Liposuction is a topic that I frequently get asked about
and specifically patients come asking for
reduction in fat in particular areas of the body, and for those patients liposuction
works really well
Most people are familiar with the concept of liposuction. The ideas is really to remove some of the fat cells
in areas that are a little bit bigger where you'd like a little bit of
volume reduction. Best candidates for liposuction
are patients who are overall quite fit and really have specific problem areas where they would
like to reduce the volume a little bit
Liposuction actually isn't really used for general overall
weight loss. I occasionally have a patient who comes, and is a little overweight
and would like me to sort of reduce them overall
and liposuction unfortunately isn't really a great choice for that.
For that, really the best choice is diet and exercise. For patients who
have gone through diet and exercise where
everything looks fit but there's just one area lets say the abdominal flank areas or
just the upper or lower abdomen where they really can't can't get much improvement,
liposuction is a great choice for these patients. In addition,
liposuction by virtue of what we're doing is really reducing the
fat in the area, it's really used for areas where there's no extra skin,
so if people have excess skin that's sagging,
for those people typically there's a different surgical procedure either
tummy tuck if it's the abdomen or
another associated surgical procedure. The procedure itself is straightforward.
It's basically done in two steps. The first step is
to insert into the area
of liposuction this tumescent fluid and that fluid is a
combination of a painkiller to make it more comfortable for the patient
as well as what's called a vasoconstrictive agent
which is an agent used to shrink the blood vessels to ensure that there's less
bruising. That's what I typically use and then afterwards giving this time to take
effect then really going with the
liposuction cannula, which is sort of like a metal straw
and then slowly and carefully taking out the fat cells
the trick in liposuction and
the important part liposuction in terms of surgical technique
is to really try to get a nice reduction of where the
ultimate goal is very smooth and looks natural with the rest the body.
You don't want to take too much fat out of one area and have it be
out of harmony or out of sync with the rest the body. At the same time you don't want to take out too much
fat such that there are any irregularities in the skin
and I think that typically as with most aspects of plastic surgery,
if you are conservative with your goals and conservative
in their execution of the surgery the results could be
quite nice. Post operatively, patients do have a lot of
dressings on them. I have my liposuction patients wear
a compression garment afterward. It's basically something that I have them wear that's quite
tight and the idea is to really push on the skin
so that the skin will kind of shrink wrap a little bit over the the smaller volume
What we don't want is for the fat cells to be removed and the skin to just
sag because it's not as filled up now we want the skin to actually contract and kind of
shrink wrap around it, and the compression garment is very good for helping that
I have patients wear the compression garment really almost all the time
the first two weeks and then as much as they can for the first six weeks
after that, the body does continue to remodel and the
results continue to improve.
Overall I think that patients after liposuction
I encourage them after the surgery to use that sort of as a kickstart
to resume good diet and exercise