'Botched' Dr. Terry Dubrow tackles most severe reconstructive surgeries without judgment

The E! hit show Botched (streaming on Hayu in Canada) has become a cultural phenomenon, but Dr. Terry Dubrow says that Season 8 of the plastic surgery series features an "advanced season of cases," many of which would have been passed on for previous seasons.

"It's a lot like a sport, the more you do something the better you get at it," Dubrow told Yahoo Canada. "But as opposed to a sport, you can't just practise doing difficult plastic surgery, it has to come to you."

"So after seven seasons we said, 'OK we now have this experience, we have this skill set, let's take on those cases that we passed on before,' which were deemed too risky, not fixable, too difficult."

It's important to stress that Dubrow, alongside Dr. Paul Nassif, are incredibly well-respected and highly distinguished reconstructive surgeons. They're among the best in the world. So when they say something is advanced, it's the real deal.

An upcoming example of the challenges these doctors will face in Season 8 of Botched includes a woman who has a "giant" tumour growing from her eye to her jaw. As Dubrow teased, she's from outside the U.S. and that country's university team of plastic surgeons tried to fix it, but it bled so much that they had to close up what they were doing.

'We focus on going forward ... not criticizing'

Dubrow and Nassif create a very non-judgemental space for each person they see, but that doesn't necessarily stop fans from sharing their very honest reactions to some of these Botched cases.

Most recently, that included fans being alarmed by one person featured on Season 8. Mateo wanted to have ribs removed to make his waist smaller, after already going through a previous procedure to do so, which involved breaking his ribs.

As Dubrow revealed, the doctor gets asked "not infrequently" to do rib removal.

"It sort of became popular with these waist trainers, you put these very tight waist trainers on and you wear them long enough, it can cause a sort of a longer term narrowing of the waist," Dubrow explained.

"There's always a willingness towards potential body modification based on innovative ideas that are essentially human experimentation. ... But rib removal, ... there's a reason we have our ribs, and the obvious reason is to help us with respiratory excursion, take a deep breath, and of course protect the organs. So that's not something we encourage."

Another plastic surgery trend that we'll also see on Botched is "abdominal etching."

"You take a liposuction cannula and you carve, sculpt out fat to look like muscle," Dubrow explained. "Giant, in my opinion, mistake."

"We gain 10 pounds every decade of our life and imagine a 40 or 50-year-old, chunky dude, with etched out abdominal abs. It's going to look so weird. It's very hard to fix."

With a show like Botched it can be tempting for the audience watching at home to wonder about the credentials or skills of a plastic surgeon who performed some of the procedures that led to these individuals being "botched," and seeking the help of Dubrow and Nassif. But as we see on the show, the doctors aren't coming on TV to shame anyone, a patient or a doctor.

"Remember, we're only hearing one side of the story," Dubrow said. "We do get the old records, but we weren't there and there's always two sides of the story. ... They would prosecute 100 per cent of criminals if all you heard was the prosecution case."

"At the end of the day, they're starting at what we call 'T zero' with us, time zero. ... Just as long as we understand what operations were done, what complications occurred, we focus on going forward from there, not criticizing. Sometimes if a doctor took a weekend course on plastic surgery, was a radiologist two weeks ago and is advertising themselves as a plastic surgeon, we do get critical because sometimes you've just got to call it out."

Dubrow explained that oftentimes botched plastic surgery occurs due to a combination of factors.

"A complication occurs, even though the operation was done properly, or a patient was just not a good candidate, or the patient pushed the doctor too far and the doctor fell for it," he said.

"It doesn't matter. What matters is, how can we go from here to give the patient a positive outcome."

'This is our legacy'

While the surgeries and stories on Botched are captivating, we can't undervalue the rapport and the banter back-and-forth between Dubrow and Nassif. It gives the series an entertaining edge that can't really be replicated.

"We got lucky because our personalities have always meshed from the day we met," Dubrow said. "Our egos are just perfectly aligned and intact enough that no matter what he says to me, or I say to him, we know we're just ribbing each other and goofing around."

Dubrow added that now that we've reached Season 8, Nassif's personality is really coming out. For example, Episode 2 of the season starts with Nassif talking about "BDE," something Dubrow highlights Nassif never would have talked about on camera in previous seasons.

"I think one of the things about Season 8 is, in the past Paul wasn't as comfortable as I might have been showing my true sort of regular personality on TV," Dubrow said. "I don't care if the cameras are on, they're not on, I'm going to be as silly as I am with my patients. Paul was a little more buttoned up."

"There's a lot more of Paul's real sort of behind-the-scenes personality. He's actually a really funny guy and he does some really amusing stuff this season."

But jokes aside, while it can be easy to trivialize a show like Botched, it's clear that these doctors are making a significant impact on people's lives.

"We're extraordinarily grateful to have the opportunity to have this experience, to be able to take someone who's not really part of society, because they have a disabling problem and they're sad and they're isolated, and work with them, get them through the healing process," Dubrow stressed.

"This is our legacy. This is what we'll be known for. The only thing we hope is, to be honest with you, that we get to do it more and more. Because the more we do it, the more we see how much need there is for it."

New episodes of the E! hit Botched Season 8 are released weekly on Thursdays and are available to stream on Hayu in Canada.