Affiliated with Ascension Medical Group, the University of Texas Dell Medical School and the University of Texas Medical Branch, Sharma said these procedures are common in the Austin area due to the community’s culture of being outdoors and trying to stay healthy. He spoke with Community Impact about how body contouring works, ideal candidates and tips for community members to know when looking for a provider.
What is body contouring?
Body contouring is a broad-based category in plastic surgery. Any part of the body can be contoured. It can be from areas that are sort of stubborn fat deposits. Patients sometimes want to know how they can get rid of isolated pockets around the abdomen, legs, thighs or arms.
Body contours can involve multiple techniques. Surgical is actually cutting out the excess body tissue, semi-invasive with liposuction cannulas to help target sub-areas of fat, and there are also noninvasive machines or devices that can melt away fat, liquefy fat or tone the muscles to help define muscle groups.
Body contouring in general is for patients that have massive weight loss and that mindset is sort of having to get rid of the excess skin or the excess weight to give the shape that you are really looking for. It’s a pretty big specialty in plastic surgery.
Who is an ideal candidate for a body contouring procedure?
Body contouring, or liposuction procedures in general, are not a fat loss or weight loss mechanism. It has to be specific areas that you want to be targeted that are effective for the removal of fat by liposuction. If you are at a stable weight, you're a better candidate.
If you're still on medication and you're losing weight continuously on the medication, it's best not to approach any kind of body contouring until one feels like they're at a stable weight for at least a year. Knowing their lifestyle, their diet, their nutrition—those things are optimized before one considers doing any kind of body contouring procedures.
What are some benefits and risks to having one of these procedures?
If patients have lost a significant amount of weight, they have excess weight carried on them and there might be some conditions where there's rashes or you’re unable to keep the wetness or the dryness away from the pores of the skin. That is an annoyance and it can lead to infections and problems. Logically, body contouring is about self-esteem, feeling confident, getting back to a time in the past when you felt the best that you could, and I think that's where those procedures do very well.
There are opportunities to do some of these procedures in a local anesthesia environment under office control. ... You have to be cautious and know that you can't do a very large volume of removal of skin and fat unless you do it in a sterile way. Patients that may seek to try to get the procedures done in a least expensive way may not necessarily be the safest way.
What does the post-operative care look like?
For patients that have had liposuction procedures, it tends to be the easiest sort of recovery. We would ask patients to refrain from heavy lifting activities or workout activities for about four weeks. There'll be some swelling involved. Our patients may need to wear body garments to help to shrink-wrap the skin back to the body.
Most of the results are seen early in about six weeks. Three months tends to be the time when most of the swelling has come out and we can actually see the shape developing. The patients will still continue to mature and the physiology returns to normal with the skin at the one-year mark.
What are some things interested individuals should keep in mind when selecting a provider for body contouring?
Check the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. Any sort of training program is accredited so that you go through an appropriate number of years of training to become a plastic surgeon which can be anywhere from six to nine years, depending on if you're going to do any specific training.
Patients should be aware that although surgeons may say they do aesthetic procedures, they may not be board-certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery. We have to be careful to look at the credentials and ask questions like, 'How many of these cases have you done? Do you have any photographs of what you've done? Do you have any outcomes?'
Do your homework, be diligent, ask questions and visit the American Society of Plastic Surgery website. A lot of the board members of plastic surgery are being listed, and make sure you can ask the plastic surgeon questions.
