Breast Enhancement

When people want to enhance their breasts, one of the biggest things they have to figure out or the surgeon has to figure out is, are they looking to increase size, or are they looking to lift and reshape? Sometimes people are looking to do both. That's why it's very important to find a very skilled and experienced plastic surgeon that can help you figure out exactly what it is that you're looking to do. A lot of times, I'll have people come in saying they want an augmentation consult. Then, when we do the exam, we find out they actually have a lot of breast tissue, and what they really want to do is just restore the fullness. For those patients, they just really need a lift. They don't need implants at all. A good candidate for breast augmentation is pretty much anyone who wants to enlarge their breasts. Now, one thing I always talk about when patients come in is, are you doing the breast augmentation before or after having kids? There's nothing wrong at all with doing breast augmentation before kids, but you do have to realize that pregnancy can change your breast. If you have a breast augmentation before kids, and then you have pregnancies and your breast change, you may have to have a follow-up surgery to get you back where you want to be. The implant choices today are almost limitless. The two big decisions are saline versus silicone. Now that actually used to be a debate 10, 15 years ago. Nowadays, it's something like 97 to 98% of augmentations are done with silicone gel implants. They just are a better product. They look more natural, they feel more natural, and they last longer. There are really very few if any downsides. Breast augmentation surgery on average takes about an hour and a half. I know some surgeons rush through them. I tend to take my time. It's not a race. I do sizing implants in surgery, which means before I put the permanent implants in, I use a temporary sizer, put it in, sit patients upright on the bed, and then measure the breast to make sure those measurements correlate to the measurements that we talked about in the pre-operative consult. That absolutely ensures that when a patient gets out of a breast augmentation surgery with me, that they're going to get exactly what they ask for. One of the nice things about breast augmentation surgery is it actually is a really easy recovery. I find my patients are almost surprised at how quickly they feel better. I have plenty of people who do surgery for breast augmentation on a Wednesday and go back to work Monday. I've even had plenty of people that do it on Friday and go back to work on Monday. I tell people to expect 1 or 2 days of being sore enough that you don't feel like doing a whole lot. Then from there, it’s pretty rapid recovery. With breast augmentation, the technology is always changing year to year. Mostly, it's in the different advances in the implants. There's definitely a huge difference in breast implants today versus the old breast implants of the 80s and 90s that they took off the market. Most notably, it's a silicone gel implant today versus the liquid silicone in the past. Beyond that, they're starting to change specifics of the gel itself. For people who want a perfectly natural implant, they have very soft gels. For people who want a really full look without going the big implant, they have more cohesive gels. There's actually quite a bit of technology in the implants, and they do change from year to year. Of course, I like to keep up with all these advancements, because I am in the media talking about plastic surgery, because I write newspaper articles about health and medicine, and because I have my own talk show. I'm always keeping up on research papers and trying to keep in tune with what is the new technology out there, and that does mean keeping up with breast implants.