M.D. Ahmet Ali Aktaş

My 82-year-old father, Mehmet, had a strangulated hernia that developed suddenly during a family dinner. We rushed him to Acibadem Atakent in panic. Dr. Ahmet Ali Aktaş assessed him with remarkable calmness, explaining the emergency surgery in terms we could understand despite our fear. What stood out was how he personally called my sister at midnight to update her post-surgery, describing the procedure's success in detail. His follow-up visits felt like a family member checking in—he even adjusted my father's pillow himself. The surgical scar is nearly invisible, and my father now jokes it's his 'battle medal from the general.' We trusted a stranger with our father's life and found a guardian instead.

Our 7-year-old daughter, Elif, needed an appendectomy during our vacation in Istanbul—every parent's nightmare abroad. Dr. Aktaş didn't just treat a patient; he comforted a terrified child who didn't speak Turkish. He entered the room making balloon animals from surgical gloves, earning her first smile in hours. He performed a single-incision laparoscopic surgery, explaining to us how this would minimize scarring for her future. Post-op, he visited her room with a stuffed animal from his own office, speaking to her in simple English she understood. The nursing staff told us he personally reviewed her pain management chart every two hours overnight. We returned to Germany with a healthy child and a story about the Turkish surgeon who healed with both hands and heart.

As a 45-year-old teacher with a complex pilonidal sinus that had recurred three times after previous surgeries elsewhere, I approached Dr. Aktaş with skepticism and chronic pain. He proposed a completely modified cleft lift procedure I'd never heard of, spending forty minutes drawing diagrams of the technique versus traditional methods. His honesty was brutal but reassuring: 'This will hurt for weeks, but I believe it's your last surgery for this.' The procedure took two hours longer than planned because he insisted on removing every microscopic tract. For six weeks of recovery, he answered my anxious WhatsApp messages personally, sometimes at 11 PM. It's been eighteen months—no recurrence, no drainage, just a thin line where misery once lived. He treated not just the disease but the exhaustion it brought.

What began as a routine gallbladder consultation for my intermittent pain turned into Dr. Aktaş detecting an unusual thickening during ultrasound review. He canceled his next appointment to perform an urgent MRCP, discovering a rare biliary stricture requiring intricate reconstruction. His approach was methodical: he created a three-page visual timeline of surgical options, risks, and recovery milestones. During the four-hour surgery, his assistant came out twice to update my family with sketches of progress. The unexpected complexity? He had coordinated with a gastroenterologist colleague to place a temporary stent weeks prior to optimize conditions—a multidisciplinary foresight I've never witnessed. At my six-month follow-up, he reviewed not just surgical sites but my liver function trends with the focus of a detective. He turned a simple organ removal into a masterclass in physiological preservation.