Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Thigh and body contouring · post-weight-loss skin surgery · scar planning
Dr. Tongchun Mao is an aesthetic surgeon at Chongqing West District Hospital, where he is Deputy Director and Head of Aesthetic Surgery in its Plastic Surgery & Aesthetics Medical Center and the responsible physician for this site. He personally performs more than 700 operations a year, within hospital standards of assessment, anaesthesia and follow-up.
In a thigh assessment he works from the skin downwards. The first question is how much of what troubles the patient is skin rather than fat, tested by pinching the tissue and watching how it recoils, and by asking what the thigh looked like before and after any weight change. The second is where the incision would fall in the clothes the patient actually wears, because a line inside the underwear is a different proposition from a line running down the inner thigh, and that judgement belongs to the patient rather than to him. Incision length follows from how much skin has to be taken and where the tension will sit, so a longer line is sometimes the plan that closes without pulling. He advises against a thigh lift when the fullness is mostly fat under skin that still has tone, when weight is still moving in either direction, when the request is to change the shape of the leg rather than to remove skin, and when the patient is clear that they could not live with a visible scar. In that last case the honest answer is no operation rather than a smaller one.
Clinical focus
The scar is the operation
Every thigh lift is a trade of skin for scar, and the trade cannot be split. The assessment is where the patient decides whether the exchange is worth making with the scar they will actually have, rather than with the scar they hope for.
