Transcript

One of the most common questions we receive in our office is regarding breast surgery, specifically breast reduction surgery or uplift surgery, and the question is: can we do it without the scars? And the answer is we can’t. There are some surgeries –a lot of surgeries that we do– that I consider gifts, a gift means you’ll have the surgery, no one in the world will ever know that you did it no matter how they look at you under what light or what clothing. Some surgeries, however, are compromises, or trade-offs, and a reduction or an uplift is one of those. Why? Because there’s extra skin. In fact when we reduce the breast we’re doing three things. We’re reducing the size of the areola and raising it up in a nice and attractive and young position, we’re removing breast tissues, and that creates even more extra and loose skin, so we have to remove the skin, and removing the skin does create a scar. There are three types of scars – three patterns that we can one in breast reduction: one is simply having s scar around the edge of the areola, the second is what we call a lollipop or a vertical and that means adding an up and down component that goes from the areola to the fold, that’s what we call the stem of the lollipop, and the third is what we call an anchor, and in an anchor we add an incision under the breast in the fold to take out the lower skin. Which of these to choose? Well, you want to go to a plastic surgeon who knows how to do all three, and someone that has experience and really look at the person and listen to what they want, will talk to you about which of the three will be the best for you. One of the things that I do advise people to be very careful about is not to make the breasts big – to deal with the extra skin. What does that mean? It means that some surgeons will tend to just put a large implant in a loose or an empty breast to deal with the extra skin. The problem with that is three-fold. First of all it doesn’t really look good. Over time it gets droopier and heavier and actually looks worse. It doesn’t feel better. It’s heavy and people don’t like it, it affects posture and ability to work out. And the third thing is those patients always wind up coming back and having the implants removed and having the scars anyway because they were trying to bide time with actually wastes time and wastes money and gives them an unhappy result. I hope this helps. I’m Dr. Lawrence Koplin, and I thank you for listening.