Dr. Barrett explains why plastic surgeons mark your body while you're standing before surgery. Tissues shift when you lie down, so markings made upright serve as a visual guide to ensure results look right in the position you actually care about.
Why do we mark patients standing up? I'm Dr. Barrett, a board-certified plastic surgeon. Here's an implant, right? So this thing behaves differently depending on whether someone is standing up versus when they're lying down. Okay, so human body tissues fall in a different plane when they lie down. Most of the time, people care more about what things look like when they're standing up versus when they're lying down. When you're lying down, that's the position that we do surgery in. Obviously, we can make things look good when you're lying down, but we want to make sure that they look good when you're standing up. So a lot of times surgeons will mark you when you're standing up, and it can take several minutes to do it. That is our roadmap for surgery. We follow those markings and they help us tremendously to make sure that you have good, accurate results. Have any of you had some surgical markings? How did you feel going through that experience?
