Body Lift

Hey everybody, welcome back. We are here with our sponsor Dr. Rhys Branman of the Cosmetic Surgery Center. Let me talk about some amazing results of skin removal surgery – this is especially after a massive weight loss. That’s right, that’s right, thank you very much and thanks for having me. Okay so you know I mean they want to lose the weight but there’s this image in their mind of what they’re gonna look like right? That’s right, and if you think about it, when people have a lot of weight that, skin has to accommodate that weight and so the skin stretches. And when they lose the weight, especially if they lose it pretty quickly – either through diet or exercise or through something like a gastric bypass or lap band – that weight disappears very quickly but the skin doesn’t bounce back in a lot of people. It just stays in the shape of what they used to in that larger weight. And it’s sort of like if you deflate a balloon, you’ve got a lot of excess skin, and it’s loose excess skin, and the problem is there’s no muscle in skin and so you can’t exercise it to tighten it up and it just stays loose, you know? 10 to 20 pounds, which is great – it’ll bounce back. Yeah [if you lose] 10 to 20 pounds, it’s going to bounce back, but these individuals are people who lose 50, 100, 150 pounds or more, and they just have excess skin and there’s no way of getting rid of it except through a surgical procedure. A lot of times people say, “well I look good in clothes, but I just don’t look good in, let’s say – a bathing suit,” right, and the issue that really comes into play is that a lot of them have problems with the overlapping skin. You can get infections, it can cause chafing, and just constant irritation, so many times we need to do this for those reasons alone, not just for cosmetic [reasons]. And you do want them to feel good, and they can’t feel good if they don’t come in and get that taken off. Okay, I think we’ve got some before-and-afters. We’re going to show you some of the folks who they’ve done. That’s right, and so we’re showing you some pictures of patients who have had tummy tucks or they’ve lost a lot of weight. They’ve got a large excess amount of tissue that overlaps the pubic area, and sometimes goes on to the thighs. And so here is a patient that we did liposuction, as well as removed some of that excess skin. Yeah, they lost they lost a fair amount of weight, but then they still had excess skin as well as a little bit of excess fat. All right, it’s almost a six pack on the right. Yes, and this next case was a similar thing where you’ve got a lot of excess skin – it wraps around the whole waist area and so we get all the way past the midline of the waist and kind of bring that around and get a lift of the waist area, we get a lift of the abdomen, we get them a new belly button, and then now they’re like, “yes!” They can put on a bikini and go out there and strut their stuff. So on the left, that’s not bad – then the next is even more dramatic, where this patient had a dramatic amount of weight loss. We call that a massive weight loss: over 100 [pounds lost], and they’ve got excess skin at the top of their tummy, they’ve got excess skin at the bottom of their tummy, and there’s no way of actually removing that by just making a low incision, right, we have to make an incision right down the middle and bring everything – in a matter of fact their entire abdominal. Front of their abdominal wall, that you see there is gone. We’ve recruited all the tissue from the sides and brought it to the center, and so that that is how you get rid of this tissue. And we, it is pretty basic, we have to free up all the tissue – literally we have to free up all the tissue – in the front of the abdomen and then we bring it in front, bring it together. Recovery’s gonna be two to four weeks. We do this also on the arms where you have excess skin on the on the arms. We do it in the medial thighs, or the thighs where you’ve got excess skin here, and so this can be done – usually we do it in staged manner: we do maybe the abdomen and the arms, or just the abdomen, then we go the arms and do each procedure in a stage. So it does take some time to get these procedures completed, but once they’re done, the incisions heal very well and the patients are a lot happier because they just look more as they would say, “normal.” Yeah as they’re talking to their doctors about the weight loss surgery they need to ask these kinds of questions too. Absolutely. And then go to someone who’s board-certified. Obviously they just need to understand that it is a process, and the weight loss alone isn’t going to take care of everything. Do you have them come to you and they’re like, “you know I’ve lost all this weight”? Just yeah, they say that “you know I want to go to the next stage” and a lot of them understand that it is a process and that they want to get rid of that excess skin which is causing them problems.

Okay, if you are, or if you know someone who has lost a large amount of weight – congratulations. That’s right, but if they want to take the next step, then you do help them with that. Absolutely. Okay thank you so much, here’s the information about Cosmetic Surgery Center – whether it’s this procedure or some of the many, many others that they have, they’re on Executive Center Drive. You can certainly go to the website or give them a call and ask any questions, they will answer them.