A SLICE OF LIFE!
An extract from “Sunday Life” 20 May 2001

An increasing number of young women are opting for cosmetic surgery as ongoing "maintenance". So what, exactly, do the surgeons suggest for a typical 35-year-old? Wendy Tuohy surrendered her dignity to find out.

My first stop is dermatologist Daniel Lanzer, a father of eight who impressed me straight off when he said in passing that his wife still looks young and gorgeous even though she hasn’t had a thing done.

He is thorough; his tie, with its cascade of Venetian-style masks falling through the air, almost touches the ground as he bends down to get a view. And thankfully, he’s kind.

"You’re healthy, and overall you’re skinny but you do have those genetic (fat) deposits on your thighs and they are going to be very hard to move with diet or exercise. And the left hip is a little bigger than the right. You’d be a textbook case for liposuction". Oh, joy.

In an operation lasting an hour Dr Lanzer could suck the saddlebags out, then trim a bit off the inner thigh so it didn’t look bumpy compared with the new, flatter outer one.

He could also do a little liposculpture on the hips, to achieve that smooth, straight line from the waist down, so well illustrated by Elle. This is the most common cosmetic procedure.

Lanzer, who has performed 5000 liposuctions in the last 10 years, quotes from US statistics on complications from liposuction among members of the American College of Plastic Surgeons (as distinct from dermatologists). They report that one in 5000 liposuction patients dies as a result.

But Lanzer says that the US dermatologists’ body, the American College of Dermatologists, has reported no deaths at the hands of its members, who use a variety of techniques to do the procedure. The American Academy of Cosmetic Surgeons reports a liposuction death rate of one in 40,000.

"That (one in 5000) figure is horrific but it is being caused by plastic surgeons combining liposuction with other major (surgical) procedures like face-lifts, abdominoplasty (stomach fat surgery) and lipectomies (surgical fat removal)".

The deaths he continues, "related to bleeding, which just shouldn’t happen if you’re using tumescent liposuction (where fluid is pumped in to soften the fat). "They were related to surgeons piercing the stomach wall, which just shouldn’t happen – it’s just poor technique – and they were related to having prolonged procedures so that the patient was asleep for six hours, and death was caused by the combined procedure".

One of the problems is that terminology surrounding cosmetic surgery is loose, and as Lanzer says, "GP's who might have gone to a weekend conference" are permitted to call themselves cosmetic surgeons, or practice the various liposuction techniques.

"At the end of the day it comes down to personal judgment. People who have stuffed up in Australia have not had good personal judgment, in understanding the patient, appreciating what a patient wants, being able to explain that properly to a patient so they do understand. Every procedure, no matter how safe it is, has a risk and even if it is one in a million patient must understand that risk".