A plastic surgeon explains which health conditions require caution before surgery. Obesity and uncontrolled diabetes can delay healing. Smoking is a hard no. Autoimmune disorders need low disease activity. A tummy tuck can actually improve old C-section scars.
Questions this video answers
It depends. When BMI is over 25‑30‑35, wound complications increase; for liposuction, GLP‑1 therapy may be a cheaper alternative. Caution is required.
You need to get diabetes under control before surgery. Most surgeons won’t operate on uncontrolled diabetics.
If the condition is under control and not severe, surgery can be safe, but you should address root causes and avoid immunosuppressives around the operation due to infection risk.
No. Smoking severely impairs wound healing; it’s a hard no.
There’s no contraindication; a tummy‑tuck can improve the scar and abdominal appearance.
Can I have plastic surgery if I have this condition? Obesity.
It depends. Anytime you get the BMI over 25 to 30 to 35, you gotta be careful because your wound complications go up, other complications go up. If it's liposuction, a lot of times I could just get my patients on a GLP and you could save thousands of dollars of liposuction just by taking a little injection. So it's relative and you have to be careful with that.
Diabetes.
You want to get that under control prior to surgery. Most surgeons won't operate on you if your diabetes is not under control, but if it's under control, you can't have surgery.
Autoimmune?
Relative. If it's something that's under control and not too crazy, you have a sense of what's causing it, I think it's very safe to get plastic surgery. Ultimately, you want to get to the root cause of like, is it leaky gut? Is it something else? And without stressing your body to create a flare-up of autoimmune. So you really want things under control with that. And you have to be careful with the immunosuppressives for some of these, which I'm not a huge fan of, but sometimes they're necessary. You don't want to be taking those during surgery because you can increase your risk of infection.
Heavy smokers.
Yeah, no. Smoking's bad for wound healing. You could debate about nicotine a little bit, but like actually smoking cigarettes is very bad. That's a hard no.
Prior C-section.
Prior C-section, man, it looks so much better after we do a tummy tuck. There's a lot of damage that can happen with C-section, and you can sometimes you get this shelf that happens that's very unsightly. And even just revising the C-section scar can be very helpful for people. But in general, like, there's really no contraindication to getting any plastic surgery if you have a C-section.
Someone on blood thinners.
Yeah, if you're on blood thinners, you can't have surgery, plastic surgery at least. I mean, obviously there's some life-threatening stuff that you, you need surgery, you gotta, you gotta do what you gotta do. Typically you get a clearance to see if you can actually stop the blood thinning medication, but this is not life or death kind of surgery. So stopping blood thinners and risking getting blood clot is a major thing, and you may want to think twice about doing that or trying to go down that road.
