A film plotline highlights widespread dishonesty about male height and the extreme measures some men take to appear taller. Thousands travel to Istanbul clinics like Make Me Taller and pay tens of thousands of pounds for leg-lengthening operations. A 38-year-old patient named Frank sought four inches on his 5ft 6 frame. Surgeons saw off the bone, implant a device to separate the ends, and monitor new bone growth through additional surgeries. The lengthening requires daily key turns that force bones apart by millimetres, causing severe nerve pain, prolonged recovery, and gradual height gain to roughly 5ft 9 over weeks.
The first step involved cutting his leg in half to allow a device to be implanted to separate the two ends of the sawn off bone. It leaves a space for new bone growth to take place, which is also monitored through several surgeries. Of the ordeal, he told the outlet: 'Sometimes the nerve pain wrecks me'. But he endured it because he is proud of being a self-starter, having a 'self made' tattoo on his knuckles.
Next is the lengthening process, which sees a small key inserted into the device on his thigh that is slowly turned, a painful millimetre at a time, which forces the bones apart and creates space for new bone to grow. If he can endure five turns of the key each daily, Frank could gain slightly over a millimetre a day. At the end of 10 weeks, he would stand at 5ft 9 in, the average height of a man.
But these scenarios happen off-screen, too; thousands of men, undeterred by the brutal surgery and crippling recovery, travel to the Turkish city of Istanbul and hand over tens of thousands of pounds to add a few precious inches to their stature at clinics such as Make Me Taller.
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