Videos

Transcript

Another very common question that we’re asked regarding liposuction is relating to technique. Can you melt the fat by some magic, external ray, or ultrasound, or some other technique? Can you inject some kind of magical solution and make fat disappear? Can you freeze it? Can you heat it? Can you burn it? And the answer is not really; not yet. The best techniques are what I call real-time techniques, which means watching the process and changing and altering the surgery to get the final, sculpted result. One of the most wonderful new accomplishments and realizations in technique is what I call fat equalization. We call it Lipo F.E., and it’s a three-phase operation. The first phase is to do something to break up the fat, to make it easier to remove so that when do the second phase, which is the fat removal, the fat comes out easily, evenly, smoothly, in a controlled fashion. And the third thing we do is to again –to when were all finished– move around a little bit of the fat that is remaining to make it smooth, contoured, and level. The instrument that we use –I’m going to show you right here– we call it a mushroom-tip or an exploded-tip cannula. Basically all it is, is an instrument with a blunt tip –not sharp– that has some wings or gills on it, that when it passes through the tissue, disrupts the fat. It doesn’t injure the fat, it doesn’t remove the fat, and in fact is does it in a way that does it –I talk about with my patients– kind of like shaking apples off of an apple tree. What does that mean? I’ll shake the apples off, it’s a lot easier to pick them up and remove them, and then when I’m finished removing the number of apples I want, there’s a few left on the ground. I can remove them around on the ground so that the ground remains level. So the three components of that are preparing the fat for removal, actual liposuction, and then the fat equalization part at the end, which is in fact, is the most important and the most valuable part that separates it from other techniques. I’m Dr. Lawrence Koplin, and thanks for listening.