“I wanted to talk today about a specific area of body contouring and that’s fat destruction. When we talk about fat destruction, there are really a few categories, one of them is liposuction and liposuction is just like what it sounds like. There’s a small incision placed in a very small cannula or tube under high pressure vacuum is placed with lots of local anesthesia, tumescent technique at least the most common way of doing it, and that suction cannula is passed multiple times in the area where there’s unwanted fat.
It’s evacuated from the body and discarded. That liposuction has been very well described and is been very effective for you know 2 or 3 decades now, with the last decade showing the most improvement in terms of outcome predictability.
The other categories of fat destruction of course are non-invasive and that’s what our area of expertise in the Appearance Care CenterTM is, is doing non-invasive body contouring and when I categorize that there’s a couple of devices out there.
There’s the ultrasound that creates heat and one called Liposonix. In our experience and from all the reports said very and looking into this very carefully probably too much discomfort associated with it to make it an effective office space treatment.
There is the Cool Sculpting device from Zeltiq which actually got quite good results in terms of destroying fat and it does that by applying big suction cups on the abdomen, sucking that tissue in and make it very cold and freezing the fat cells which are fragile cells. In the area of the footprint to that suction cup the fat’s gone of course there are areas in between those footprints that can be an issue which leads us to the newest technology, Ultrashape.
Ultrashape uses ultrasound a lot like the first that I describe but instead of generating heat, Ultrashape uses mechanical vibration of the fat cells. This vibration creates what’s called the cavitation effect where the fat cells are separated and it results in the destruction of about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch layer of fat in any area that’s distributed.
So a commonly asked question that people almost always ask me “What if I destroy the fat in this area, does it come back?” and the answer is “No,” we’re born with the certain number of fat cells and that’s all the fat cells that we’ll ever have. When we get fatter or skinnier the cells that we do have get bigger or smaller, so there’s not more fat cells the cells that we have are getting bigger they are made to store fat.
Then others ask me “What if I get destroyed in one area, won’t I get fatter in another area?”
The answer to that is basically dependant on your diet and your exercise. If you’re going to get fat, yes those fat cells that are gone are no longer going to get bigger, they’re not there but other areas can still expand and of course we want to watch what we’re doing if we are doing body contouring and spending money on improving our shape, we really want to be careful with balancing diet and exercise.
Nobody has to go crazy on this part of it, but I think it’s important to understand if we’re spending our resources on looking better, we got to include things that we can manage including our diet, what we’re eating, and what’s the exercise we’re doing.
So to zone in on this newer area of Ultrashape or the ultrasonic body shaping that is not heat related or not thermo related. Ultrashape is a technology new to the U.S. it does it through vibration, it’s completely pain-free and very evenly destroys a layer of fat about a centimeter and a half, it’s about 3 quarters of an inch below the surface. That layer of fat is destroyed evenly about a half to 3 quarters of an inch layer of fat below the surface and any area that we can treat, and the general rule is if we can pinch an inch, we can treat that area with Ultrashape.
Ultrashape is a procedure that’s done in the office, there’s no anesthesia required because there’s no pain and there’s no discomfort afterwards so you can go back to your business after the treatment. There’s no special dressings required, there are no incisions, and there’s no downtime, and in fact we haven’t even seen any kind of bruising with this. The technology again is new to the U.S. We’ve seen dramatic results and certain patients, we’ve seen good results in others but everyone’s getting measurable results particularly when we use objective measures like measuring the circumference of the waste or the thighs or the areas that we’re treating.
So I would say Ultrashape right now is probably the most exciting technology that’s of course new to the U.S. and a lot of people haven’t even heard a lot about it yet. It effectively destroys fat cells without pain, it does it uniformly, it doesn’t do it as traumatically as Cool Sculpting but it also doesn’t have this sort of, “bath tub deformity” that’s the result of where the suction cup goes and in fact they’re maybe some synergy between Cool Sculpting and Ultrashape if you want bulk reduction of fat in an area the foot print to that suction cup and be able to smooth those edges. Those two technologies might work very effectively together.
If you have other question about Ultrashape, I’m very happy to discuss them with you, you can reach out to us at DrMaas.com or leave me a message if you want to leave some pictures I can comment on your candidacy for non-invasive versus surgical body contouring.
I’m always happy to have questions, photographs or even video if you want to send them to DrMaas.com or visit our website at MassClinic.com where there’s more information. This is Corey S. Maas MDTM on Looking Your Best.”
