeps creating more bone tissue, creating length in the lower legs. They do recommend that patients don’t go any more than a few inches though, since all the length is really underneath the knee caps, and it can end up looking disproportionate to the thigh part of the legs if they add too much length below.
Many people who are just five feet or barely over have opted for the surgery and been happy with the results, which usually end up with a faint scar just below the knees, however, the recovery process is gruesomely painful as reported by some, and take a long time. For some patients, the bone growth is slower than expected, and they are debilitated for longer than they had hoped, which is a pretty big deal, especially for a surgery that is not medically necessary.
There are people though that get it done for medical reasons, such as an asymmetry between the lengths of the two legs, and end up happy and able to walk normally. The surgery to lengthen the legs is expensive, ranging from the upper seventies to over one hundred thousand dollars, once the physcial therapy and all is said and done.
