An excerpt from The Guardian -
‘Being short is a curse’: the men paying thousands to get their legs broken – and lengthened
By Ruth Michaelson
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At a leg lengthening clinic in Istanbul, iodine is applied to a patient’s legs
in preparation for surgery to remove the metal rods that have stretched his femurs.
: Bradley Secker/The Guardian
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It was on his honeymoon in Kuala Lumpur, looking out of his hotel window at the silvery points of the world’s tallest twin skyscrapers, that Frank decided it was time to become taller. He had recently confessed to his new wife how much his height had bothered him since he was a teenager. As a man dedicated to self-improvement, Frank wanted to take action. He picked up the phone, called a clinic in Turkey that specialises in leg lengthening surgery – and made a booking.
“I had a lot of second thoughts – at the end of the day, someone’s going to break your legs,” he says, propped up on a hotel bed in Istanbul, his legs splayed in front of him, bracketed by a brace on each thigh. His wife, Emilia, tends to him, fetching painkillers and ice packs for the wound sites where the braces puncture his legs. For the first two weeks after surgery, Frank needed her help to get on and off the toilet, but now, six weeks later, it’s largely only to get off the bed.
The bleep of an alarm interrupts our conversation: time to insert a key into the metal bracket on the side of Frank’s thigh and turn it, forcing apart the rods that have been inserted into his femurs. New bone grows into the gap in his thigh bones, one agonising millimetre at time. Each turn of the key dictates how much the patient can grow, and Frank is aiming for five turns each day rather than the four recommended by his doctors, to gain a precious extra quarter of a centimetre. It means more suffering, but Frank is all about putting in the work to get what he wants. “Time to grow!” Emilia says, with a little laugh, as the alarm sounds.
At 5ft 6in (1.7m) tall, slightly under the average male height worldwide, Frank, 38, feels he has lived life “as a short man”. But speak with any patient at the Wanna Be Taller clinic in Istanbul, where Frank chose to undergo leg lengthening, and it becomes clear that shortness is relative. Men over 6ft have had the procedure. One tells me he needed surgery to “correct” his bow legs and decided to add some height at the same time. A slim blond woman – a rare example of a female patient here – who was 5ft 3in before surgery, looks me square in the eyes as she deadpans that shortness “is the last acceptable prejudice in society” to explain why she underwent the procedure to gain two inches. (The clinic also offers leg shortening surgery, though this is far less common; only nine patients have so far had it done, mainly women.)
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If having your leg bones cut in half sounds painful enough, the true agony comes afterwards. Ensconced on the periphery of Istanbul, in a hotel built from what looks like plasterboard and fake gold leaf, about 20 leg lengthening patients spend their days obsessing over their muscles and tendons, making sure they stretch to accommodate their new bones. This means daily physiotherapy to learn how to walk again, blood thinners, massages and a lot of painkillers. While there are few global statistics on the number of people opting to have this done each year, one Indian market research firm estimated the global limb lengthening industry will balloon by 2030 to be worth $8.6bn (£6.4bn).
“I always tell them, 1cm is not more important than your health,” says Serkan Aksoy from Wanna Be Taller, who supervises Frank’s physio. Most of their patients are men, and Aksoy has to dissuade many clients from trying to gain too much height. From the clinic’s perspective, the risks come from patients not adhering to a strict aftercare routine, but problems and even deaths do occur. Blood clots, joint issues, failure to grow new bone tissue, blood vessel injuries, scarring and chronic pain are all potential complications, as well as “ballerina syndrome”, where the achilles tendons fail to stretch adequately, forcing the feet into an exaggerated arch and preventing the patient from walking. Last year, a patient who had flown in from Saudi Arabia died from a blood clot 16 days after undergoing leg lengthening surgery. When I ask Wanna Be Taller about this, they say an investigation by the Saudi authorities found no fault with their surgeon.
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| Yuto from Japan has surgery to remove his femur stretchers. Photograph: Bradley Secker/The Guardian |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/aug/17/being-short-is-a-curse-the-men-paying-thousands-to-get-their-legs-broken-and-lengthened
