Dr. Daniel Butz of Quintessa Discussing The Tummy Tuck
Dr. Daniel Butz
The common procedure of performance in abdominoplasty or tummy tuck. Many women come in after having children complaining of loose skin, stretch marks, and just an overall lax abdominal wall from the stretching of the muscle. Abdominoplasty can address all these issues by removing that loose skin, and the stretch marks, and tightening the abdominal wall to really provide a nice flat abdomen and improve contour. This can often be combined with liposuction of the flanks to also improve that contour. Other patients need abdominoplasty for just weight loss, or from weight gain and fluctuations over the years. This can really also enhance the final outcome by removing that extra skin. Sometimes they don’t need to have that muscle tightened if they haven’t had children. Overall, again, the final outcome or goal is to provide that flat abdomen, allow them to wear the clothing they’re looking to wear, feel more confident.
It’s a really powerful procedure and patients feel great afterwards when they stand and look at themselves in the mirror. You can just see their improved self-confidence after getting their body back to where they want it to be. There’s a number of different incisional approaches that you can use for abdominoplasty, from a mini to a full, or even an extended. The incision length really depends on how much skin excess needs to be removed. The ideal mini abdominoplasty candidate really just has a little extra tissue in the lower abdomen, and not really a lot of redundancy above the belly button. This allows us to remove about half of the tissue below the belly button. If you have a lot of extra skin or looseness above, which is very common if you’ve had multiple children, a full abdominoplasty incision is likely it can be helpful to help really remove that extra skin and tighten and flatten the abdominal wall.
The scar placement is really critical. I always try to place it as low as possible, really try to allow it to be hidden by a bathing suit. This really enables it to not be as big of a concern as most patients think. Over time the scars tend to fade and become a quite fine, white lines. An extended abdominoplasty is a longer incision. That’s really ideal if you have a lot of flank excess, but most patients that isn’t quite necessary for. I think it’s better to have a slightly longer incision to improve your final outcome, since the scars heal quite well and are normally very easy to conceal.