- Video
- Liposuction
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Liposuction was the number one surgical procedure performed this pastyear according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Liposuction
involves removing fat from anywhere on your body with small tubes or
cannulas. These cannulas come in different sizes depending on how much
fat I want to take out, the location on the body. And liposuction can
be performed commonly on the neck, the arms, the stomach, the sides, the
legs, really anywhere you have fat, we can remove it. It's a relatively
non-invasive procedure. The incisions are extremely small. The only
incisions you need are incisions that are just big enough to place one
of these cannulas. So on areas where I am doing very fine liposuction
like the chin or the neck, the incisions are literally like the size of
a large needle that often don't even need a stitch to close them. So
they can be very small and they can be hidden inside areas where you
can't see like inside the belly button, beneath underwear line, that
sort of thing. The amount of fat that can be taken out really ranges. We
can remove very high volumes of fat, several liters of fat at anytime.
The other nice things about liposuction is we don't have to waste the
fat. We can actually take the fat that we've removed, clean it, process
it and re-inject it into other parts of the body. So this is called
autologous fat transfer and it's really become popular. I commonly do
fat transfers in people that see me that have contour irregularities
from a previous liposuction with a different surgeon. So sometimes,
correcting that involves removing some fat and re-injecting it into
other areas in order to smooth out the contour of that body part. We
often use the fat to plump up the cheeks, to fill lines. A lot of
people right now are taking the fat and using it to increase the size of
the breasts as autologous fat breast augmentation. So there's really a
lot of things coming in the future about fat transfer. I think that's
one of the hot areas right now in plastic surgery.
