A Respected Orthopedic Center Is Tapping Into a New Market

At the Ilizarov Center, patients have their legs broken in eight places to become taller. Photo: Maxim Novikov

In a few minutes, Karina will go through a procedure that makes some of the worst horror-movie fare seem like a children’s cartoon. The lower half of each of her legs will be broken in eight places and speared with a dozen needle-sharp steel pins. After the operation, doctors will fit each of her legs with four pound (1.5 kilogram) steel frames that she will then have to wear for six months.
Karina (at her request, a fictitious name) is willing to put herself through this ordeal because she wants to have long, “ideally shaped” legs. She says that all of the hardship will be worth it.
“I’m not afraid at all,” she says as a doctor gives her the first epidural injection.
Karina is not alone. While the focus on perfectionism so widespread in Western society had, for the most part, passed economically impaired Russia by, this is no longer the case. Beauty standards in the country are becoming more and more demanding.
As a result, dozens of individuals from all over Russia and, more recently, the world are flocking to the Center for Restorative Traumatology and Ortho pedics, more popularly known as the Ilizarov Center, after Soviet orthopedic trailblazer Professor Gavriil Ilizarov.
Located in the small town of Kurgan, 4,000 miles (6,300 kilometers) southeast of Moscow, the home of this 55-year-old clinic, shaped futuristically like a giant snowflake, is famous worldwide for successfully treating dwarfism and a variety of deformities of and injuries to the limbs.
Once fitted on a broken or deformed limb, the frame designed by Ilizarov half a century ago is turned several times a day to stretch the tissue and make the bones fuse and lengthen. With an average lengthening of less than 0.1 of an inch (about one or two millimeters) per day, a person can “grow” by about three inches (eight centimeters) in six months.
The work with the disabled or injured was the clinic's only focus until the late 1990s, when people who were looking for improvements, instead of cures, began to come for treatment. The doctors at the clinic now perform about 50 cosmetic operations per year, which represents about 30 percent of all the surgery they do.
“Every time I saw a tall woman with nice, straight legs, I would become frustrated,” Karina said. “Let’s face it, we’re living in a culture in which nice legs are the focus of feminine beauty. So I’d think: ‘why me and why legs?’ You can change everything today: your nose; your breasts; your hair; but not your legs. It’s not fair.”
She said that she had reconciled herself to the fact that her legs would not be long and “perfect,” when she read a story in a newspaper about the work at the Ilizarov Center.
“I became ecstatic, I knew I should do it and didn’t have any second thoughts about it,” Karina said.
A few weeks later, she took an unpaid leave from work, collected all of her savings and hopped on an airplane to Kurgan, having told her boyfriend that she was going to “a spa-center to become totally gorgeous.”
Gathering her savings was a good idea. The leg-lengthening operation at the Ilizarov Center isn’t cheap. The cost for Russian citizens is $2,000, while for foreigners it is 10 times higher.
But neither the high price nor the time-consuming and excruciatingly painful rehabilitation process is keeping a new generation of clients away from the clinic. The staff at the clinic says that the majority of these patients are relatively affluent and successful and range in age from 16 to 40 years. Above all, they say, the majority are of average height. All the same, they believe that becoming taller or having the shape of their legs changed will improve the quality of their lives.
A recent patient, a 20-year-old model from the city of Ekaterinburg, near the Ural mountains, wanted to be 2 1/2inches (six centimeters) taller than her natural height of five feet, seven inches (172centimeters). She was convinced that this would be crucial for her modeling career.
Another patient, a 25-year-old lawyer from Brisbane, Australia, claimed that, at a height of five feet even (154 centimeters), no one would ever take her seriously professionally or personally. Her account of her leg-lengthening experience in a best-selling book titled God Made Me Small, Surgery Made Me Tall, sparking a lot of controversy in Australia, where the surgery is only performed in cases where it is for medical purposes.
For Nori, a 32-year-old businessman from Tokyo who also asked that his real name not be used, a taller frame meant the opportunity to attract the attention of women he likes. Before the operation, he was five feet, six inches (171 centimeters) tall, which is actually above-average for Japanese men. Before coming to the Ilizarov Center, where he added another three inches to his height, he had approached three orthopedic clinics in Japan. The doctors had refused to perform the surgery, however, saying that he was tall enough.
But Nori didn’t give up.
“I’ve never been attracted to Japanese women,” he confessed. “And Western women wouldn’t go out with a short guy. People do underestimate you because of your looks, and I got sick of that. Besides, I’ve wanted to be taller ever since I was a teenager.”
As the number of people wanting to have the cosmetic leg-lengthening process increases, so does the waiting list at the center. At present, the wait is about six months. The surgeons at Ilizarov say that they have mixed feelings about what was originally a respected medical institution turning into a beauty factory. On one hand, the work undercuts the center’s reputation but, on the other, the operations provide much-needed funding for research and treatment as support from the state has dried up with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“What we are doing here is in contradiction to the central medical principle, which is ‘do no harm’,” says professor Vladimir Shevtsov, the center’s director. “In fact, we are making a healthy person temporarily sick here. It’s a bit disturbing, but we can’t stop these patients from coming here. They are obsessed, and nothing will stop them from having the operation.”
Many psychologists describe people who are excessively preoccupied with a real or imagined defect in their appearance as suffering from some form of Body Dysmorphic Disorder, the condition that causes anorexia. The doctors at the clinic in Kurgan, however, offer a more ambiguous diagnosis, insisting that their patients simply suffer from “subjectively insufficient height.” To be safe, each patient goes through counselling on arrival and is given at least a week to reconsider the decision to have the surgery performed. Very few of them change their minds.
CA“These people may have everything, family and career, but they still have this idee fixe, just like children who want a certain toy, regardless of how much it costs,” said Anna Aranovich, the chairwoman of the center’s first orthopedic department. “It is impossible to talk them out of it.”
“At first, [the clients] were mostly young women. Now 50 percent are men,” Aranovich said. “Space at the Center is limited, but they say they would sleep in the hallways just to get their legs lengthened as soon as possible.”
Still, Aranovich added, it is sometimes inspiring to see the boost in patients’ self-esteem after their dream has been fulfilled.
Two days after her surgery, as she is getting ready to take her first steps on her “new” legs, Karina, is an example of this. She grimaces from the pain and her lower legs are severely swollen, bruised and tense from the weight of the frame the broken bones have to bear.
“I am in heaven,” she says as she succeeds in standing up and finding her balance. “I can wear whatever I want now. It is extremely satisfying. I will be able to show up at a job interview wearing a skirt and not have to obsess about them seeing how ugly my legs are.”
‘I’ll be happier from now on,” Karina adds, as if trying to convince herself. “My dream of dreams has come true.”