Custom rewrite

Not sure how easy this is going to be, all in all.

So we have this as a sample url:

mywebsite.com/plastic-surgery/before-and-after/nose-surgery/nose-1

You mention you have a “before and after” post type, so that makes the URL breakdown:

mywebsite.com/plastic-surgery/POST-TYPE-SLUG/nose-surgery/nose-1

You also have a “surgery type” taxonomy, with “nose surgery” as an example term. This gives us this:

mywebsite.com/plastic-surgery/POST-TYPE-SLUG/TERM-SLUG/nose-1

Since we’re dealing with content, I assume “nose-1” will be the post slug

mywebsite.com/plastic-surgery/POST-TYPE-SLUG/TERM-SLUG/POST-TYPE-POST-SLUG

What’s “plastic surgery” in this case? A page a site in a subfolder based multisite network? Just a folder on the server holding an install?

Depending on the answer to that, WordPress could be interpreting the entire URL as a bunch of child pages for a “plastic-surgery” page.

mywebsite.com/PARENT-PAGE/CHILD-PAGE/CHILD-PAGE/CHILD-PAGE

Hard to say for sure without having an actual URL to visit and seeing what sort of query is being made.

The URL structure, as I’m sure you can imagine, is actually pretty important to WordPress so that it knows what to query for. This is why you see things like post type and taxonomy slugs in the URLs. It is saying “look for a post with this slug from this post type” or “look for posts that have this term in this taxonomy” etc.