Would you have your legs broken to be taller?

你愿意打断双腿来变高吗?

Today in Focus

2025-09-05

29 分钟
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Alongside dental work, hair transplants and nose jobs, people from around the world are travelling to Turkey to get leg-lengthening surgery. Ruth Michaelson reports. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus
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  • This is The Guardian.

  • Today, would you have your legs broken to make yourself taller?

  • My name is Ezequiel.

  • I am from Barcelona, from Spain.

  • I am 41 years old.

  • And right now I am in Turkey because I am doing the leg lengthening.

  • Ezekiel is halfway through this grueling process,

  • in which you would have spent three months living in a hotel in Istanbul to complete a procedure that will break and then lengthen his legs.

  • I had my surgery on 3 July.

  • Right now I have length almost five centimeters.

  • I want to achieve eight centimeters.

  • He was excited before the surgery.

  • He'd done his research, he'd saved the money, and now, finally, the moment was here.

  • You wake up, and when you wake up, believe me, the pain is so, so extreme.

  • You feel that your bones, everything is like an explosion of pain inside you.

  • The first three days, you regret.

  • You start to realise that I had my bones break and you are in a foreign country and I can't even move.

  • I can't do nothing.

  • This isn't for the faint hearted.

  • After his femur bones, that's the ones in his thighs,