Robert Whitfield MD explains why non-surgical body contouring is replacing traditional surgical lifts and excisions. He predicts non-invasive treatments will dominate plastic surgery over the next 20 years, driven by patients who want results without surgery.
I think it's an incredible time for body contouring. Body contouring has completely changed since I trained. We were taught to do all these complicated surgical procedures of excision of tissue and body lifting and it was so complicated and there were many, many complications and difficult outcomes for the patients. And now in 2017, we have all these non invasive treatments, minimally invasive treatments, and then there's still all the surgical excision options. So there's still multiple surgical options for that. I think for me it's going to be the most important, probably growth area in surgery over the next 20 years is how do you treat someone with a body contouring issue who doesn't want to have surgery? If you're not passionate about doing surgery, you should never do surgery. So I've never regretted one day that I became a surgeon, a plastic surgeon. I don't get up in the morning thinking, oh my gosh, I have to go to work again. It's always a great day for me.
