Is there any discomfort involved with this procedure Dr. Richards? Really there’s not discomfort. There’s some changes in sensation of the lips and cheeks for up to a couple weeks afterwards because as you move the cheeks up the nerves get pulled a bit but as far as pain I don’t think I’ve had more than 1 or 2 patients in 8 years say that it was painful. So very minimal discomfort at best. Minimal discomfort. Alright.
And I believe you have some before and after pictures that you’re gonna show us. can you please describe them? Sure. In this first set of slides you see a patient holding her right arm out. The upper slide shows a before picture, the bottom slide shows her result after a year. On the second set of slides the upper pictures shows the back of a woman’s arm, that’s her left arm, and the bottom again is a year out showing the post operative results. On these third set of slides I took a close-up picture of the scar in the armpit two years out from surgery. Now the patients that we’ve seen so far have had a mild to moderate deformity of their upper arm that they complained about. This final set of photographs shows patients that have a more severe deformity with their upper arms. And you can see on the pictures on the right the result 1-4 months after minimal incision brachioplasty.
Finally your treat, your pictures that haven’t been seen before, the left is a front view of Miss Tripp approximately 6 months after she had her face lift surgery done in Los Angeles. She was very unhappy with it as you heard. I think she probably had some improvement from what she originally looked like but there were things about her face that really bothered her greatly. She didn’t like the chin implant that was given to her there that made her almost look like her nemesis Jay Leno. She has an elongated face and so she needed more width applied to the cheeks. That can only really be accomplished through cheek lift or a cheek implant. The brows were still down giving her a stern expression. So she had many of these things done, too much to go into today, and you can see on the right her face is much more oval, she’s softer, she has a much prettier look. In fact she looks pretty. You can see a ¾ shot which is really the most telling shot. It’s the view that we look at people the most in conversation. We’re rarely face to face and you’re rarely talking to somebody on their side. You’re almost always talking to somebody 3/4. It’s the least threatening, it’s the most common in conversation. And here is her ¾ shot. On the left you can see the cheeks are flat, she looks tired, she looks a bit sad, the chin is pointy and long. And on the right everything is much smoother. It’s more curved, more oval. And she has an attractive appealing look to her.
Can you please tell us if there’s anything out there that out viewers should be cautious of when considering possibly getting a cheek lift procedure themselves? Sure I think it’s usual things you have to be aware of as a healthcare consumer. You want to make sure your doctor is board certified in plastic surgery and you would really like to make sure that your doctor has had significant experience with the cheek lift procedure. And you get a chance to look at his before and after pictures to see if he really gives the results that you’re looking for.
What’s the typical recovery time from Rhinoplasty? Usually Rhinoplasty patients have black eyes, particularly if you need to move the nasal bones inward which happens in most cases. So I would say you can expect some black and blue or yellowing around the eyes for a week to 10 days afterwards. The initial recovery is uncomfortable not because of pain, as I said before, but because there’s packing frequently in the nose. There’s a splint on the outside which pushes the bones and tissues in and there’s packing on the inside which pushes the bones and tissues out. And this way I can keep things immobilized, sort of like a cast. The packing comes out at 3 days, the splint on the outside usually comes off at 7-8 days. Usually by 9-10 days they are able to go out to parties and look good with a little cover up makeup on the bruised eye lids. So one really couldn’t tell a 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks out that one maybe even had Rhinoplasty done on themselves? I can tell you that the second patient I showed you was 3 months out from surgery. The first patient I showed you is only 6 weeks after. Very impressive.
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