In this week's edition
- ✍️ Letter from P'Fella
The Big Mac Burger = Cost of a Textbook - 🤓 The Sunday Quiz
How well do you know Radial Nerve Palsy? - 🖼️ Image of the Week
Foundations cover and AI-generated visuals. - 🚑 Technique Tip
How to build a textbook in 6 steps. - 🎈 Upcoming Events
New events by P'Fella: What to look forward to. - 🔥 Articles of the Week
Online, physical, and blended learning in plastic surgery: With 1-sentence summaries. - 💕 Feedback
Suggest ideas & give feedback!
A Letter from P'Fella
The Big Mac Burger = Cost of a Textbook
When Knowledge Becomes Cargo
Shipping exposed the madness of global inequality. Sending a book to the US costs about $5. To Saudi Arabia? $40. South Africa? $60. At those prices, almost no one would buy. So we set a flat global fee of $9. The true average came to $11. We lost $2 per book, but access became possible everywhere.
The Big Mac Index of Education
But fairness isn’t just about postage—it’s about purchasing power. Economists use the Big Mac Index to compare how much people can afford across countries. Strangely enough, it mapped perfectly onto textbooks. Americans paid more. Southeast Asia paid less. Not because the knowledge was worth less, but because a burger in Bangkok doesn’t cost what it does in Boston.
Outsmarting Import Taxes
The next hurdle? Import fees that often cost more than the book itself. The fix was simple but unglamorous: print locally. By producing books in multiple countries, they were never technically “imports.” Customs couldn’t inflate the cost, and surgeons could get their copy like any other domestic delivery
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the hardest part of global education isn’t writing or teaching—it’s shipping.
With love,
P’Fella ❤️
The Sunday Quiz
How Well Do You Know Radial Nerve Palsy?
Join The Weekly Quiz in each edition of thePlasticsPaper. This is the fifth round of seven rounds!
The top scorer wins one of the first print Foundations at a discount!
Image of the Week
Foundations Cover and Other AI-Generated Visuals
This week’s image is the cover of Foundations, our newly released textbook. Beyond its bold visual design, this cover reflects a key principle that runs throughout the book: The integration of modern, inclusive visuals into plastic surgery education.
These AI-generated visuals have allowed us to:
👉 Represent a broader spectrum of skin tones and anatomy, going beyond the limitations of traditional surgical photography.
👉 Maintain consistency and clarity in anatomical illustrations, eliminating visual noise and variability often present in clinical photos.
👉 Update and adapt visuals quickly, ensuring our educational content remains current with evolving techniques and guidelines.
👉 Avoid patient confidentiality concerns, making it easier to share educational content safely and widely.
Teaching plastic surgery shouldn’t rely solely on limited datasets or generic images. Every diagram in Foundations is part of our commitment to accuracy, accessibility, and representation in surgical education.
Technique Tip
6 Steps to Building a Textbook
This week’s technique tip is a little different. We’re breaking down the process of creating a textbook because just like surgery, it takes planning, precision, and teamwork.
Here’s how we built Foundations in 6 (very simplified) steps.
1. Define the Vision: What problem are we solving? Who are we teaching? Before a single word was written, we set our learning objectives and tone.
2. Build the Team: Fellows, trainees, advisors, designers, surgeons — each brought a unique lens to the table. Diversity was key.
3. Structure the Content: We broke down topics into digestible, logical formats. Every section had to teach clearly, not just be an info-dump.
4. Create Visuals: AI-generated. Confidentiality-safe. Diverse. We reimagined what educational anatomy could look like.
5. Review Ruthlessly: Internal edits, student reviewers, peer feedback. Every single page went through multiple rounds before approval.
6. Print, Package, Publish: From writing rooms to print runs, it all came together in one hardcover book: Foundations.
Upcoming Events
New Events by P'Fella: What to Look Forward to
We’ve got a busy event schedule coming up, including live teaching, journal reviews, and live podcasts. These sessions are designed to dive deeper into plastic surgery education while building a collaborative community around Foundations and beyond.
We're currently planning Study Club, Journal Club, Roundtable Discussions, and Residency Q&A events. Stay tuned for more info!
Articles of the Week
3 Interesting Articles with One-Sentence Summaries
Blended learning outperforms both online-only and traditional offline methods, with students achieving higher exam scores and showing stronger motivation, comprehension, and satisfaction.
Most students prefer using a mix of textbooks, lecture handouts, and online tools, choosing resources based mainly on quality of information and time efficiency rather than format alone.
Digital simulation training led to significantly greater accuracy and learner satisfaction in cleft lip repair markings than traditional textbook study.
