How I Used The Internet For Surgery Research

After all my research, short listing, and eventually booking my different surgeries I wrote a lot about my process and methodology. I’m honoured that my writing is being published on FACIALTEAM’s blog. I jolted down so much about the topic that it was decided to post a number of articles based on my experiences and observations.  Here’s the first of a bunch of blog posts where I unravel how I used, and in some cases how I did not use the internet as a fundamental tool in my research prior to the different surgeries.

We all use the internet for all kinds of searches and research. My gender affirming surgeries were not the exception. I used the usual suspect sites ranging from social media where communities share their experiences and views, to all sorts of online videos, and many surgeons’ websites. For my surgeries in 2016 and 2017 (FFS, HT, and BA) I first wanted to find out which surgeons to approach based on my internet research, in essence to create a short list of surgical centres to talk to, and after speaking with the surgeons I’d make a decision where to go to.

The blog posts I wrote on ‘My Approach to FFS Surgery Research’ discus the following topics:

• The basics where I lay down my research objectives and approach
• The surgeons’ websites and how I deconstructed them to try to read in between the lines. After all surgeons’ websites are marketing tools that could sometimes be a little misleading
• Online videos explaining what kinds of videos I was looking at and what information or knowledge I wanted to distill.
• Social media and my omnipresent skepticism while still gathering very useful information

Though these posts talk about my personal experiences, I acknowledge that the way I did my groundwork may not be for everyone. Still, I hope that by sharing what I learnt, if someone is considering any kind of gender affirming surgery, that they can get something useful for their own research.

I also have a number of blog posts here on HolaSoyYo.com that touch on the topic of gender affirming surgeries, my experiences, and my thoughts.

And of course, if you find my writing interesting, please consider subscribing to receive email notifications every time I post something new on HolaSoyYo.com’s blog.