DR. WORLDWIDE GETS SOCIAL
DR. WORLDWIDE GET TO KNOW HIM
Frank Agullo, MD, FACS — known globally as Dr. WorldWide — is a double board-certified plastic surgeon in El Paso, Texas. He is a Clinical Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and Affiliate Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. Specializing in preservation-based aesthetic surgery and the Deep Plane Facelift, he has been named a Castle Connolly Top Doctor for thirteen consecutive years and has a global social following of over 3.5 million across Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. He is the founder of Southwest Plastic Surgery and Plastic Surgery Studios.
Meet Dr.WWDR. WORLDWIDE GET TO KNOW HIM
Frank Agullo, MD, FACS is the plastic surgeon the world watches. Known globally as Dr. WorldWide, he has built one of the largest followings of any surgeon on the planet (over 3.5 million on Instagram @RealDrWorldWide) by pulling back the curtain on plastic surgery and showing what extraordinary results actually look like. Celebrities, influencers, and patients from across the United States and around the world make the trip to El Paso, Texas, because when you have seen the work up close, there is nowhere else to go. More than 80% of his patients travel from outside El Paso. The practice handles every detail of their journey.
Dr. Agullo is double board-certified, Mayo Clinic fellowship-trained, and a Clinical Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. But credentials only tell part of the story. What sets him apart is a philosophy built on preservation: enhancing, restoring, and elevating what is already there rather than changing who you are. Not cookie cutter. Every plan is molded around the individual patient's desires, their anatomy, their life.
That philosophy drives every decision in the operating room. His Motiva Preserve breast augmentations deliver results that feel as natural as they look. His deep plane and endoscopic deep plane facelifts turn back time without announcing themselves. His Supercharged BBL has been refined, published, and presented on international stages. And his ability to combine face and body procedures in a single operative session is a capability few surgeons in the world can offer safely at his level.
The same philosophy applies outside the OR. Forget synthetic fillers. Dr. Agullo restores volume with regenerative grafts including Alloclae, Lipoderma, exosomes, and platelet-derived growth factors. Recovery is treated as part of the result: lymphatic massages, scar management, and Elixir MD LED light therapy ensure that what happens after surgery is as intentional as what happens during it.
Castle Connolly Top Doctor for eleven consecutive years. Texas Super Doctors Hall of Fame. Best Plastic Surgeon in El Paso for thirteen consecutive years. Aesthetic Everything Top Plastic Surgeon 2026. Founding Vice President and President of the World Association of Gluteal Surgeons, where he helped write the global safety standards for gluteal surgery.
The results are daily. The standard is uncompromising. The philosophy is simple: #MakeItHappen. #HappyIsBeautiful. #StayBeautiful.
#PlasticSurgeryIsMyPassion
GLAMOUR SHOTS
Plastic Surgery is a very personal choice and a unique experience for every individual who chooses to undergo a change, be it a discreet or major surgery. The one thing in common for my patients though is that they experience an inner transformation which ultimately shines through as confidence in themselves. Confident is Beautiful!
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- Posted on: September 15th 2026
- Category: Commentary, Patient Safety
BMI is the number I am required to record. It is not the number I use. On visceral fat, the tape measure, and the part of an abdomen surgery cannot fix.
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- Posted on: September 15th 2026
- Category: Commentary, Patient Safety
BMI is the number I am required to record. It is not the number I use.
“I can have two patients walk in with the same BMI and a completely different body composition and health situation. One can be a former athlete still carrying dense muscle, and the other has lost muscle over the years and replaced it with fat, with visceral fat sitting deep in the abdomen. The visceral fat is really the bad guy, the one that drives up blood pressure, blood sugar, and inflammation.”
BMI was never built for this.
“BMI stands for body mass index, and it measures weight relative to height. That’s really all it measures. It doesn’t know whether the weight is muscle, fat, bone, or fluid, nor does it know where on the body the weight sits.”
“It was never designed as a personal health test, but it ended up being used in medicine because it was a simple calculation.”
Woman’s World asked me last month whether waist-to-height ratio is the better predictor of heart risk.
“Waist-to-height ratio is not really measuring anything new. It measures the same underlying problem more directly. Heart disease tracks with the fat around the organs, and waist circumference gets closer to that than total body weight does. So it’s not that it’s a new body metric. It’s just that we’re setting aside the old one.”
The rule:
“You should keep your waist to less than half your height. A ratio under 0.5 is the goal. 0.5 to 0.6 is where the risks start to rise. Above 0.6 is concerning, and patients should have a full workup with their primary care doctor to check blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol.”
The surgical part, which the health coverage never gets to: liposuction and a tummy tuck work on the fat between the skin and the abdominal wall. Visceral fat sits behind that wall. No cannula reaches it.
This is also the fat that responds.
“It’s usually the first fat to arrive when your habits slip, and the first fat to leave when your habits improve. This is good news, because you can monitor your waist circumference as you’re dieting and often see more change than on the scale, which can be discouraging.”
One more thing, because it catches women off guard:
“Around and after menopause, the drop in estrogen changes where the body stores fat. It moves from the hips and thighs to the abdomen. So your BMI stays the same, but there’s more visceral fat than before, and the waist-to-height ratio rises.”
Get a tape measure. Stand up straight, find the space between your last rib and the top of your hip bone, measure there, snug, breathing normally, without sucking in. Divide by your height.
Under half.
Call (915) 590-7900, text 1-866-814-0038, or book at agulloplasticsurgery.com. #StayBeautiful
Title alternatives (title PICKED 2026-09-09 by blog-publish-driver under the 2026-09-05 standing default; option kept is above)
- The Fat I Cannot Remove
- BMI Is the Number I Am Required to Record. It Is Not the One I Use.
- Keep Your Waist Under Half Your Height
- Two Patients, Same BMI, Different Operations
- Posted on: September 14th 2026
- Category: Commentary, Surgeon Take
A reader asked whether AI can stand in for part of a doctor visit. The honest answer makes a lot of doctors uncomfortable, and it still has a hard limit.
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- Posted on: September 14th 2026
- Category: Commentary, Surgeon Take
A reader asked whether they could use AI to get more out of a doctor visit. I am going to give the answer I actually gave, because the polite version is less useful.
“Your reader is actually right, and that’s making a lot of doctors uncomfortable. With AI, you have unlimited time and patience, and there are no interruptions. The limitation, and the benefit, is that AI can fill in the gaps during the doctor visit, but it cannot fill in what the doctor can actually do or prescribe or treat.”
Unlimited time and patience. No doctor has that, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
What it is genuinely good at
“I feel AI is a great tool for preparation for a doctor’s visit, and it’s even a good tool to summarize and review the information afterward. It’s generally good at explaining and simplifying medical information and complicated words. It’s really good at gathering information and putting it in a timeline, which can be very helpful when you’re describing your problems to the doctor. It’s also great at putting together questions you may want to ask during the visit.”
The questions are the part I would not skip.
“This is where most patients stumble. Once the visit is over and the doctor says, ‘Do you have any questions before stepping out?’, a lot of patients blank out, and having something written down definitely helps. Doctors actually like it when patients have questions ready. Sometimes patients feel like they have to make up a question when they don’t have one.”
The hard limit
“I would never trust it with anything that requires a physical exam. AI has now been trained to recognize photos and evaluate lesions, but it cannot touch and feel the way we do when we perform a physical exam, to evaluate hernias or rectus diastasis, masses or lumps in the body or breast, skin laxity, and quality of skin.”
Skin quality is the one I would point at. Two people can photograph identically and have completely different tissue under the hand, and that difference is what decides the operation. It is the whole reason a tummy tuck plan cannot be made from a picture, and the same hand exam is what routes someone toward a MedSpa treatment instead.
“It’s also not good at predicting results, especially in cosmetic or plastic surgery, where a patient may upload a photo and ask for the postoperative result, which may or may not be a good expectation or even a possible one. This is where the surgeon’s experience and assessment of each patient’s anatomy and tissues comes in.”
The part that should worry you
“It’s really difficult to recognize hallucinations or wrong information, because AI always feels like an authority, all-knowing. I’ve had experiences where I’m researching a topic and AI comes up with completely false references to support what it’s saying. So this is really the difficult part, and the one where the doctor can come in and rectify and explain what is actually happening, or what’s actually in the literature. So many times when I’m researching a topic, after I receive an answer I’ll ask for references, and then I’ll go look for the source to see if it exists, and read about it to make sure it’s factual. Sometimes, if the information seems strange, I’ll ask again in another question, and a lot of times it will recognize that it made a mistake and rectify it.”
That is my actual habit, and I would recommend it to anyone. Ask for the references. Then go find them. It is the same standard I hold myself to when I write about a procedure here.
“And one of the most dangerous answers AI can give is false reassurance, that you shouldn’t be worried, that it’s really nothing, when in fact it may be, and only a doctor can make that determination.”
Of everything here, that is the sentence I would want people to keep.
Supplement, not replacement
“I don’t think AI would realistically replace office visits. The main factor is the physical exam, which is absent. A lot of times there’s no check of the vitals either, unless a patient has a way to measure these and upload them at the same time. I think it’s a supplement to medical care.”
“Patients worry that if they research too much and come into the office with information, it seems like they know more than the doctor, and that it may undermine the doctor-patient relationship. But as doctors, we’re up to date on the most recent technologies, and we’re aware that patients are using AI, so most of us are very open to it. I’ve always said that an educated patient is a better patient. I’m a proponent of educating patients, and the use of AI is a way to educate yourself more efficiently than going to the library and reading a bunch of books and articles.”
Privacy, plainly
“In terms of privacy, you have to assume that none of your information is private. The AI programs I use in the office are all HIPAA compliant, and we have a business agreement with each of them that protects the patient’s information. This is not the case with most chatbots and AI tools available to the public. You should really keep your name, date of birth, Social Security number, address, and anything identifiable out of it, because you have to assume the companies are using these to train their AIs and may also be sharing it, and it could end up in their own hands.”
When to close the laptop
“What I would skip discussing with a chatbot is anything that seems like an emergency. An unstable patient, chest pain, difficulty breathing, severe headache, facial droop, a new breast lump, a mole that’s changing, fever, spreading redness. If you believe you might have to go to urgent care or the emergency room, or you’re really worried about something, those are all signs that you need to go to the hospital or a doctor as soon as possible.”
Two prompts
Before a visit: “I am having the following symptoms, and I have a doctor’s visit. Can you give me five questions I should ask my doctor about?”
After a visit: “My doctor diagnosed me with [blank], recommended the following tests, and started me on the following medications. Can you explain this to me, and what questions should I ask at the next visit?”
The takeaway
Prepare with it. Review with it. Keep your identifiers out of it. Demand references and then verify they exist. Never accept reassurance from it. And anything that has to be touched, felt, or measured stays in the exam room, which is where every body contouring decision is actually made.
I am a double board-certified plastic surgeon, a Mayo Clinic fellowship alum, and I teach plastic surgery as a Clinical Associate Professor at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.
Ready to Talk?
Come in with your list. If you want a straight answer about what actually applies to you, let’s talk. Call the office at (915) 590-7900, text us at 1-866-814-0038, or book a consultation.
#StayBeautiful
@RealDrWorldWide on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, @Agullo on X, or @AgulloPlasticSurgery on Facebook.
