Greed-driven plastic surgeons putting profits before patients are behaving more like social media influencers than doctors, their own colleagues warn.

The Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) has admonished self-aggrandising surgeons peddling misleading marketing over medical ethics, and damaging the reputation of the entire profession.

ASPS have drawn up a new ethical framework to redress to deterioration of standards among plastic surgeons. Credit:FDC

The Chair of ASPS Ethics Committee has issued an excoriating rebuke of his own specialty, describing “a worrying deterioration of standards” and “erosion of trust in the community”.

“At best unethical behaviour can be inadvertent … at worst it is driven by greed and ego where the patient becomes a commodity to be exploited," Dr Richard Theile wrote in an editorial published in the Australasian Journal of Plastic Surgery.