Dr. Jean Loftus is a double board-certified plastic
surgeon and is a national authority on plastic surgery. She has
appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and The Today Show, as a vocal advocate
of safety, conscientiousness, and honesty in plastic surgery.
Her book, The
Smart Woman's Guide to Plastic Surgery, is
the #1 best-selling book in the country on plastic surgery. This
book is available online at
amazon.com,
bn.com and
borders.com.
Dr.
Loftus has offices in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. Visit
her website at
www.infoplasticsurgery.com. To schedule a consultation,
you may contact her offices at (513) 793-4000 or (859) 426-5000.
Dr. Loftus just loves getting questions and posting answers. To
submit your question, please follow the link at the bottom of
this page. Even if you just want to send her a comment, she'd
love to hear from you.
Q:
My
wife had silicone injected in her lips 5 years ago and now has
painful, lumpy, and hard lips. One
doctor told us that the silicone could be removed, and another
told us that it could not.
Dr.
Loftus Answers: Silicone injection is quite a problem, regardless
of where it is injected. At first, it appears soft and wonderful.
The early results are usually quite impressive, leading inexperienced
plastic surgeons to offer this procedure again and again. I presume
that the surgeon who injected your wife was either inexperienced
or, more likely, not a real plastic surgeon. Plastic surgeons
have known for over a decade that long term results from silicone
injection are fraught with problems: inflammation, extrusion,
firmness, nodules, irregularities, and pain.
As for the advice you received, both of your plastic surgeons
spoke the truth. Their advice, although seemingly contradictory,
is accurate. The following analogy may help you understand. Picture
a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie with a lot of chocolate
chips, some large and some small. If you tried to remove the chips,
you would have great difficulty doing so. As you removed each
one, you would also remove some of the surrounding cookie. The
more chips you removed, the more the cookie would crumble. You
would get to the point where you would realize that trying to
remove all the chocolate chips would leave you with nothing but
crumbs. As with the chocolate chips, some of the silicone can
be removed, but trying to remove it all would be impossible without
destroying the lip. I therefore advocate removing the most problematic
areas.
If plastic surgeons had a way to reconstruct a lip from scratch,
then the solution would be to remove the lips and perform a reconstruction.
However, this is not possible. Even the best of lip reconstructions
fail to look normal. My best advice is to selectively remove the
most problematic areas. Later injecting the lip with collagen
may help to restore volume, but will be difficult due to scar,
inflammation, and distortion. I am terribly sorry for your wife.
I wish both you and her the best in getting through this very
difficult problem.
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