Facelift

www.drvaibhavshah.net

Vaibhav Shah

                     FACE-LIFT

                        Facelift surgery is probably the best-known cosmetic facial procedure and is the absolute gold standard for lower face and neck rejuvenation. Although there are many new technologies that supposedly address skin and neck tightening, none of these can come close to the improvement and longevity of traditional facelift surgery.

                      Facelift surgery was developed and refined over a century ago and has undergone many changes. The facelift that your parents may have had is not the same as today’s contemporary techniques. A generation ago, a facelift had an average hospital stay of 3-4 days. With the recent advances in instruments, technology and anesthesia, facelift surgery has never been easier or more affordable.

                   

                         Another difference in today’s facelift patient is the age. Today’s patients do not want to wait until they look old to have cosmetic surgery. They want to stay younger looking all their life. In the past, most patients waited until their sixth decade and underwent a big operation with an extended recovery. Today’s patients opt to have smaller procedures along the way and avoid the overhaul their parents had. Performing smaller cosmetic procedures along the way may require the patient to have them again later in life, but again, they will avoid looking aged.

                            If it sounds too good it probably is! Don’t be fooled by any technology that reports facelift type results without surgery. This includes Thermage, Fraxel. Ulthera and Thread Lifts. This is not to say that these therapies do not do anything, but they cannot hold a candle to the improvement and longevity of contemporary facelift surgery. We routinely see patients in our office that were treated somewhere else with a “new miracle technology” to tighten their face and neck and are embarrassed and frustrated that they wasted enough money to have paid for a real facelift. If any doctor reports significant results from a non-surgical procedure, demand to see 20 STANDARDIZED before and after pictures at least 1 year after the procedure. Also make sure they are pictures of actual patients taken by this doctor and not company pictures. If someone can show you results like this, then the procedure may be worth consideration. So far we have never seen any technology meet this challenge. We see many disgruntled patients every month who wasted their hard earned money on a promise that sounded too good to be true.