‘Botched’ Doctors Terry Dubrow and Paul Nassif Talk Their Scariest Season Yet, ‘Ozempic Shaming’ (Exclusive)

Botched doctors Terry Dubrow and Paul Nassif are taking on the scariest cases they’ve ever seen in Season 8, as the plastic surgeons embark on their greatest challenges yet using their years of experience correcting surgery complications. Dubrow and Nassif opened up to PopCulture.com about what’s to come ahead of the E! series’ Aug. 3 season premiere as they touched on some of the biggest cosmetic trends of the day – including “Ozempic shaming.”

“Season 8 is a different season,” Dubrow teased to PopCulture. “Season 8 is an advanced season, and we have a lot more complications. … I think you’re going to find it’s a lot scarier than you’ve ever seen before on Botched.” In Season 8, Nassif tackles what his partner calls “the case of the series,” or the most difficult case either of them has ever faced in eight full seasons. When doctors at an international university attempted to remove a fast-growing tumor on a patient’s face, it bled so much that they immediately closed – what Dubrow calls a “peek and shriek.” That tumor then continued to grow and “literally took over [the patient’s] face” before coming to Nassif, who did “some genius work” to change her life forever. 

Dubrow compares surgery to playing a sport, in that the more you do, the better you can become, allowing both he and Nassif to take on cases over the years that they never would have tackled before. “As opposed to a sport, you can’t practice plastic surgery,” he continued. “If you’re lucky and get involved in a situation where you get to do an incredibly high volume of difficult patients, you get the practice of surgery behind you, and you can bring that experience to bear on these even more difficult cases. So you’re going to see a lot more complicated cases and a lot of complications related to fixing these people.”

In one of those complicated cases in Season 8, Dubrow revealed he faced a “true emergency” during surgery that required him to kick out the Botched camera people. “They have this expression in surgery and anesthesia where it’s ‘99% boredom, 1% sheer terror,’” he explained. “Well, this is [the] 1% of sheer terror that we had to face where this could be the end of it all, that moment. So it was a true emergency, and we had to sort of go into salvage mode right away.”

In an age of much more openness about plastic surgery and other cosmetic procedures, Nassif told PopCulture that he’s loving having a “really educated” clientele that will listen to his advice more when it comes to body modifications. “In the past, the patients that would want body modification, 90% would not listen to us and [would] go ahead and proceed, have the bad procedure, and come up with a complication,” he explained. “As a matter of fact, I think one or two patients, or even three or four … [patients] that we told not to do something, they’ve actually passed away because of more procedures. Horrible. But now we were talking, maybe 75% of the patients are actually heeding our advice and not going to that next step because they’re actually afraid.”

Dubrow hopes the openness surrounding plastic surgery now will “evolve” into a similar attitude toward drugs like Ozempic, which are being used for weight loss. “I think these drugs are a breakthrough, they’re here to stay, but we don’t really know exactly how to use them,” he explained. “They have a lot more complications in non-diabetics than we really realize. But if we stop people from shaming people for using these, like they’re cheating, we will learn more quickly how to use them and be able to use them more effectively and safely. So let’s stop the Ozempic-shaming. Let’s learn how to use them and tell your doctor if you’re on these drugs.” Botched returns for a brand-new season Wednesday, Aug. 3 at 10 p.m. ET on E!