Drfeldmaninterview

Male: Welcome back. With us now is Dr. Paul Feldman who is a plastic surgeon at Advanced Aesthetics with offices in McDonough and Fayetteville.

Welcome to the show.

Female: Welcome to the show. And a board certified plastic surgeon and that's important to know that and been in practice for many, many years.

Paul: Absolutely. A total of 24 years and we have two other plastic surgeons in the practice, Dr. Gronka and Dr. Raniere. And we have combined experience of over 50 years.

Male: That's awesome.

Female: Let's talk about getting pretty.

Male: Yeah. Let's talk to the viewers about what all you do over there.

Paul: We do the full range of cosmetic plastic surgery. That includes body contouring, such as breast augmentation, breast lift, abdominoplasty, liposuction, and other body contouring procedures. We also do facial cosmetic surgery, such as face lifts, especially the short scar face lift, eyelid surgery, lipoplasty, nose surgery, such as rhinoplasty, and ear surgery, such as otoplasty.

Female: Let's break it down a little bit. The trend right now seems to be that liposuction. Everybody wants to look better, have their bodies look better. What is that procedure like? We've heard a lot about the anesthesia and the local and all that. Break down that difference for us, and what procedures could require each one.

Paul: We view ourselves as the experts in liposuction. And liposuction is the procedure where you can actually surgically remove the excess fat using a very small cannula and a very small puncture size to remove the excess fat. It's predicated upon the fact that the skin will contract down and form a more pleasing contour after the procedure. We recommend doing it under local anesthetic with IV sedation. Using IV sedation, it keeps the patient more relaxed, more comfortable, and we're able to take out more fat and do it in a more exacting method.

Male: On the patients, granted you have all these procedures and each one is going to be different, but is there a prime candidate for plastic surgery? What is the fundamental need?

Female: Like how fat can you be, or how small should you be?

Male: And other general purposes.

Paul: Actually, that's an excellent question. Number one, the person needs to be in good health because we need to do it in a safe manner. But actually, we can treat all comers to a certain extent. And we usually want people to be is what I call a cruising weight, the weight after diet and exercise, that they feel comfortable with. The ideal candidate is one who is actually an ideal body weight and just has localized areas of fat.

But the truth of the matter is most patients don't always meet that criteria, and we're able to do more sculpting and more reduction on people who are still a little bit overweight. If they actually have more excess skin than just excess fat, then we can remove the excess skin by doing body contouring procedures.

And that's actually a key factor is that you need to have somebody that knows how to do both types of procedures, not just liposuction, but can do the body contouring procedure so they can make the right recommendations.

If you try to do liposuction with somebody with too much excess skin, they're going to end up with a lot of contour irregularities and not a pleasing result.

Female: Okay. Safe environment. I heard you say that. That's very important. Now tell us about your particular facility.

Paul: We're very proud of our surgery center. We built it to look and feel like a hospital. It's state licensed, it's also certified and that means we're giving you a safe and quality environment. To be licensed we need to have the right equipment for safety functions. We have to have the right personnel, such as trained nurses, and we have to have the right protocols such as drills to make sure, god forbid, that if anything ever goes wrong, we're able to take care of you.

We're located close to a hospital in case there's ever any, in the rare event, anything would ever happen. We have a tremendous safety record.

We've done thousands of procedures without any major untoward event. We're very proud of our safety record.

Female: Let's talk about recovery time for that particular procedure. I'm

sure it varies with the average recovery time.

Paul: Well, we use a very sophisticated anesthetic technique usually involving low narcotics, but actually we're able to keep you comfortable.

You won't remember the procedure at all so it makes it much more smoother.

If we can keep you comfortable in the operating room, the procedure actually goes faster. And the recovery times are usually anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes. It's rare actually that somebody might stay later than within an hour.

Female: Okay. And so when are the women back at work?

Paul: Well, depending on the procedure, I think most people try to get back soon. It's almost like a contest, but I'd say most of our procedures, such as breast augmentation or liposuction, they could probably be back at work in three, four, five days.

Female: Oh, interesting.

Male: So with individuals that want to do this, there's obviously some reservations in some people. How do they get over that? And what do they do about coming in and getting a consultation?

Paul: Well, we actually welcome people to come in for a complimentary consultation. We feel that once you meet us that you'll actually feel very confident about it. We actually have in the consultation itself, we have educational videos. We go through the whole evaluation about your health, about your actual issue at hand, and then we talk about the surgical plan and tell you what to expect.

Male: Can you do the before and after?

Paul: Yes, we do actually have lots of before and after pictures.

Female: Oh, you do on the video? Like on the screen?

Paul: The video is actually produced by the plastic surgery society, so it's a little bit more generic. But we do on our website have before and after pictures. And then our coordinators who are actually the people who you'll first talk to and they'll walk you through the whole operative experience will actually show you the before and after pictures that you want.

Male: Awesome.

Female: Just really quickly on the face, let's tell the viewers what the different procedures are that you do on the face. The rhinoplasty, one more time.

Paul: We do face lifts, eyelid surgery, such as blepharoplasty for excess skin of the eyelid. We do rhinoplasty which is surgery to contour the nose.

We also work on the internal function of the nose if that's necessary, so if somebody has a breathing problem along with it, we can fix that. We also can work on the ears and actually what people call pinning back the ears for protruding ears.

Male: Real quickly too, on the short scar as it relates to men and their facial growth?

Paul: Short scar face lift is an excellent procedure. It actually has more limited external scars and by placing it only in front of the ear and in front of the hairline, we get access to the mid-face of men or actually women, and that gives you a more youthful appearance. And for men in particular, it avoids placing the bearded skin behind the ear.

Male: So great, for you guys, too.

Female: So men want to look pretty, too.

Male: Exactly. We all feel the effects of age so I mean it's just not a woman thing.

Female: And coming up on the next segment, we're going to talk about Truffles which is the other facility that Dr. Feldman owns. And what's wonderful about that is, guys, you want to stay tuned because you can get some gift certificates for your valentines. So stay tuned, we'll be right back.

Male: Welcome back. We're still here with Dr. Feldman. And Dr. Feldman, in the first segment we learned so much about Advanced Aesthetics, but we are going to talk about Truffles Medispa now which you are also involved with.

Tell us a little about that.

Female: Everybody needs to go.

Male: This is good stuff.

Female: There is no one that should be left out of this. And tell us why.

Male: Guys, gals. Everyone.

Paul: Well actually, we're very proud of Truffles Medispa, and we developed it because many of our patients were too early for plastic surgery. And we wanted to give them alternatives that were non-surgical. And the way we differentiated between the two practices is that Truffles is for nonsurgical intervention and Advanced Aesthetics is for surgical intervention.

And we offer many types of techniques and treatments that can actually improve the quality of the skin, help to remove wrinkles, hyperpigmentation, environmentally damaged skin, acne, or large pores, all with a non-surgical treatment.

Male: Cool.

Female: Alright. Every woman is going to be able to relate to this question. The wrinkles around the eyes, the lines around the eyes.

Male: Where? Right here?

Female: Yeah, I have them. I've earned each one of them.

Male: Yeah, you have.

Female: Okay. So there's something we can do at Truffles maybe before we go and have a surgery on it.

Paul: Exactly. Actually, the lines around the eyes are actually a nonsurgical treatment. Botox is the ideal treatment for that.

Female: Oh, it's Botox. Okay. You also offer some things besides Botox that can help diminish those lines.

Paul: Correct. Well actually, we have things that can actually improve the overall skin quality. So that if somebody comes in and they have lines around the eyes or the forehead, the lines between the eyebrows, those are

all treated primarily by Botox. If they have nasal labial lines, these folds over here that's treated with Juvederm which is a filler material.

Some people would want to have larger lips as lips may get smaller with age, and that's actually done with Juvederm as well. We do have another filler that can actually treat large areas of the face, such as the whole mid-face, the temple area, the pre-jowl area and that's Sculptra Aesthetics which is actually a long-term volumizer. It lasts for over two plus years, and it's really treating facial atrophy, which is one of the new theories about how people age.

Male: I think it's cool that we were talking off-camera about the two facilities that you have, and how they leverage each other whereas like, for instance, somebody may be going in thinking they need plastic surgery when in fact they don't. You have an alternative and can be able to refer them to that.