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: October 25th 2026
- Category: Commentary, Facelift, Skin Quality
This week a Harvard model trained on more than 40 million faces told the world it can read biological age from a photo and predict who survives cancer treatment. Patients who looked five years older than their age had a 21 percent higher risk of death. The model looks at the temples, the folds beside the nose and the forehead. So do I. A surgeon on what the photo is reading, why smoking shows, why most plastic surgery did not fool it, and what a lift can and cannot reset.
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- Posted on: October 25th 2026
- Category: Commentary, Facelift, Skin Quality
Harvard built a model that reads biological age from a selfie and predicts who survives cancer treatment. The Lancet Digital Health, this week; the Boston Globe has the numbers; three to ten selfies at faceage.bwh.harvard.edu gets you one.
I have read faces for a living for nearly twenty years. The machine and I agree.
What the Model Found
More than 40 million training faces. About 38,000 patients. Look five years older than your age: 21 percent higher risk of death, adjusted for age, sex and cancer type. Where it looks: the folds beside the nose, the forehead, the temples. Smokers read oldest. Makeup, lighting, pose: nothing. Most plastic surgery: nothing.
The Temples
“The biggest surprise patients see is the change in their face. The face doesn’t have a lot of fat, but the fat it does have is the good fat, the baby fat, what makes you look young. In the face you see the loss of the fat under the eyes, the temporal areas, temporal wasting, the buccal fat. We see the face just melt down because it’s lost all that volume. That’s usually the first thing they notice in the early stages of the weight loss.”
“I think fat grafting has been rising for many years. It’s an essential component of almost all facial procedures. I incorporate fat grafting into lower eyelid surgery, I incorporate it into all my facelifts, and I incorporate it in any facial procedure where the patient has lost a considerable amount of weight. So the GLP-1 wave has certainly increased the demand, but just normal aging is comprised of loss of fat and volume in the face, as well as skin laxity and quality.”
The model stares at the temples. So do I.
The Skin
“If you compare the two time frames and look at the brows, they sit in the same position. They have not been lifted. The excess upper eyelid skin remains. The volume of the cheeks is still in the same place, and the jawline is still sharp. If you look at other photos around the March timeline, it almost seems like she had lost too much weight, and that may have helped make her appear older. In the latest photos, it seems like she gained some of that weight back, which of course fills the face and makes it look younger.”
My Kristen Wiig read, last week. Skin and volume, not surgery.
“We’re having less fat consumption, and fat is an emollient that helps with barriers in the cell membranes. We’re taking less protein, which generates collagen. And we’re usually taking a lot less fluid, so we’re dehydrated. All three decrease the moisture in the skin, which makes it look older a lot quicker. The topicals have two functions: barrier and attracting moisture, and then the antioxidants, which keep the skin looking younger, and retinoids, which can speed up turnover.”
The Cigarette
“Any type of nicotine is the same, and this is something patients don’t realize. They think that because we say smoking, we just want them to stop smoking. But any other form, like Zyn or dip or vaping, the patches and the gum, they all have nicotine. They have the same effect, which is they constrict the small capillaries that carry the nutrients and the growth factors and cells to the scar area to repair and heal.”
“If I know a patient is smoking, I will refuse to do most procedures, but especially any facelift or neck lift, any breast lift or breast reduction, and tummy tucks. All these procedures rely on flaps and capillary blood flow.”
Clamp the capillaries for twenty years and the skin shows it. Nicotine and surgery has the rule.
What Surgery Resets, and What It Does Not
“The most interesting thing about a face lift procedure is that it can make you look ten to fifteen years younger. Of course, that depends on the age at which you get the procedure. If you get it at forty, you’re probably going to look like you’re in your early thirties, or even late twenties. But time keeps moving forward, so if we repeat the procedure ten years later, we take you back to that earlier stage of yourself. Now you’re in your fifties, looking like you’re in your thirties.”
“The reason we’re seeing this increase exponentially is that patients are noticing signs of facial aging earlier, or they’ve been on GLP-1s and have had accelerated aging from fat loss in the face and skin sagging.”
“Preferably I want the patient to have lost the weight that they had planned and be weight stable after any facelift procedure. The reason being that oftentimes patients after a facelift tend to lose further weight. And of course, if we lose the volume, then we will have some aging. As the face deflates, the skin tends to sag.”
Most plastic surgery did not move the number. Not surprised. A lift moves tissue back. The model reads what the tissue is made of: fat in the temples, collagen in the skin, the blood a cigarette shut off. Fat grafting, skin care, no nicotine. The lift alone leaves those alone.
I can make you look younger. I cannot make you be younger. The photo knows the difference now.
Longer reads: face after weight loss, where the cream stops, mother or daughter. Surgical version: agulloplasticsurgery.com. Skin version: the Southwest Plastic Surgery post.
Why Choose Dr. Agullo
Dr. Agullo is certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery and the American Board of Surgery, completed his plastic surgery fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, and serves as Clinical Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. He has been a Castle Connolly Top Doctor for thirteen consecutive years, 2014 through 2026. Fat grafting is part of every facelift he performs.
Ready to Talk?
Upload the selfies if you like. Then bring the number to me and we will talk about which part of it is volume, which part is skin, and which part is a habit.
Call (915) 590-7900, text 1-866-814-0038, or book online at agulloplasticsurgery.com. #StayBeautiful
Find me at @RealDrWorldWide on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, @Agullo on X, or @AgulloPlasticSurgery on Facebook.
- Posted on: October 25th 2026
- Category: Commentary, Industry, Safety Commentary
The AI labs are warning about extinction. I am worried about something smaller and closer: a confident wrong answer in fluent medical English, handed to someone with no way to check it. MDLinx ran a paragraph of that. Here is the rest, including the references a chatbot invented for me and the patients who arrive already diagnosed by one.
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- Posted on: October 25th 2026
- Category: Commentary, Industry, Safety Commentary
One word for MDLinx. Then the rest.
“Moderately. The failure I worry about is not a dramatic one. It is a confident wrong answer delivered in fluent medical English to someone who has no way to check it. In surgery we have decades of practice at recognizing a bad result. We have very little practice at recognizing a bad output that reads well.”
The Reference That Does Not Exist
“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.”
The Diagnosis Nobody Made
“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.”
The other direction too: a patient told a procedure is simple, expecting what the anatomy will not give.
What It Cannot Do
“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.”
“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.”
The Implant Precedent
We approve an implant on trial data, then track it for years, and sometimes learn it behaves differently in the field. Software ships, then changes. The version treating today’s patient may not be the one that was tested. Nobody is tracking it the way we track a breast implant.
| Implants | Medical AI |
|---|---|
| Approved on trial data | Validated on a test set |
| Tracked for years after | Rarely, and the model changes |
| Behaves differently in the field | Same, and faster |
| A named surgeon is accountable | Nobody, yet |
Where I Land
“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.”
“I’ve always said that an educated patient is a better patient.”
Prepare with it. Let me examine you. The patient’s how-to is my earlier AI before the doctor visit read; the full MDLinx answer with the three safeguards is on agulloplasticsurgery.com, and the consult-prep version is on the Southwest Plastic Surgery post.
Why Choose Dr. Agullo
Double board-certified, by the American Board of Plastic Surgery and the American Board of Surgery. Mayo Clinic plastic surgery fellowship. Clinical Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. Castle Connolly Top Doctor for 13 consecutive years. Harvard certification in AI in Healthcare.
Ready to Talk?
Bring the chatbot’s answer. I will check its references, then examine you. (915) 590-7900, text 1-866-814-0038, or book at agulloplasticsurgery.com/appointments. #StayBeautiful
@RealDrWorldWide on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, @Agullo on X, or @AgulloPlasticSurgery on Facebook.
