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Feel Comfortable

Transcript

Let’s talk a bit about the biggest fear that patients have with facial rejuvenation, lower lift, neck lift surgery. And it’s the obvious one that all of us are aware of. It’s looking operated-on, it’s looking pulled; it’s looking tight; it’s the wind-tunnel look. It’s terrible, it’s preventable. Why does it happen? Because the surgeon’s not paying attention to what’s wrong and if you don’t know what’s wrong, no matter what you do, you won’t be able to fix it. So what we do in our office is I ask the patients to bring in a photograph of themself –not from last year– but from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, because that’s really the mark and the goal that we’re working for. We look at the picture and there’ll be a number of obvious things, and there’ll be a number of not-obvious things. One of those not-obvious things is how the face becomes thinner over time, or how the neck muscles become more prominent over time. I tell the person, who’s naturally and normally fearful, the following: all I want to do is to make you look like you looked ten or fifteen or twenty years ago. Well it’s not quite as simple as it might sounds, but all I have to do is put everything back where it was and you achieve that goal. Putting everything back where it was is the key. As they say, if you don’t know where you’re going any road will get you there. If you don’t know what to do and you do a wonderful job and it’s the wrong job, you won’t have a wonderful and a happy patient. But in my process, what I do it deconstruct the patient from how they look now to the photograph that they’ve brought in, and make a list of all the things that are different and why we’ll address each one of them. It will very often relate to restoring lost fat, repairing muscles that are in wrong locations, and moving the deep muscles –the deep layers of the face and the cheeks– back to where they were. If we just put everything back where they were and restore the things that are lost over time, you’ll have a naturally and a beautiful and a long-lasting result, and a happy patient. I hope this helps. I’m Dr. Lawrence Koplin, and thank you for listening.

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