Body lift is recommended for patients who have lost significant weight resulting in redundant skin that is far more prolific than excess adiposity. Body lift involves resection of large amounts of skin as well as the elimination of residual fat. As such long surgical incisions are required. Learn more on how body lift incision healing is optimized below.
The most common concern of body lift patients is how bad their surgical incisions will be? To start with, let us review the extent of incision lines required that may involve your arms, upper back, lower back and buttock, the abdomen, breasts, and medial thighs.
These incisions are naturally required to complete Brachioplasty, upper body lift, lower body lift, breast lift, and medial thigh tuck. If your health is optimized, all of these procedures can actually be performed in a single surgical session. Body lift patients are reminded that our priority is to improve their overall contour. However, the incision line healing must be optimized.
So How Body Lift Incision Healing is Optimized?
Body lift incisions are optimized through a regimen of maneuvers. To begin with, we minimize the risk of contamination by placing you on peri-operative antibiotics. The second maneuver requires to use of a multi-layer closure that requires repair of underlying fascia as a separate layer from the skin. Additionally, the skin is repaired in two separate layers.
Of significance is our use of the hardiest suture available, called PDS, which lasts for up to 3 months prior to being absorbed by your body. This allows your body to heal or bridge the gap of the incision line up to 60 % prior to losing the support of the sutures.
Cheaper sutures including Vicryl and Monocril are used by other providers and only provide you 2 weeks and 6 weeks of support. Finally, no external sutures are used in order to avoid any hash marks. Instead, we use an external tape, called Steri-Strip, which acts like an external suture that avoids any suture marks.
Following surgery, multiple modalities are used to further optimize your body lift incision healing. First, the Steri-strips are maintained for 1 month. Once the Steri-Strips fall off, you will be provided Intense Pulse Light therapy to start lightening the redness in your incision lines. These treatments are offered at eight weeks, 10 weeks, and 12 weeks.
Finally, from one month through six months, we advocate the religious application of topical silicone to your incision lines as silicone is the only intervention that has been scientifically been proven to reduce incision line prominence.
We use the Siligen brand for scar management since it is nearly 100% silicone in composition and avoids non-proven molecules that are used by competing products in the market to dilute their product.
If you are a patient who is concerned about incision line healing but is desiring a body lift, we encourage you to make a virtual consultation with our staff to learn who we optimize your body lift healing.
Please see this 33-year-old female following a total body lift. These photos are before, 3 months after surgery and 6 months after surgery.
