“Patients would bring in shoes they dreamed of wearing,” he said over tea recently at the St. Regis New York, where he was staying to see New York patients. Then they got their eyes pecked out by pigeons for being shallow. Sitting with a brown Yorkie in her lap, Dr. Levine explains that she is ''simply fulfilling a need, a need to wear stylish shoes.'' These risks explain why many foot doctors advise patients to try everything -- including never wearing high heels again -- before risking surgery.  It’s like something out of a fairy tale: a New York princess can’t fit into her Louboutuins, so she calls her fairy godmother plastic surgeon and he snips little pieces off her feet until her shoes fit like magic! Dr. Oliver Zong, founder of NYC Footcare and self-proclaimed “originator of the foot face-lift and toe tuck,” routinely corrects such conditions as High Heel Foot (a term he coined to describe a deformed foot that’s conformed to the shape of a stiletto), and Hitchhiker’s Toe, (an abnormally large big toe that sticks out like the thumb of a hitchhiker). But, she added: “It was unsightly and it hurt when I wore certain shoes. Although she would not provide specific numbers, Dr. Levine said that this year she will undertake 40 percent more cosmetic foot surgeries than she did three years ago. And I can wear sandals I couldn’t wear before.” 
 
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 Indeed, it’s not unusual for patients to walk into Dr. Suzanne Levine’s Institute Beauté, a podiatry clinic and medical spa on Park Avenue, with a bag full of shoes they can’t wear because of bunions and hammertoes. But advocates for the procedures say that critics simply do not understand the importance of high heels. Some doctors have even gotten requests for toe liposuction, which they’ve denied. Dr. Levine and her partner, Dr. Everett Lautin, said that critics do not understand that when doctors tell their patients not to wear high heels, patients do so anyway. ''It's far simpler to cut the shoe to fit the foot than to cut the foot to fit the shoe,'' said Dr. Pierce Scranton, a Seattle orthopedic surgeon who was an author of the 1993 study. Dr. Jonathan T. Deland, chief of the foot and ankle service and attending orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery, is opposed to even less-radical cosmetic procedures. “The most important thing about a foot is that is doesn’t hurt you and you can function,” he said. The answer, Dr. Positano said, is that ''you don't walk on your face.'' Now Ms. Levitt said that she is unable to wear anything but sneakers and that her feet hurt constantly. “If you live in New York, your feet are your wheels,” she said.
– How far are women willing to go for fashion? According to the New York Times, pretty far. The newspaper walks a mile in the shoes of a handful of LA- and NYC-based podiatrists who perform procedures specifically designed to help women fit comfortably into designer heels. What types of surgery are women undergoing for the sake of their Manolo Blahniks? Aesthetic toe-shortening, fat-pad augmentation, and toe-lengthening procedures, by way of one Beverly Hills podiatrist, who brands his procedures with names like "the Cinderella" and "Perfect 10!" A Park Avenue podiatrist, who recommends Prada and Michael Kors for women looking for a wider shoe, offers injectable fillers for cushioning and other injections to tame profuse sweating; another NYC practitioner corrects what he calls Hitchhiker's Toe (a case of an outsize big toe) but drew the line at one patient's request: amputation of a pinkie toe to allow for a better fit. And it's not a new trend: The Times checked in on it in 2003, focusing on the "perils on the procedures"—an elective bunion removal, for instance, that ended up saddling the patient with serious foot pain. Time points out that woman are doing other "gross things" for fashion's sake, like Botoxing their calves to make them skinnier, and thereby better suited for skinnyjeans and slim boots. (And then there are these 7 people, who went under the knife in an attempt to look like a celeb.)