The newest kind of plastic surgery is the face transplant. This is not done for the reason ordinary plastic surgery is usually done, because someone isn’t happy with the way they look. People who get face transplants have been extremely disfigured, usually from car accidents or fires. For them, this is a life saver, even if it means they end up looking like someone else.

Plastic surgeon Raj Persaud is studying how having a new face is affecting these people psychologically. Psychologists are concerned that literally wearing another person’s face may cause identity problems in an individual, even if, as is almost always the case, the recipient of the face did not know the donor.
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When Jim Alexander backed out of a convenience store where he?d stopped for a cup of coffee in 1996, he crashed his car, which burned for 20 minutes before rescuers could get him out. Burns disfigured his face so badly that the other diners at his regular restaurant asked him not to come back. Alexander, age 60, retreated to his home, partially blinded and disfigured ?like a freak in a sideshow,? despite 38 surgeries.

Then he found Bob Barron a former disguise expert for the CIA, who helps seriously disfigured people blend back into society by designing prosthetic devices that look so real, most people don?t notice them. This sounds like the plot of the recent Tom Cruise movie ?Vanilla Sky,? but in this case, the story is real.
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