Doctor808 Plastic Surgeon Honolulu Hawaii

LASER liposuction and other fancy things as you know are not my forte. I have written before about such new fangled techniques such as belly button approach to breast augmentation. These “newer” , “better”, “cooler” and “gods gift” to plastic surgery techniques I have always look at with a jaundice eye. It seems every two years in the world of Plastic Surgery a new technique or device comes out which is all the rage. I have seen this happen non stop for twenty years.  So please forgive me,  if I am not that excited about 99% of  new devices or so called new techniques.

NEWER !! COOLER !! WOW !!!

In my honest and sincere opinion most of these things are driven by marketing and not by solid medical science. It seems to me that even though cosmetic plastic surgery is more consumer driven and not medically required for health it should be based in a solid foundation. Money drives this market as with a Holywood movie and this produces what we may call “Hype”. So surrounding all of these new techniques is a onslaught of Madison Avenue Public Relations and marketing hype.  Medical and surgical breakthroughs should be studied and the results analyzed first not get a quick aproval from the FDA and then loudly marketed.  Unfortunatedly this is not always the case.

Hype Central

In the case of LASER assisted liposuction the marketing hype is very rich. “go back to work the next day” or “less pain” or ‘faster healing”. All of these crys of better newer faster are more appropriate for Tide clothes washing detergent than for a medical procedure. Marketers know that using these key words like “NEWER” Or “IMPROVED” will grab consumer attention so they of course utilize these keywords as much as possible.

Yet what is really behind LASER assisted lipo, smart lipo or any of the other brand names? I have spoken with many of the LASER liposuction advocates and detractors , looked at the results and feel I have a good understanding of the procedures.  Basically a very small cannula , which is a tube has a LASER at the end which produces heat. This “melts” some of the fat which turns it to an oily liquid. This is then sucked out with  the cannula. Rather simple concept really. The same thing was done (sorta)  with ultrasonic liposuction which was the latest greatest thing a few years ago. The problem with this LASER lipo is that the cannula’s so far are very very small. So each practioner tells me in any sizeble area  of fat , they still have to use traditional liposuction. —–HUH@#$%^&* !!!????.

I am not a “hater” but my gosh these pencil thin cannulas cannot take out any appreciable amount of fat. So that is exactly why the LASER lipo doctors have to go over the area with traditional liposuction technique.  Now the advanatage is lost completely as you are still doing traditional liposuction in the area. So what is the purpose of using the LASER lipo? I have heard skin tightening, which may be true in a small area like under the chin but for abddominal or thigh or any  larger area there does not to be any benifit what so ever to my eyes and the cases I have seen. So I conclude that the only advantage of LASER lipo suction in most cases is simply marketing.

Well marketing is potent stuff. If you do not have any patients you cannot do any liposuction,  be it LASER, Ultrasonic or traditional.  So I see the reason why many surgeons like this idea , it is great marketing. Yet for me I have seen these trends come and go and until someone shows me an advantage that I consider worthy,  I will stick to the techniques which I have used for many years with so much success. Maybe I am old fashion, but somehow I cannot stomach doing something just for marketing or 90% marketing. I know Plastic Surgery is suppose to slick and whiz bang,  but again I like the traditional well proven techniques  over marketing . Thats me.

doctor808

On Thursday my staff and I gave a event at Fort Schafter an Army Miltary base.  We invited the public to this lecture and question and answer period about Plastic Surgery in Hawaii. We had it sponsored by Mentor Breast Implant Company and Company which makes Dysport. There were about 50 people who showed up. There were three lectures given. One by me, one by each of the representatives. We also had door prizes and live injections of fillers and Dysport. The best prize was a free pair of breast implants dontated by Mentor Corporation.

The crowd was fun and interested

My staff had put a lot of work into this event and I think it was a success. The most important issue to me was I tried to evaluate something new we call the Aloha Dysport Lift. This is where I inject in the superficial layer of the skin Dysport in a special pattern. For reasons I will not dicuss here the facial skin is lifted to a small degree and lines will dissapear. I will be writing more about this later on a web site we are in the process of building. So for now I will tell you what we did. We did this on three patients from the audience but only on the right side of the face. We then waited 30 minutes. I then under High Density Video we asked the audience to raise their hands if they could see a difference. Amazingly every one raised their hands and all agreed that they could see the changes in each of the three patients. I actually begged them to not to go along with the crowd if they doubted what they saw. Still they all agreed that they could see the changes. This to me was amazing. We will show the pictures on the web site at a later date so stay tuned.

My Staff was available to answer questions

The staff stood by to answer questions. Many good questions came from the audience about Breast Augmentation. Liposuction and all the various fillers such as restylene, juviderm and the like.

The food was great and we really enjoyed this event and learned a lot about the Aloha Dysport Lift.

We hope to have future events such as this and we thank our sponsors.

Doctor 808