Is liposuction really safe? You will understand after reading this!

Do you know where the term “sterile operating room” came from?

The earliest surgical operations were performed in bathhouses and barbershops, and sometimes in the patient's home. In the 17th century, some prominent surgeons moved the operation to the anatomy classroom in the school. This classroom was set up to teach anatomy, so it was also called an amphitheater. The surgical environment can be imagined.

Later, German surgeon Gustav Adolf Neuber discovered these drawbacks and first proposed the concept of "sterile operating room", so he is known as the founder of modern aseptic technique.

Dr. Gustav Adolf Nubel

If we trace the development of liposuction as a medical aesthetic, it is also inextricably linked to Dr. Nubor.

Predecessors of liposuction

In 1893, Dr. Nubel reported the first fat transplantation operation at the German Surgery Annual Meeting. He cut a piece of fat tissue from the patient's arm and implanted it into the inferior orbital rim to correct the sunken deformity after osteomyelitis. Nubel's innovative technology was only spread in German. In addition, the operation used a cutting method to directly transplant, which was very traumatic and difficult to operate. Later, this innovative technology gradually disappeared.

This is the first recorded report of fat transplantation in history. In fact, the application of fat in the field of medical beauty includes fat transplantation, liposuction and weight loss, as well as the current fat stem cell technology. The historical report on liposuction was 23 years earlier than fat transplantation. That is, around 1870, abdominal wall skin fat removal surgery was already performed by some doctors.

Whether it is the recognized first fat transplant or the first liposuction for weight loss, both methods were relatively simple compared to today, and could even be said to be "rough."

But the two have different purposes. Fat transplantation is to solve aesthetic or physiological defects, while liposuction is for weight loss and body shaping. Although the technology is lacking and the results are very uncertain, it has been suspended due to problems with reabsorption rate and oily cysts. Fortunately, fat medical beauty has found a breakthrough after a century of hard work.

In 1972, a pair of American doctors, Fischer father and son, developed a new suction device called "Cellusuctiotome", which marked the beginning of relatively safe modern liposuction technology.

It consists of a negative pressure suction device and a liposuction handle, on which a liposuction needle is connected. The liposuction needle is designed with a knife head inside, and the fat is sucked into the liposuction needle by the negative pressure. At the same time, the knife head rotates to cut the tissue, and the fat is quickly sucked out.

Early liposuction surgery was called "dry liposuction" and caused a lot of bleeding. In 1982, French surgeon Yves Gerard Illouz improved the method of the Fishers. Before liposuction, he injected a certain amount of swelling fluid containing saline and sodium hyaluronate into the subcutaneous fat layer to make the fat cells swell and rupture, and then used the needle invented by the Fishers to suction. This method was called "wet liposuction" and was successful and accepted by doctors all over the world.

In 1987, the above method was further improved. In order to change the general anesthesia required for liposuction surgery, American dermatologist Jeffrey Alan Klein added lidocaine (local anesthesia) and adrenaline (vasoconstriction) to the swelling fluid for local anesthesia, which allowed the patient to undergo surgery in an awake state and greatly reduced the amount of bleeding.

Technology is always moving forward, and smart doctors have invented different liposuction techniques, such as ultrasonic liposuction, laser-assisted liposuction, hydrodynamic liposuction, cryolipolysis, and radiofrequency liposuction.

The first liposuction surgery in China was performed by Professor Zhou Xingliang in Jinan in 1987. He was performing a breast reduction surgery on a woman and found that she was also fat in the abdomen. With the patient's consent, the doctors carefully extracted 500ml of fat from her abdomen.

From today's perspective, 500 ml is really insignificant compared to liposuction surgeries that often involve thousands of milliliters, but at the time it opened the precedent for liposuction for weight loss in the Chinese plastic surgery industry.

The increasing popularity of fat aesthetics

You may never imagine what women would go through to become beautiful. Women's pursuit of beauty can be traced back to ancient Egypt 6,000 years ago. At that time, the royal women of ancient Egypt had almost all the cosmetics sets: lipstick, eyeliner, face cream, hair dye, perfume, etc. But at that time, most of the ingredients of these cosmetics were toxic, but people knew nothing about it, and they were poisoned at the least and died at the worst.

According to records about Chinese beauty culture, it originated in the Shang and Zhou dynasties more than 1,300 years BC. "Yanzhi originated from King Zhou." "Yanzhi" is the later "rouge", which means that rouge has existed since the Shang Dynasty.

In modern times, with the rise of the plastic surgery industry, many women have joined the ranks of plastic surgery. However, since early beauty seekers did not have a correct understanding of many products and were highly blindly obedient, coupled with the lack of scientific industry supervision, businesses took risks driven by profit, resulting in many medical accidents.

Later, with the development of science and technology, the improvement of doctors' skills, the improvement of regulatory systems, and the convenience of information dissemination, the plastic surgery industry has entered a period of sedimentation from a barbaric and impetuous rapid growth stage. Beauty seekers have become more rational from their early blind obedience, and the range of choices has also been greatly broadened. They hope to seek a worry-free, safe and healthy way to become beautiful.

Among modern plastic surgery methods, fat aesthetics has unique characteristics that cannot be matched by other methods. First of all, the effect of autologous fat transplantation will not have a sense of boundary and look fake like other fillers. In addition, other exogenous fillers will produce rejection reactions, but there is no need to worry about this with autologous fat transplantation.

The biggest advantage of fat medical beauty is that liposuction can achieve both weight loss and body shaping at the same time, and it will not rebound easily. The number of fat cells in the human body after adulthood is generally maintained at around 30 billion (there will be differences among individuals), and liposuction is a targeted surgical method to reduce the number of fat cells. As long as the operation is performed properly, the long-term shaping effect can be guaranteed. Even if the patient gains further weight after the operation, that is, the body's fat cells further hypertrophy, or more precisely, the fat droplets in the fat cells become larger, but because the number of fat cells in this area has decreased, its total volume after hypertrophy in the same proportion will not be exaggerated.

Despite this, after liposuction, you still need to choose a scientific and reasonable lifestyle, improve your diet, increase physical exercise appropriately, and enjoy a natural and healthy life.

Most girls are quite resistant to fat, thinking that fat is the culprit that affects their figure, but in the eyes of our plastic surgeons, fat is very precious. Fat can also be called the treasure of youth and the gold mine of beauty.

Plastic surgeons have seen too many cases like this, where girls ask doctors to do a lot of liposuction in order to lose weight, hoping to leave no fat at all. However, after liposuction, various uneven areas will appear, and muscles will be exposed, not to mention the appearance, and it will even affect normal functions such as walking.

Seeing this situation, I often feel deeply sad. All the fat is wasted, and repairing it requires finding fat from multiple places. If the fat is really not enough, it will become a "nightmare" for girls throughout their lives.

Final words:

Fat medical aesthetic technology plays an increasingly important role in plastic surgery and is gaining more and more attention and favor from the medical community and consumers. In the field of fat transplantation, with the continuous emergence and improvement of new technologies, the success rate and effect of fat transplantation will be further improved. Combined with photoelectric beauty and injection beauty, fat medical aesthetics will be more complete and the effect will be more obvious.

However, we would like to remind those who are seeking beauty that the essence of fat medical treatment is medical behavior and must be carried out in strict accordance with standards. Those who choose fat medical beauty must go to a regular institution and choose an experienced doctor, so that they can obtain safe, natural and secure beauty.

Today, we have entered an era of collective "fat hatred", where everyone is afraid of it and avoids it. This rejection of fat has led to society's pursuit of thinness.

In order to reduce fat, people spend a lot of time and energy, completely forgetting the most authentic meaning of fat to humans - giving and maintaining life. This is a popular science book about fat, based on topics such as humanities history, biochemistry, physiology, plastic surgery, stem cells and gene editing. It uses detailed information, vivid stories and humorous language to introduce the chemical composition, cell structure, biological principles, genetic mechanism and cultural aesthetics of ancient and modern times at home and abroad, revealing the scientific principles of obesity and the underlying logic of weight loss, covering everything.

After reading this book, you can understand the mechanism of obesity without any basic knowledge and learn how to lose weight scientifically and effectively. At the same time, the book also introduces the application of fat in plastic surgery and the international frontier progress of fat research, pointing out the direction for readers who are suffering from obesity. I hope you can understand the true nature of fat from this book, recognize the value of fat, no longer have excessive fear and hatred of fat, and look at fat scientifically.

Source: Book "The Biography of Fat", Science and Technology Press of China

Author: Wang Ying, Bachelor of Peking University, PhD of University of Illinois, Postdoctoral Fellow of Stanford University

Review丨Sun Yifei Director of the Medical Education History Research Office of Hebei Medical University