It wasn’t her initial intention, but Dr. Nedra Dodds eventually became nationally known as an outstanding “butt doctor,” at her Opulence Aesthetic Medicine practice in suburban Atlanta, the type of physician who could provide the right type of augmentation to help give women that hourglass shape — or apple bottom — that so many covet.
Butt augmentation, Dodds advises, basically takes women’s shapes and enhances the entire female body.
“That was my goal. It was not to focus solely on the booty, but to give women a feminine look to the entire female shape. I understood this. I was a model before and understand what it’s like to have low self-esteem. So I talk to them about. My business grew from that. We do full-service skin care, nutrition, arthritis and how diet change can make you healthier.
“Without advertisements, I became known as the person who can help patients who had butt augmentations by a non-physician,” she said. “And this came from word of mouth from other patients.”
Dodds has become concerned over the years, however, that black women have developed a distorted concept of what it means to look “feminine” and have delusions about how butt augmentation can transform their lives.
“The first thing, people always come in with what I call a menu — a magazine or someone’s picture and say ‘I want to look like this.’ And I say that the desire may be there, but the reality is not. I would always say ‘let’s talk real talk.’ First, the picture is not real. The celebrity doesn’t even look like this in real life,” she said.
Despite her protestations, Dodds’ recommendations for other remedies and practices to prospective patients about how to get that perfect body would fall on deaf ears.
“I saw people who were reckless in their everyday life. I would try to talk to them about let’s talk about your diet, ‘let’s change this.’ And they would be like ‘Mmmm, I don’t want to talk about that. I want surgery.’ And I would be like ‘Hmmm,.’ ” she said.
Dodds and others in the medical community discerned that the demand for the perfectly sculpted “stripper booty” was so strong that women would go to great — and oftentimes, dangerous — lengths to obtain it, ramifications be damned.
“These patients would do anything — lie, cheat and steal to get on the operating table,” Dodds outlines. “I’ve seen them switch labs. I’ve seen them use their friend’s blood and name because they know that, during preliminary examination, they know that something [a negative medical condition] is going to show up in their labs. What is going on in society that people are so desperate to get the perfect body? And it’s the media. There are singers whose entire gimmick is their butt. That’s driving that,” Dodds said.
This is where Dodds would have to double up as a psychologist and a medical doctor.
“I would tell them that, no matter what, he is not going to come back to you,” she said she has told prospective patients. “You are not going to get that job, that nothing is going to change until you, from the inside, see that you have self-worth. The problem has gotten completely out of control,” Dodds said.
When women’s unrealistic demands were rebuffed by American doctors, those with the means would journey to other countries, particularly South America, to get the surgeries on their bodies that American doctors refused to perform.
“In South America, there is a very expensive and sophisticated black market, where employees inside a doctor’s office would use industrial grade silicone products and mimic what they see in a doctor’s office. Say, for example, a doctor uses body fat to enhance the buttocks. But the [person on the black market] uses silicone. At first it was Latina woman, but then it was people who looked like me. You would have fake doctors who would advertise their services,” she said.
Vanity, Dodds says, has replaced illicit narcotics as the fastest growing drug in the United States.
“This is the new heroin of America. This is global. And it is huge in the United States. And here in Atlanta and Georgia it’s close to No. 1,” Dodds said.
