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  • What Are Contour Irregularities and How Can I Avoid Them?
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Hey, it’s Dr. Lowenstein in Santa Barbara, and I'd like to talk about contour irregularities when you have liposuction. In the last two days, I've seen three patients come to me from having had liposuction, either recently, one person was from 15 years ago, who had contour irregularities that they want to fix and it's very, very difficult to fix at this point.

But I want you to understand that the main way that you avoid having contour regularities during liposuction is doing what we call a cross-hatch technique. So, if you can imagine the cannulas, or tubes that you take the fat out with in liposuction, they're exactly that, they're long tubes. So, if you're trying to take fat out of an area and you use the tube from one spot and it goes this way, and this way, and this way, and this way, and you're fanning it out, you are very likely to end up with ripples along that plane because you're only going in one direction with this tube.

So the way to fix that is to have two entry points, and while this direction is being addressed from here, the opposite, actually the 90-degree angle direction is being addressed from another incision site, and that's how we get a cross-hatch technique, and that allows for any rippling in one direction to be resolved because you're getting the fat from at least two directions.

So, in my practice, I always do two directions- bi-directional cross-hatch technique, and I do it in the deep layer of fat, and the superficial layer of fat, and even when I'm done with liposuction, I go over things again with very small cannulas just under the skin to give multiple layers of this cross-hatch technique and avoid contour irregularities, which in my practice I haven't seen from my patients, but we certainly sometimes try to fix it from other kinds of places.

So, anyway, I hope that gives you some understanding. Best wishes!

What Are Contour Irregularities and How Can I Avoid Them?

Dr. Adam Lowenstein explains the crosshatching technique that should be used during a liposuction procedure to avoid contour irregularities.