Dr. Robert Whitfield walks through fat transfer surgery, where living tissue from your thighs, flanks, or abdomen is harvested and injected into the face, breasts, or buttocks. Unlike fillers, transplanted fat needs blood supply and oxygen to survive. The procedure has four steps: preparing the patient, harvesting, processing, and placing the fat.
We want to obviously reverse that. The better question is not what you lose when a device comes out. The better question is what can we restore with your own tissue and what, what can we not restore? So fat transfer is not a filler you can dissolve. Fat is your own tissue source. It has cells that need to have blood flow and oxygen. It has its own blood supply. When we move it, we are transplanting it. It has to heal in that new position, that new space wherever we place it, whether it's face, breast, or buttocks. Here's the foundation I want you to keep for the next 20 minutes: prepare the patient, harvest the fat, process the fat, and then place the fat. And so these are things that I, I don't take them for granted. They're very specific in our process. And timing is very important as well. Harvest is not ordinary liposuction where you debulk an area and throw that tissue away. We take fat intentionally from places such as the inner outer thighs, flanks, and abdomen, sometimes upper mid back areas for bra fat.
