Today’s image-conscious can get a little nip and tuck in less time than — and with about as much effort as — it takes to watch the plastic surgery reality show “Extreme Makeover.”
Face-lifts in an hour.
Made-over body parts with virtually no scarring.
Full new cheeks created with long-lasting injections during a lunch break.
All are possible with new cosmetic procedures that promise more affordable results that spare patients pain, risk and recovery time. But is ultraquick and easy cosmetic surgery safe? And does it work?
Some doctors warn that such procedures often don’t deliver lasting results and can put patients in danger. With so many new offerings on the market, many patients are trusting medical procedures that haven’t been tested by time.
Fast and easy
Even those who perform the newest fads in cosmetic surgery say the trend toward the fast and easy is compromising results.
But patients aren’t being deterred.
“Everybody wants to do something without going through surgery,” said Dr. Bruce Chau, a Southfield plastic surgeon who performs a controversial new procedure that uses a barbed thread to lift the face. “People always want the best result, but they want to go through the least effort.”
Doctors are cleaning up as patients go under the knife — or the laser, thread and needle — in record numbers. Cosmetic surgery, once popular with a small segment of the population — usually aging and wealthy white women — is becoming more popular with men, minorities and younger people.
Want bigger breasts without the scarring? Get implants inserted through a hole in the belly button.
How about getting rid of varicose veins? More than 20,000 people last year had them removed with a laser.
Or a face-lift without a knife? The thread procedure all but eliminates cutting from the procedure.
“Years ago we could only do so much with people,” Chau said. “Now we have something in between. It’s like ice cream. It used to be only vanilla. Now we have Ben and Jerry’s and all these flavors.”
The thread lifts were featured on “Today,” “Good Morning America” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Thousands of doctors are signing up to be trained in the procedure, in which serrated plastic sutures are inserted into the face through small incisions.
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The sutures catch the fatty layer beneath the face to raise drooping tissue.
Nationwide, more than 3 million people had work done in 2004, nearly two-thirds of which was considered minimally invasive, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Spending on cosmetic procedures nationwide totaled $7.2 billion in 2002, the most recent figures available, according to the surgeons group. Most of those costs are out-of-pocket because insurance plans rarely cover such procedures.
Carol Johnson of Milford, Mich., was looking for dramatic results without the pain and complication of a full-fledged face-lift.
Too much desk time
A career secretary, she said hours spent bending over her desk caused her jowls, cheeks and neck to sag. So Johnson, 63, went to California last year to visit a plastic surgeon who worked on her friend.
The surgeon said he could do the work but it would cost $16,000 to $28,000. He suggested multiple procedures, including a face-lift and liposuction, which would have laid up Johnson for weeks.
She took the idea back to her husband, Clark, who immediately protested. The couple travel and have a busy social schedule. Neither wanted Johnson recovering in bed for weeks.
Then Johnson heard of a center in Troy, Mich., that performs a minimally invasive face-lift dubbed the Lifestyle Lift. For about $4,000, she could tighten up the lower part of her face and neck and be well enough to drive home afterward. She went in for a consultation and decided immediately to do it.
Johnson showed up at the small Big Beaver Road office on a Wednesday. The waiting room was packed, with all the seats taken and people standing against the walls. Doctors and nurses bustled in the back rooms, rushing from one procedure to the next. A backup of patients delayed Johnson’s appointment more than an hour.
Once the procedure began, however, she was finished in less than an hour. Johnson lay awake calmly, sometimes talking, as Dr. Jeffrey Colton made incisions around both of her ears. After pulling her skin away from her face, Colton began to pull Johnson’s muscles and stitch them in a new, higher place. When he was finished, Colton cut more than an inch of skin off each side of Johnson’s face.
He stitched her up, and the results were remarkable. She had a newly narrow chin and smoother neck. The bandages around her ears were the only signs of the surgery.
“I don’t want to take a chance that something major could happen,” she said. “This just seemed more bearable.”
Many procedures have been around for years but are becoming more common as new technology and training help perfect them.
Doctors are feeling the pressure to provide the latest. Grosse Pointe, Mich., surgeon Dr. George Goffas regularly buys new equipment to keep up with the latest trends. He recently spent about $10,000 on a device that allows him to perform a minimally invasive forehead lift to smooth out the skin on the forehead and lift the eyebrows. The procedure costs patients about $4,500.
“It’s good for business,” Goffas said of the growing demand for new procedures. “But they think you can do everything for them and do it all at once.”
Unrealistic expectations feared
Goffas, like many colleagues, also worries that the push for new and fast is creating unrealistic expectations and making an already image-obsessed society even more sensitive about its appearance.
“People who don’t need anything are coming in,” he said.
The thread lifts, in particular, have come under fire lately as some patients report disastrous results and doctors question how they’ll hold up. The threads can detach from the skin after a short period of time or, if not inserted correctly, they can be seen through the skin, leaving railroad tracklike marks.
Many patients aren’t aware that simpler procedures often produce less dramatic or impermanent results, doctors say.
“There’s no good study that talks about the longevity of all these things,” said Michael Olding, chief of plastic surgery at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “All the somewhat-uneducated public hears is `face-lift.’ Not a pull and tug on a portion of the face that only works on selected individuals.”
Rhea Heil, for one, is happy with the work she had done. A fit size 10, the 67-year-old from Birmingham, Mich., was still unhappy with some fat on her legs, thighs and belly. She decided to get ultrasound-assisted liposuction.
She’s now a size 6 and has no marks from the procedure except 13 pea-sized scars that are fading fast. Heil was back doing volunteer work five days after the surgery.
“It wasn’t as severe as I thought it would be,” she said. “I told my friends afterward what I had done, and they were jealous.”