Dr. Stephen C. Nicolaidis

Specializing in breast and body contouring, Dr. Stephen C. Nicolaidis is one of the few plastic surgeons in Quebec to be board-certified in both Canada and the United States. In addition to his private practice at Clinique Contour, located on Montcalm Street, he also practices reconstructive plastic surgery at the CHUM. He also has expertise in hand surgery. His dual practice—aesthetic and reconstructive—nurtures his in-depth expertise, particularly in complex cases.

Dr. Nicolaidis stopped using all types of breast implants in May 2021. After realizing that any patient could potentially react negatively to these devices, he chose to focus on explantation. He is now considered Canada’s leading explantation surgeon, with over 1,300 procedures performed as of January 2026.

Legal Disclaimer: The opinions expressed on this site regarding breast implants are those of Dr. Stephen C. Nicolaidis and do not necessarily reflect those of his colleagues at the University of Montreal.

Dr. Nicolaidis was interested in understanding why some patients develop breast implant disease (BII) and others do not. In other words, he was interested in risk factors for prevention purposes.

In October 2020, he presented his “Prospective Study of 182 Patients Undergoing Capsulectomy for BII: Three Reasons to Do Capsulectomies for BII Patients” at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) Congress as well as in 2021 at the 1st Breast Implant Health Summit.

In early 2021, Dr. Nicolaidis was doing more explant procedures than augmentations. Most concerning, he started to meet patients with no apparent risk factors who still developed BII. Therefore, he could no longer predict if any given patient might develop BII with breast implants.

Unable to predict which women were more at risk for BII, Dr. Nicolaidis made a decision based on caution and medical responsibility: he stopped breast implants altogether in May 2021.

A Montreal native, Dr. Stephen C. Nicolaidis is a plastic surgeon who graduated from McGill University, where he completed his plastic surgery training. He then specialized in craniofacial aesthetic surgery at the University of Miami and then pursued a fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. He worked for three years in New York City as an assistant professor of surgery at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. During this time, he was named one of America’s Top Surgeons in plastic surgery. Following the events of September 11, 2001, he decided to return to Montreal, where he now teaches at the Université de Montréal.