Leo Lapuerta’s main work is caring for his own patients in a private Houston-area practice. Part of his professional life belongs to surgeons who have not finished training yet.

Dr. Lapuerta serves as teaching faculty for three plastic surgery training programs in the region while running a cosmetic and reconstructive practice. A biography of his training and teaching roles lists both sides of that work, and the combination offers a useful case study in how a senior professional keeps a second track alive alongside a first.

Three programs, one practice

The teaching roles span Houston and Galveston.

UT-Houston Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery

He serves as a teaching surgeon on the faculty supporting the plastic and reconstructive surgery department at UT-Houston.

University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston

He holds a similar faculty role with the Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery department at the University of Texas Medical Branch.

Houston Methodist Hospital fellowship

He also teaches in the Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery Fellowship at Houston Methodist Hospital.

Alongside those roles he serves as Chairman of Plastic Surgery at St. Joseph Hospital in Houston, the hospital where he completed his own plastic and reconstructive surgery fellowship.

The private-practice side

The day job is substantial. Dr. Lapuerta is triple board certified, by the American Board of Plastic Surgery, the American Board of Surgery and in Surgery of the Hand, and he has more than 30 years of experience. He reports more than 30,000 surgical and non-surgical procedures and keeps more than 3,000 before-and-after images for patients to review.

He owns and operates a QuadA (AAAASF) accredited surgical facility, works with physician anesthesiologists, and sees patients at offices in the Houston area, including Pearland and Katy. In that context, teaching competes for hours that a private surgeon could spend on paid cases.

The reason a busy surgeon keeps teaching

His practice describes the reason in plain terms: he believes his academic involvement strengthens his cosmetic work by keeping his knowledge and skills current. That reasoning will sound familiar to professionals in other fields who guest-lecture or mentor while running a business.

Teaching also forces a surgeon to explain decisions out loud. A trainee asks why one incision and not another, why a patient is a good candidate or a poor one, and the faculty member has to give a reason that holds up. A surgeon who answers those questions for trainees gets practice answering the same questions for patients.

Reading a faculty title as a patient

A faculty appointment signals that a training program trusts a surgeon to model judgment for the next generation. It does not, by itself, guarantee any result, and patients should weigh it alongside other evidence.

Dr. Lapuerta’s own view puts the weight elsewhere. In his opinion, the strongest predictor of an outcome patients are pleased with is a surgeon’s experience with the specific procedure, counted in cases and years, combined with board certification. Teaching sits on top of that foundation.

For readers comparing surgeons, the faculty line on a biography is a prompt for better questions:

• Which training programs do you teach in, and in what capacity?
• How many times have you performed the procedure I am considering?
• Which boards certify you, and are those certifications current?
• Where would my surgery take place, and who accredits that facility?

A lesson for career builders

For readers outside medicine, the structure is the takeaway. Dr. Lapuerta built a private practice with its own facility, then kept formal ties to academic programs that keep testing his reasoning. He has also volunteered with Operation San Jose, providing plastic and reconstructive surgery to children and adults with genetic and developmental deformities in underserved areas of Mexico, Central and South America.

Each of those commitments draws on the same skill set and returns something different: income from the practice, sharper explanations from the classroom, and perspective from surgical trips to underserved communities. A professional in any field can borrow that pattern by attaching one teaching or service role to the main line of work and keeping it for years.

This article is for general information only and is not medical advice. Results vary from patient to patient. Consult a board-certified plastic surgeon or your physician about your own situation. Written in partnership with Joseph Lambert, a publicist working with Leo Lapuerta, MD Plastic Surgery.