Op. Dr. M. Revaha Kirtilli

About Dr Revaha Kırtıllı

Most people who reach this page are thinking about having breast surgery in Turkey, and most of them are uneasy about it. That is a reasonable position to hold. You have probably read the news reports, and you have probably noticed that it is difficult to find out who would actually be holding the scalpel.

So let me start there.

Training

Medicine — Abant İzzet Baysal University Faculty of Medicine, Bolu (2010–2016)

Specialty training in Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery

Since December 2023 I have worked as an operating surgeon in the Department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery at Prof. Dr. Cemil Taşçıoğlu City Hospital in Istanbul, covering aesthetic surgery, reconstructive surgery, hand surgery and emergency trauma.

International patients are operated on at Özel Güneşli Erdem Hospital, Istanbul.

Registration

Registered with the Turkish Ministry of Health as a specialist in Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery since 23 August 2023.

I have not printed my registration numbers on this page, and the reason is worth saying. Turkey’s physician register is not open to the public — it sits behind a national identity login that only Turkish residents have. Published here, those numbers would give you a figure you cannot check, while handing a working set of credentials to anyone who wanted to use them. Ask me and I will send them to you.

What you can check yourself, without me:

If any surgeon you are considering cannot give you at least that much, ask why.

Experience

Since 2018 I have performed more than 1,000 breast operations — augmentation, uplift, reduction and revision — at university and city hospitals in Erzurum, Ankara and Istanbul.

I state the number plainly, because in surgery it matters. Across surgical specialties, experience and case volume are associated with better outcomes. A surgeon who operates on the breast a few times a year is not the safer choice.

What goes wrong in surgery abroad is not volume. It is anonymity — patients who never meet the surgeon before the day of the operation, who are discharged after three days, and who have nobody to call once they are home. Those are different problems, and they have different answers: aftercare when you return to the UK.

Memberships and academic work

Published work

Kirtilli MR, Cengiz İZ. Pulsatile numbness in the fingers: surgical management of a common digital artery aneurysm. Turkish Journal of Vascular Surgery 2025;34(3):258-60. doi:10.9739/tjvs.2025.01.01

Çinal H, Barın EZ, Kara M, et al. (Kirtilli MR). 277 Hand Finger Replantation: Demographic Characteristics and Outcomes. Selçuk Medical Journal 2020;36(2):79-86. doi:10.30733/std.2020.01455 — the largest reported series of finger replantations in Türkiye.

Specialty thesis

Kırtıllı MR. Investigation of preoperative and postoperative sexual life in breast reconstruction patients. Specialty thesis, Ankara University Faculty of Medicine, 2023. Turkish Council of Higher Education National Thesis Centre, no. 819200.

For my specialty thesis I sat down with 96 women who had undergone breast reconstruction and asked them, one by one, what the surgery had done to their body image and their sexual life. The work used three validated instruments — the Turkish BREAST-Q reconstruction module, the Female Sexual Function Index and the Sexual Quality of Life questionnaire — and was approved by Ankara University’s human research ethics committee.

I chose the subject because it is the part of breast surgery that patients think about most and are asked about least. Surgeons discuss scars and implant sizes. The question women actually carry into the consultation — how will this change how I feel about my own body, and about being touched — usually goes unasked in the room and unanswered afterwards.

Two things are worth saying plainly about that study. Those women were reconstruction patients, most of them after cancer, and I will not stretch findings from that population across to aesthetic surgery. And an interview study of 96 patients is not a landmark trial.

What it does mean is that when you ask me what happens to sensation, or when intimacy returns to normal, or whether you will feel like yourself again, you are not getting an improvised answer. It is a question I have sat with a hundred women and studied formally.

Congresses

41st National Congress of TPRECD (2021) · 45th National Congress of TPRECD (2023) · Body Contouring Congress (2024)

Why a breast surgeon’s publications are about hands

Because that is what the job is in Türkiye, and it is worth explaining rather than hiding.

Plastic surgery here is not a cosmetic specialty with a reconstructive hobby attached. The training and the day job cover emergency trauma, hand surgery, microsurgery and reconstruction, and the aesthetic work sits on top of that foundation. My published work is on replanting severed fingers and on repairing an artery aneurysm in a hand — microsurgery, under a microscope, on vessels roughly a millimetre across.

That is not a detour from breast surgery. It is the reason tissue handling, bleeding control and dissection are second nature rather than something learned on aesthetic cases.

The same applies to the breast itself. I trained in breast reconstruction after mastectomy — rebuilding a breast from a patient’s own tissue or with implants after cancer surgery — and my specialty thesis was carried out in that population.

My practice today is aesthetic, not reconstructive. I am not running a post-mastectomy reconstruction service and I would not want a woman recovering from breast cancer to arrive here expecting one; that work belongs with a team doing it weekly. I still take reconstructive cases when a patient specifically asks.

I mention the training rather than advertising the service because it is the reason the aesthetic work looks the way it does. Reconstruction teaches you what a breast is built from before you are ever asked to reshape one for appearance.

A surgeon whose entire experience is cosmetic has never had to rebuild anything.

How I work

You speak to the surgeon, not to a call centre. The person who assesses you before the operation is the person who performs it and the person who follows your recovery afterwards. This sounds obvious. In medical tourism it is not.

I will tell you when surgery is not the right answer. Some people who write to me are asking for the wrong operation, and some should not be operated on at all — because of their expectations, their anatomy, their health, or simply their timing. Saying so costs me a case and saves you a great deal more than that.

The clearest example is smoking. I do not operate on patients who will not stop, and that is not a preference. In the replantation series I co-authored, success in smokers fell to 41 per cent against 65 per cent overall, and the gap widened the longer the tissue went without blood supply. Different operation, same biology: nicotine constricts the small vessels that healing depends on. I have seen what that does in the data I helped collect, which is why I will not take the risk with your breasts.

I plan around the problem, not the procedure. Patients usually arrive having already decided which operation they want. Sometimes they are right. Often what they describe — the shape they dislike, the change after pregnancy, the asymmetry they have lived with — points to a different solution than the one they came in asking for. The consultation exists to work that out before anything is scheduled, not after.

Aftercare is part of the operation, not an extra. Going home to another country is the part of surgery abroad that goes wrong most often. How that is handled is set out in writing before you travel: aftercare when you return to the UK.

Outside the operating room

Freediving (AIDA Level 2), spearfishing, snowboarding, photography. I mention it because patients ask, and because a surgeon who never leaves the hospital is not necessarily a better one.

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