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  • Real Housewives of Atlanta's Phaedra Parks Gets the Scoop on New Non-Invasive Body Contouring
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Phaedra Parks: We've talked about a lot of different procedures but I know that you love reconstructive surgery. What are some of the newest, latest, and greatest emerging technologies with non invasive things that you can do?

Robert Centeno: So, Phaedra, as you know, what we do in plastic surgery can be life-changing, very dramatic, and enhances quality of life, but not everyone has the downtime associated with these kinds of procedures. There's been this dramatic increase in non-invasive technologies to try to address some of the problems we otherwise address with surgery. For example, in the body contouring space the holy grail is to melt fat and to tighten skin. We need to figure out how to do that as effectively as possible to avoid having to do liposuction or tummy tucks or body lifts. And there are a host of new emerging technologies that are looking quite promising. For example, cool sculpting, venus freeze, those are devices that freeze fat and permanently reduce them. It does a good job at freezing fat. It requires a couple of treatments. They reduce the fat level by about 22% at each treatment.

So, Phaedra, the next technology that's really quite promising is radiofrequency and basically that uses radiofrequency technologies either monopolar or unipolar and it both melts fat and kills it permanently, which reduces it but the other benefit is it tightens skin and it tightens the fibers that cause skin contraction. So by using radiofrequency not only can we contour the body by reducing fat but tightening skin also. Some of them require using a wand, others you just put a panel over you to heat up and tighten the skin.

The next class of non-invasive technologies that are exciting is ultrasound. Ultrasound, there's basically low-frequency on focus and high-frequency focus. You can take ultrasound beams and focus them down below the skin level so it doesn't hurt the skin and it reduces and kills the fat at a lower level so you can melt fat.

Phaedra Parks: Does that really work? That sounds too good to be true.

Robert Centeno: No. It absolutely works. The question is how much does it work. So, the technologies are effective but they're not quite delivering the same results you can get from surgery, but what's beautiful about this is that with time those technologies are going to get better and better. The only downside to using ultrasound is it tends to be a little bit more on the painful side. So it has the benefit of melting fat and potentially tightening skin but it's more painful than either radiofrequency or fat freezing.

Now, the final frontier, so to speak, in body contouring is what are called the low-level lasers and I'm sure you're familiar with Zerona...

Phaedra Parks: Oh, Zerona.

Robert Centeno: And that was this low-level laser that was supposed to open up the fat channels and then your fat just kind of went away. Unfortunately you could show that on a microscope but it really didn't deliver what they were promising. But there are some newer technologies like for example i-Lipo which is a low-level laser that basically again opens up the channels but it does it a little bit more effectively. Releases the free fatty acids and then you exercise afterwards so the free fatty acids in your blood stream and then the fats are burned off and it causes a permanent reduction in the area you're treated. Now, what they have done to increase the efficacy is to combine that with radiofrequency which we talked about earlier and together that might provide some nice contour improvement with good skin tightening. So I'm very very excited, Phaedra, about non-invasive body contouring because I think that technologies are only going to get better and better.

Phaedra Parks: Well, there you have it. Dr. Robert Centeno, an expert in reconstructive surgery and plastic surgery, who can provide you with excelent care after your dramatic weight loss.

Real Housewives of Atlanta's Phaedra Parks Gets the Scoop on New Non-Invasive Body Contouring

Real Housewives of Atlanta's Phaedra Parks sits down with Dr. Robert Centeno to discusses the new emerging technologies for non-surgical body contouring, including CoolSculpting, radio frequency, ultrasound, and more!