Beauty hanging by a thread

Nov 22, 2010 by admin

Minimally Invasive Surgery is an increasingly used term, sometimes, unfortunately, only for advertising purposes, but is part of a clear treatment strategy derived from the great gift given by modern technology that offers video assisted surgical methods that allow to operate in the abdomen, joints and other places, only with the use of small cannulae, thus limiting dissections, incisions, and postoperative complications.

Along these lines, plastic surgery has also used new minimally invasive aesthetic methodologies, but in the field of aesthetics this has also coincided with a need to change the philosophy of beauty and aesthetics. There were obstacles, concerns and enthusiasms 25 years ago, when, in 2004, presenting new revolutionary non-invasive methods for the time for both, varicose veins and capillaries and for physical therapy with endermologie, I had the honor to submit, as opinion leader in many nations, a method that allows to rejuvenate the face only with special support wires, thus limiting incisions, dissections, hematomas and complications, only with the use of special support wires.

We must first acknowledge that the patients have changed their question “Doctor, I would like to improve, but without changing my expression, without evidence of transformation, with minimal risk and prompt recovery, even if it takes longer time”. It is a sign of a new aesthetic taste; no more swollen, static faces of the past; facial expression should be preserved, as well as some wrinkles, like those that mark the history, but not age.

We are being asked to improve the face just to the right need, to find full harmony “to improve but not change, to fix without demolishing”. Being able to prevent and slow down the sagging can be the winning bet of medicine and cosmetic surgery of our time, and here the strategies for the soft rejuvenation of the face using various surgical threads for support find their ideal place.

This sweet lifting, defined T3-soft lift with suspension surgery, provides for the use of threads supporting the tissues in a non-invasive fashion, like an invisible umbrella opened in reverse that clips the hair. When necessary, almost invisible incisions are added to the threads to enhance durability and eliminate excess skin, in the contest of a strategy that is carried out under local anesthesia and return to work within 2-3 days.

The introduction of 8-10 small threads raises cheekbones, eyebrows, cheeks and neck making the skin slide as on rails, and is now a perfected method that is painless and not bloody. The results are consolidated in 30-40 days, which is the time required for collagen and tissues to recover their best structure and position. During this period, the threads created, on one hand, a controlled process of fibrosis that favors a natural tissue retraction and repositioning, and on the other, promote the regeneration of collagen and its tone; in a summary, both, the appearance and the structure are rejuvenated.

This has opened up new horizons for other locations, as in selected cases for buttocks and breasts sagging, but although the new techniques do not replace traditional surgery, they do offer, in most cases, new alternatives, that are less invasive and, above all, also applicable at an early stage. The new strategies, although effective, will not send the traditional ones into “retirement”, because, when necessary, we will always resort to classic lifting and prostheses. The real revolution is, instead, in the need to revise the concept of beauty, where the cosmetic result is not based on the subjective construction of the surgeon according to proportions and aesthetic principles, but on the respect of that harmony required by the individual faces, and on the realization of the beauty that the patient asks for herself, because, although a face is always the same, each set of eyes sees that face in different ways.

In presenting my book on these strategies, Prof. Ivo Pitanguy recalls, “this volume is the first book on minimally invasive aesthetic surgery; what is important is not the knowledge of the technique, but the understanding of the philosophy that guides it”, and this is what we need to think about.

Bibliography:

1. Bacci P.A. Chirurgia estetica mini invasiva con fili di sostegno, Minelli editore, Arezzo, 2006

2. Bacci P.A., Chirurgia estetica minimamente invasiva con hilos tensores, Amolca Editor, Caracas 2007

3. Bacci P.A., Soft face Lift with suspension surgery, DVD videocorso in inglese, Minelli editore, Arezzo 2010

4. Bacci P.A., Chirurgia estetica mini invasiva del volto, in “Arte e scienza in medicina e chirurgia estetica, Gasparotti M., Campisi A., Verduci Editore, Roma 2010

Prof. Pier Antonio Bacci

Center for Cosmetic Pathologies, Arezzo

info@baccipa.it

Professor of Plastic Surgery at the University of Siena Director of the Center for Cosmetics Pathologies, Arezzo