Dr. Robert Whitfield explains that fat transfer success depends less on surgical technique and more on preparing the patient beforehand. Many surgeons skip this step, which tanks results even when the graft itself is placed perfectly. He avoids very young patients and those too thin, focusing on candidates whose anatomy will actually keep the transferred fat alive.
There's a kind of misconception that all the fat's going to potentially go away. We'll get into why that's really not the reality. So prepare the patient, harvest the fat, process the fat, place the fat. So that allows the patients to have the best opportunity to keep as much fat as possible. So you can be technically great. You can harvest and process in place. But if you haven't really prepared the patients, I think that's where some, some serious improvements can be made overall. So let's take the first patient, the patient who's been told they're too thin. This is a very common occurrence in my practice. And, you know, there's typically— we're not going to use really young patients because I don't really see really, really young patients.
