Richard Zienowicz, MD - Plastic Surgeon in Providence, Rhode Island

Eva Sheie (00:03):
The purpose of this podcast is simple. We want you to get to know your doctor before meeting them in person because you're making a life-changing decision and time is scarce. The more you can learn about who your doctor is before you meet them, the better that first meeting will be. There's no substitute for an in-person appointment, but we hope this comes close. I'm your host, Eva Sheie, and you're listening to Meet the Doctor. Welcome to Meet the Doctor. My guest today is Dr. Richard Zienowicz. He's a plastic surgeon based in Providence, Rhode Island. Welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Zienowicz (00:40):
Hi, Eva. Great to meet you.

Eva Sheie (00:42):
It's good to see you. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Dr. Zienowicz (00:47):
So I'm the chief of Aesthetic surgery at Brown. I've been there for over 30 years, and I have, started off as a microsurgeon. I was trained at Mass General, and so I was doing a lot of very complex reconstruction and trying to make them look as beautiful as I could. And I,

Eva Sheie (01:11):
The blood vessels, you wanted 'em to be pretty?

Dr. Zienowicz (01:14):
Well, no, no. The blood vessels. The blood vessels. Actually, if you don't get those right, you can't do anything with the tissue that you're transferring. In other words, it has to stay alive. So once you've accomplished that, you have to make it look good. So I mean, for breast reconstruction, for facial reconstruction, the key thing is to try and make things as harmonious as they could possibly be on the face of the breast. And that was my job, and I loved it. And as time goes on, you're trying to make your life a little bit simpler and easier. And so I transitioned to my aesthetic side, which I also love because it does the same thing really. I mean, it's taking individuals that have concerns about their physique and their myriad. There's so many that involve the entire body, and it's still the challenge that I always was looking for. I love a challenge. So that's a little synopsis.

Eva Sheie (02:18):
When you say that you were looking to make your life easier, what was difficult about it or challenging?

Dr. Zienowicz (02:24):
So the difference with aesthetic surgery is it's planned. You're doing it at the patient's convenience during normal working hours. And it's not like trauma surgery where somebody chops off their fingers in the middle of the night or has a motor vehicle accident that smashes their face or any number of things that happen at ridiculous times that basically make it hard to do your work the next day because you've been up all night. So there comes a time where you have to look at your health, and I emphasize with all my patients, sleep is the most important thing that we can do as individuals to promote our health and our longevity.

Eva Sheie (03:13):
Would you like to come talk to my kids?

Dr. Zienowicz (03:15):
I'll have the talk with your kids. Your kids, you know, they're probably in a phase right now where unfortunately, if they could see what their biological clocks look like, and it's something you can't change. So right now there's a guy by the name of Steve Horvath who's a PhD at Berkeley, Berkeley, California, UCLA, uc, Berkeley rather, and he has formulated a clock that allows people to know when they will die within three years of their death with accuracy. And what they look is at your methylations on your DNA and they can find with 360 different methylation sites, they can show precisely when you're going to go down. Now that sounds pretty morbid, but if you knew in advance that heck, what I'm doing right now is going to ruin my chance of making it to a hundred, let's say you might think twice about staying up too long all the time.

Eva Sheie (04:22):
Or probably a number of other things that we do due to ourselves or did to ourselves when we were younger.

Dr. Zienowicz (04:28):
Precisely.

Eva Sheie (04:29):
Yeah.

Dr. Zienowicz (04:30):
Your biologic clock has absolute memory and you can go back and look at it during those years where you were doing the stuff that made things not so good for your biological clock. Not sleeping, not eating right, taking,

Eva Sheie (04:47):
Having fun.

Dr. Zienowicz (04:48):
Yeah, drinking too much, all those things.

Eva Sheie (04:51):
This is why they say youth is wasted on the young.

Dr. Zienowicz (04:54):
Yes. You got that right.

Eva Sheie (04:57):
Someone recently told me if you saw the sunset and the sunrise every day, that it would also improve your health. And I wonder if that's

Dr. Zienowicz (05:04):
It would be true at the equator. Okay. Because time never changes there, and the length of day is,

Eva Sheie (05:12):
It's not very practical.

Dr. Zienowicz (05:13):
Always the same. But if you were doing that in say, Finland, where there's land of the internal sun, it's not going to work out too well for you.

Eva Sheie (05:25):
Oh, you're probably right. So now as the head of aesthetic surgery at a major university, what does that job look like? What do you do?

Dr. Zienowicz (05:35):
The great thing is it means that I typically have one of the chief residents with me all the time, and they're already six years into their training. So they're excellent technically, and you're just helping to make them as good as they can be, and it's a wonderful thing. It's basically while you're at the bedside and doing things and making sure things go right, you also learn about the person and their life, their interests, and try to help shape them as a good human being.

Eva Sheie (06:15):
They stay with you for a year or longer.

Dr. Zienowicz (06:17):
So they're typically with me for a year. So it's three month rotations. We have an apprenticeship type program, so every three months it'll be somebody new.

Eva Sheie (06:27):
How's the future looking?

Dr. Zienowicz (06:30):
Well, I have to say that the Gen Z individuals are a little bit more concerned about their lifestyles. So there's a tiny bit of a clash with respect to the paradigm of hours and whatnot in medicine. So we're making adjustments to make that all work, but I'm still really psyched to see the evolution of this generation because they're also bringing a lot of different things to the table in terms of their prowess with technology, their prowess with social media, their knowledge of all the transformations that are happening within their generation.

Eva Sheie (07:21):
It's an interesting time for sure.

Dr. Zienowicz (07:22):
It is totally,

Eva Sheie (07:24):
I know you care very deeply about the experiences of your patients, and I wonder if you could describe what it's like to come see you for the first time.

Dr. Zienowicz (07:35):
I think that the average patient that comes in is a little bit apprehensive, of course, and it persists all the way to the day of surgery and marking at the time of surgery. There's just the uncertainty about what's going to happen and how it's going to come out. Their hopes and aspirations are for a real transformation, and you have to be a little bit realistic, but I try to let them know that I'm going to do the very best that I can with what we have to work with, and if they're not absolutely happy with certain parts of the outcome, we can make them better. So it's like it's never a one and done for everybody. It probably is for 95%, but I want everybody to feel like they can expect as much as they can.

Eva Sheie (08:34):
Have you adopted any technology to help communicate or educate your patients inside of your practice?

Dr. Zienowicz (08:42):
I think that probably the most important thing is choosing the personnel that work with me, because the nurses that start off with the patient are absolutely the ones that set them up for the confidence that they will subsequently have with me. I have to also say things have changed dramatically with respect to the patient who's coming off the street and how they come to me. So even if they're referred by somebody else, they go to social media and they look at your reviews. And so for me, it's been exceptionally helpful because they come in with more confidence right from the get-go. So there's not as much of a quasi adversarial, am I going to get what I want? The car salesman type of deal, they have more trust. They come in with more trust. So that helps me. I think it really makes everybody happier, but they still have to take their clothes off and show you themselves, which is the hardest part. And so that's one of the things that we're really very cognizant of. Try to make that as comfortable for them as possible. We have robes that the patients have that give them a privacy that feel it's tangible and as much as we can, we're creating a comfortable environment.

Eva Sheie (10:15):
Well, and that comfortable is the magic word, and that in the data, the key driver of what makes somebody choose a surgeon is that the surgeon made them feel comfortable. It certainly doesn't exclude your before and after photos or your technical skill or your credentials, but they have to have that final piece to make a good decision.

Dr. Zienowicz (10:39):
One of the things that I've always noticed in my life is the power of touch. I really feel like that's something that I always want to utilize in my practice. I think if you're touched in a way that promotes a gesture of care and love, I think that is worth a lot.

Eva Sheie (11:01):
I agree with you a lot on that. I was at a kid's birthday party last weekend and it was like a martial arts place. They had a really different approach, and they taught the kids to touch each other in a way that made me kind of sit back because I realized that there's no other places that I take them where they're encouraged to do that. They're actually encouraged not to touch each other everywhere, and they loved it. They loved it. This is a bunch of five and six year olds.

Dr. Zienowicz (11:35):
How beautiful.

Eva Sheie (11:36):
Yeah, it was especially noticeable just because it's so unusual now. People are also worried about getting in trouble for everything.

Dr. Zienowicz (11:45):
Yes.

Eva Sheie (11:47):
What do you like to do outside of the office?

Dr. Zienowicz (11:50):
I have to admit, I'm a golfer and I love to golf. I love the feng shui of being outdoors. It's another challenge. It's a constant challenge. So for me, I love doing crossword puzzles. I just love puzzles and golf is a continuous never ending puzzle with different courses and different challenges. So it's just so much fun and you get to converse and really get to know the people that you're with. It's wonderful. It's a real social event.

Eva Sheie (12:31):
Do you prefer to walk or do you use the cart?

Dr. Zienowicz (12:33):
No, I love to walk. I'm having a knee problem at the moment, and I'm going to get some stem cells injected pretty soon in San Diego. I'm totally looking forward to that so that I can completely walk because I'm scheduled to go to St. Andrews and all those courses you have to walk the full 18. There are

Eva Sheie (12:53):
They don't have any carts.

Dr. Zienowicz (12:53):
No carts.

Eva Sheie (12:55):
Interesting.

Dr. Zienowicz (12:55):
Yeah,

Eva Sheie (12:57):
It's probably really quiet.

Dr. Zienowicz (13:01):
Yeah, I guess it is quiet.

Eva Sheie (13:03):
You mean golf carts? They're not exactly noisy, but no.

Dr. Zienowicz (13:06):
Yeah.

Eva Sheie (13:07):
Yeah. Golf is great. If anybody's listening today and they want to find out more about you work, can they look for you online?

Dr. Zienowicz (13:14):
Body by z.com and Interesting. Those call letters were given to me by the daughter of one of my breast reconstruction patients when the internet just started. It's like 35 years old. I did not choose it, but it's worked out so beautifully. Body by Z.

Eva Sheie (13:38):
Unintentional branding expert, and

Dr. Zienowicz (13:40):
Yeah, she was at Yale and she started it and it was such a cool thing.

Eva Sheie (13:46):
Body by Z. Well, thank you for sharing yourself with us today. It was a privilege to get to know you better.

Dr. Zienowicz (13:54):
Really great to meet you, Eva. Thank you.

Eva Sheie (13:59):
If you are considering making an appointment or are on your way to meet this doctor, be sure to let them know you heard them on the Meet the Doctor podcast. Check the show notes for links including the doctor's website and Instagram to learn more. Are you a doctor or do you know a doctor who'd like to be on the Meet the Doctor podcast? Book your free recording session at Meet the Doctor podcast.com. Meet the Doctor is Made with Love in Austin, Texas and is a production of The Axis, T H E A X I S.io.