Short video excerpt in which Dr. Robert Whitfield describes combining abdominoplasty (tummy tuck) with fat grafting to improve body contouring. He explains harvesting adipose tissue from lower waist/love-handle areas and using liposuction and grafting to reshape hips and gluteal regions, noting the technique requires expertise and patients/providers may be unaware of options.
We do abdominoplasties combined with fat grafting all the time. It's a routine thing. It's a great way to use that material that you would normally discard and go ahead and augment other areas. So you take from the lower portion of the waist what would be lower back, love handle area, and then recontour the hip area with it. A person unfamiliar with body contouring is going to say, oh, yeah, sure, you can have a tummy tuck. We're going to incise the lower abdominal tissue and discard it, close it, reposition the belly button. But in reality, maybe that patient needs contouring where you do liposuction to create a more narrow waist and then gluteal reshaping so that you can improve the contour not only of the upper buttock, middle buttock and lower third. It requires a bit of expertise and experience to understand what the option will be because the patient may have no idea. They may not understand what's available, what can be done because their provider is not experienced or qualified in that manner.
