Liposuction is a great procedure for those exercise-resistant pockets of fat on multiple areas of the body. I do liposuction sometimes on the neck and chin, the arms, the back, the abdomen, the waist, the hips, the saddlebags, the inner thighs. I think it’s very important for patients to understand that you have to maintain a healthy diet and an exercise program to keep that weight off after liposuction. One of the most common questions I get in consultation is whether they will ever gain that weight back in the same place or if it’s impossible because I’ve taken off all the fat cells? Maybe they’ve heard that they’ll gain weight somewhere very fun if I say do liposuction on the abdomen, can they then gain more weight on the back or on the arms? People hear a lot of information and one of my jobs during the consultation is to help a patient determine what’s true, what’s fact and what’s fiction and what is important. And again one of the important parts is to maintain a healthy diet and lifestyle, this isn’t for weight loss per se it’s more for those areas that have been resistant to weight loss even if they’re losing weight everywhere else.
A significant portion of my practice is dedicated to the post-bariatric population group. I really enjoy working with these patients. I always feel like I’m part of the process where the butterfly is coming out of the cocoon. Often these are staged procedures because there are multiple parts of the body that need to be addressed so given that I take a lot of time with these patients. In other words I may get to know them for 2 years at a time before everything is complete.
I can attribute choosing plastic surgery to an episode of 60 minutes that I watched many years ago while thinking about going to medical school. This episode was about Stanford plastic surgeons who were traveling to underserved areas around the world to perform cleft lip and cleft palette repairs. I had never traveled outside of the United States at that time and I thought what a wonderful way to travel and serve others. As it turned out when I was accepted into Stanford for the combined plastic and general surgery residency there was an organization called Interplas that happened to be the same organization that headed up that team that I saw on 60 minutes so many years before and I really felt like everything came full circle at that point. I was able to actually go on mission trips myself and eventually my career fulminated into all the aspects of plastic surgery, not only the reconstructive aspects but cosmetic.
Rhinoplasty or nose surgery is also particularly challenging because again it’s such a prominent feature on a person’s face. Even a subtle change in maybe just the tip or juts the dorsum of the nose can create such a change in a woman’s face or even a man’s face. It can actually really help us achieve a balance and even if it was just a very small change all of a sudden they look very different in pictures and feel so much more confident about themselves. This is one of those parts on the body that as a teenager maybe this is something that’s bothered somebody all of their lives and just that one subtle change can do wonders for one’s confidence.
The reason we have aestheticians in this office is to offer our patients a full range so that we can optimize their results before and after surgery. And there are a lot of techniques out there now it’s not just about making lips bigger. We try to fill in the parentheses around the mouth. There are other lines around the face that can be filled or softened, sometimes with just Botox. We actually use fillers now to help with the grooves under the eyes and sometimes smooth out the jaw line. There’s something now called a liquid face lift where we use fillers in the midface area to try to make a more prominent cheekbone and to try to restore again that volume that I was talking about earlier. It’s not just about making things tight you have to restore volume and reposition things.