Growing up in San Antonio, Leo Lapuerta went along when his father, a pulmonologist, took him to work. The decision to pursue medicine came later, at Stanford University, and it set off 16 years of education and training after high school before he practiced as a plastic surgeon.
Today Dr. Leo Lapuerta is a triple board-certified plastic surgeon in the Houston area with more than 30 years of experience. The route between those two points says a lot about how a plastic surgeon gets made, and about the questions a patient can ask of any surgeon’s training.
A bilingual home in San Antonio
His family immigrated from Valencia, Spain, and he grew up in a bilingual household in San Antonio. He is a native Spanish speaker and fluent in English, and he now runs a practice with bilingual English and Spanish support staff.
His father’s work gave him an early look at a physician’s day. He traces his own choice to that exposure and to the years that followed in California.
“My father was a pulmonologist in San Antonio and took me with him to work and I knew I wanted to go to medical school when I went to Stanford.”
Stanford, then medical school in Texas
After Stanford he returned to Texas for medical school at UT Southwestern Medical School. He has said that surgery won him over during those years, and that he chose plastic surgery for its range: it lets him treat patients of all ages, women and men, and work with each person’s anatomy as he finds it.
He describes the stretch from premed through residency as a test of persistence as much as intellect. In his account, it took hard work, a willingness to give up short-term pleasures for long-term gain, and the ability to push through the physical and mental fatigue of medical school and residency while keeping a healthy state of mind.
Detroit, then a fellowship in Houston
Surgical training took him north. He completed general surgery training at St. John’s Hospital in Detroit, the broad foundation that plastic surgeons build on before they specialize. He then came back to Texas for a plastic and reconstructive surgery fellowship at St. Joseph Hospital in Houston.
That hospital became a long-term address. Dr. Lapuerta now serves as Chairman of Plastic Surgery at St. Joseph Hospital, the same institution where he finished his specialty training.
He also teaches. He serves on the teaching faculty for UT-Houston Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery, the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and the Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery Fellowship at Houston Methodist Hospital, where trainees now walk a version of the road he walked.
The credentials the training produced
Today he holds board certification from the American Board of Plastic Surgery and the American Board of Surgery, plus certification in Surgery of the Hand. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the Texas Society of Plastic Surgeons, and a past President of the Houston Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Over more than 30 years he has performed more than 30,000 surgical and non-surgical procedures and built a library of more than 3,000 before-and-after images for patients to review. He owns and operates a QuadA (AAAASF) accredited surgical facility and works with physician anesthesiologists. Outside the practice, he has volunteered with Operation San Jose, providing plastic and reconstructive surgery to children and adults with genetic and developmental deformities in underserved areas of Mexico, Central and South America.
Lessons from the timeline for patients
Dr. Lapuerta’s view is that a surgeon’s experience with a given procedure, counted in cases and in years, along with board certification, best predicts an outcome patients are happy with. His own path shows the inputs behind that view: a general surgery base, a dedicated plastic surgery fellowship, and decades of cases since.
Any patient can ask a surgeon to walk through the same timeline: where they trained in general surgery, where they completed plastic surgery training, which boards certify them, and how many times they have performed the procedure under discussion.
He sums up why he stayed in the field in one line: “Plastic surgery allows you to reform the physical body in a way that restores a patient’s soul.”
This article is for general information only and is not medical advice. Results vary from patient to patient. Consult a board-certified plastic surgeon or your physician about your own situation. Written in partnership with Joseph Lambert, a publicist working with Leo Lapuerta, MD Plastic Surgery.
