Crazy Eyes: Adventures in Eye doctors doing breast surgery part deux

While it's hard to top the debacle I wrote about in Atlanta where an eye surgeon nearly boxed someone trying to do a breast augmentation surgery in his office, I came across this other article by another opthomolgist turned "breast expert". I don't know whether he's trying to be clever marketing a procedure or is just ignorant about breast surgery in general, but I came away from this article shaking my head.

The doctor is proposing a breast lift (mastopexy) surgery performed thru the armpit by suturing the breast to the pectoralis muscle and then placing an implant. He describes the surgery appropriate for women with little ptosis. Looking at his picture, you can see that whatever effect he's proposing is nonexistent as the patient doesn't even have ptosis (droop) of the breast. Any illusion of a "lift" is by placing an overly large implant for her frame and actually lowering her breast position to centralize the implant. There is clearly no "lift" going on whatsoever, but rather he's stretched out her lower breast.

I do not predict a good long-term result from this as that skin will frequently continue to stretch unless she develops hardening of her implant. I also would be reluctant to have suggested such a large implant for this patient as you had to violate her native breast boundaries to place it, again a poor strategy for long term results. These are elementary principles of modern breast augmentation.

It's been pretty well established thru collective world-wide experience among plastic surgeons that the maneuver of trying to sew the breast to a higher position to exaggerate the upper pole does not work, which has been demonstrated on a number of follow up studies when this has been attempted.

Rob