A plastic surgeon explains why he's seeing more patients seeking body contouring after major weight loss. The most common procedures are tummy tucks, arm lifts, and thigh lifts, but they're staged surgeries to avoid complications. One patient lost over 500 pounds and needed multiple operations.
Zombie apocalypse, you guys, of weight reduction patients coming in looking for skin procedures. And I'm being joking, I think it's fantastic, but everybody is coming out of the woodwork because of all the recent weight reduction people are experiencing with some of the medications and some of the lifestyle interventions and some of the education that's going on out there, which is fantastic, you guys. I absolutely love that people are getting healthier and they love it. However, sometimes there's extra skin, and when there's extra skin, that's where I come in. We don't have a way to really kind of remove that on our own or with any type of medication just yet. So there are multiple different things that you could do. Typically a tummy tuck is a positive a circumferential body lift, arm lift, thigh lift. Had a patient yesterday who wanted to get multiple of these areas done at the same time. She's like, "Sign me up." Slightly older patient. I was like, "All right, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa." I was like, "Never had surgery before." I mean, this is like major surgery, you know? So tummy tuck, arm lift, thigh lift, liposuction at the same time is too much, too much for that patient. Typically in these situations, these weight reduction situations with all this extra skin, we have to stage it. I like to stage it one for safety to help people kind of recover better because if you take out their arms and their abs and their thighs at the same time, how are they gonna get around? Get higher risk of complications. It's important to assess patients' ability to kind of handle an operation, you know, and so some people don't realize how much work it is. With a tummy tuck, a standard tummy tuck, it's 2 weeks before you're really kind of starting to turn the corner, and that's, it's not fun. You know, we do a lot of things to help mitigate that—long-acting pain medication, alternative pain medication—but still, nonetheless, this is major surgery. Typically, a stage I like to stage kind of from the core going out. If it's the body, I'll do the tummy tuck, I'll do the breasts first, then I'll follow up with extremities. Other people prefer to do one particular area first, more more so than the other. I always like to go for the gold. At the very least, we knock out the— probably the biggest, most improvement for the person first. And if they decide they don't want to do the other ones later because it was so difficult, then at least they got biggest bang for their buck. The third portion is probably more face procedures like facelift. Sometimes people need that as well. Most body, even significant reduction like over 100 pounds, can be done in 3 stages. Rarely would we ever have to go to 4, but sometimes that happens. I had one patient that lost over 500 pounds and we had to do multiple for her. Let me know in the comments if you've had some weight reduction. Let me know what your thoughts are on procedures you want to get done.
