Anyone who is thinking about having plastic surgery, liposuction or another cosmetic procedure, in San Diego, Orange County California or anywhere else, wants great, natural-looking results. Most concentrate on getting the most skilled and experienced surgeon they can afford. That approach makes sense. But while the skill of the doctor performing liposuction, fat transfer, skin resurfacing or plastic surgery is important, there’s another key factor in getting you the results you want. Even the best performed cosmetic procedures will only provide attractive results if your body heals properly. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy after your procedure can substantially improve how well you heal.
Editor’s Note: Dr. William Seare is board certified as both an Orthopedic and Plastic Surgeon. He has specialized in aesthetic and cosmetic facial rejuvenation for over 30 years. He has studied and researched methods to optimize aesthetic results and patented many technologies related to wound healing.
In hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), you enter a chamber to breathe oxygen at a pressure greater than standard atmospheric pressure. This allows for higher oxygen concentrations in your plasma, the watery part of your blood. This plasma can trickle through the tissues of your body, including tissues where the blood vessels and blood supply is compromised. This increases the amount of oxygen, along with other nutrients available to those challenged tissues providing an environment for quicker healing and less scar tissue, resulting in more pleasing results in plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures.
How Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment can improve your healing after plastic surgery and other cosmetic procedures
Plastic surgery and other aesthetic and cosmetic procedures can help you look younger, more rested and aesthetically pleasing. In the process, however, they create injuries within your body’s tissues. How well your surgeon performs your procedure is matched in importance by how well you are able to heal afterwards. This is where hyperbaric oxygen therapy can help you. Increasing your body’s oxygen supply can make a real difference in reducing infection and swelling as well as promoting tissue healing.
Injured cells need a lot more oxygen than uninjured tissues. One reason is that the healing process requires additional energy. A key component in energy production is oxygen. Without enough oxygen, cells can’t produce enough energy to heal quickly or without scar tissue. In some cases, oxygen-deprived cells can’t heal at all and they die. Or they don’t have enough building blocks for healing and create scar tissue. In addition, even after the best surgery in the cleanest environment, your body will often have to fight some degree of infection. Your immune system cells that fight infection need lots of energy.
Cells that have more oxygen have more energy – to fight infection and to heal rather than scar. After plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures like liposuction and Renuvion/J-Plasma treatment, hyperbaric oxygen therapy has proven to:
- Reduce or prevent scarring
- Lessen pain Contact Dr. William Seare, San Diego, CA
- Decrease swelling
These are important ways that hyperbaric oxygen therapy can help. I worked for 5 years as a Locum Tenens, substituting for the regular doctor at the Salt Lake Wound Care Center. My job was to diagnose and treat patients with various conditions using hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I personally witnessed remarkable and sometimes near-miraculous improvements in patients with a number of conditions, including healing wounds caused by diabetes and after surgery.
When I set up my practice in Carlsbad, north of San Diego, CA I invested in a hyperbaric chamber so I could help my patients receive the outstanding benefits I had personally witnessed at the Wound Care Center.
I began using HBOT for significantly challenged skin, liposuction, tummy tucks, breast reductions and other plastic surgery procedures. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy seems to have the greatest impact in two areas in particular:
- Preventing rebound scarring after aggressive liposuction
- Improving the survival rate for cells in fat transfer (autologous fat grafting)
How hyperbaric oxygen therapy improves Fat Transfer results
In autologous fat grafting – fat transfer – we remove fat from an area where you don’t want it and inject it into an area that needs more volume. This technique is often used in facial rejuvenation for restoring volume to sunken cheeks and filling deep lines that we call facial freshening. Fat transfer is frequently used for breast augmentation we call “natural breast augmentation “and butt lifts called “Brazilian Butt Lifts”. Adding volume by fat transfer allows your surgeon to add volume naturally and permanently by enhancing your body’s natural contours and restore a more youthful attractiveness.
Using your body’s own fat makes a great deal of sense. After all, what could be more natural than your own cells? Unfortunately, harvesting and injecting fat cells is easier than getting them to survive in their new location. When fat cells are harvested from their original location in your body, they lose their blood supply along with the oxygen and nutritional energy it provides. Many mature fat cells die. Only hardy, young cells survive in their new location. Studies have shown that, in many cases, a mere 30% of cells involved in fat transfer survive.
If that happened to your fat transfer, your great new look would fade away over six or eight weeks and you may choose to have another procedure to regain the volume and attractive appearance you want.
Since your own fat offers tremendous advantages over all other fillers, doctors have worked hard to come up with ways to improve fat cell survival rates. New methods include harvesting fat more gently in the right size “tissue packets”, concentrating and purifying it, and then injecting it into its new location using small channels and from multiple angles and depths. Using these methods has permitted us to increase survival rates from our average of 50% for the last 25 years to about 70% in some cases.
Now, using multiple specialized techniques and hyperbaric oxygen therapy , our fat cell survival rate at Clinique Sculpture, my practice in Carlsbad, San Diego County California, has increased from an average of 50% over the last 25 years, to as high as 70% in some cases.
This means that our fat transfer patients often only need one treatment to achieve the attractive, natural looking volume enhancements they want.
How can you maximize plastic surgery and cosmetic procedure results with Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy?
Plastic surgeons in different parts of the country offer hyperbaric oxygen therapy to maximize their patients’ chances for success. But you’ll have to do some searching to find one. If you’re in the San Diego area or Orange County, California you can find me at Clinique Sculpture in Carlsbad. I’ll be glad to provide a complementary consultation to see if hyperbaric oxygen therapy can enhance the chosen transformations you desire.
