This century has seen countless breakthroughs in medicine and surgery that would nearly seem miraculous to the generations before us. For a person born in 1910, who would’ve thought that in 100 years it’d be possible to remove fat from nearly anywhere in the body, reshape the nose, tighten skin in the abs, thighs, and elsewhere, add shape and firmness to the buttocks and breasts, remove unwanted breast development in men, suck fat out of the neck and back, whiten our teeth, remove hair from anywhere, make our lips fuller, our chins straighter, our eyes bigger, and so on and so forth! The human body has truly become something that a surgeon does indeed sculpt, hence our nomenclature of liposculpture surgery.

Obviously, many of these techniques are new or at least relatively new. How did they come about? Where did they come from? In this article, we’ll take a brief tour of history of liposculpture specifically.

In the 1920’s, a French physician by name of Dr. Charles Dujarrier removed excess fat from someone. Interestingly, it would appear that the first patient that had this type of surgery was a ballerina! She had fat removed from her calves and knees. The tool of choice was called a curette, which is a spoon like device used to scrape dirt and whatnot off the skin.

Sadly, the patients body did not receive the surgery well: something went wrong, and her leg had to be amputated – a terrible event for anyone, made all the more so worse for someone whose job was a ballerina.

Decades later in the 1960’s, surgeons began working again on similar procedures to remove fat from the body. These techniques were crude, involving removal of whole areas of skin and fat at once, leaving quite a scar on the body of the patient. This type of surgery was not widespread.

Halfway through the 1970’s, an American father-son team working in Rome invented what we call the cannula – the tube inserted into the patient which sucks fat out of the body. The Fischers invented this device and connected it to a suction tool to successfully remove fat from the patient. The methods used here came to known as dry liposculpture, and while wildly more successful than the work done before them, the procedure was not without it’s problems, creating roadblocks to it becoming a widespread surgery.

In the early 1980’s another French surgeon made history in the area of body sculpting by refining the previous “dry” technique and inventing wet liposculpture or wet liposuction. This technique involved the injection of saline into the area being treated, which reduced bleeding as well as made it easier to remove body fat through a cannula.

5 years later in 1987 an American physician by the name of Dr. Jeffrey Klein is credited with the invention of the tumescent liposculpture technique. This technique involved injecting the patient with solution of licodaine and epinephrine, which reduced blood loss during surgery, and made the swelling and pain experienced in recovery easier. Additionally, because licodaine was used as part of the solution, it allowed for a local anesthesia to be used during surgery instead of a general anesthesia, further making tumescent liposculpture safer and easier to implement than previous techniques.

Today, over 20 years later, there are various tools and techniques developed for liposculpture – such as smart liposuction, lippodissolve, and vibro liposculpture – yet the tumescent liposculpture technique remains the most widespread surgical technique for removing fat from the body.

In explaining the liposuction technique known as tumescent liposculpture, it will be helpful to contrast it with other methods in order to illustrate the differences between the two. Prior to the widespread adoption of tumescent liposculpture, a patient being treated to have fat removed via liposculpture / liposuction, was at the receiving end of a surgery that had to use larger incisions in the flesh in order to accomodate larger cannulas. (The cannula is the fat suctioning or fat sucking device used in all liposculpture procedures.) This technique used what’s known as general anesthesia and carried with it an increase risk of blood loss during surgery due to larger incisions and the possiblity of an unwanted reaction to said anesthesia. Additionally, prior to the tumescent technique, recovery was usually considered harder on the body with previous techniques.

Compare this to the tumescent liposculpture technique in which one or more very small incisions are made to insert also very small cannula tools, sometimes referred to as micro cannulas. Instead of using general anesthesia, tumescent lipo uses local anesthesia. The important point to note about this difference is that it means less risk of anesthesia related complications for the patient. Because the incisions are smaller and the cannulas are smaller, this carries a number of benefits to the patient. First, it lessens the risk of blood loss compared to traditional techniques. Secondly, smaller incisions mean faster healing time and less risk ofd scarring or marks left on the body post-surgery. Third, these micro cannula tools are able to target the fatty areas with improved accuracy and finesse. This all translates to a speedier recovery as compared to previous techniques!

Why the word tumescent though – what does this mean?

When speaking of “tumescent liposuction”, the tumescent phrase refers to being swollen and firm. This is in reference to the fat which will be removed, which is made swollen and firm through the injection of lidocaine, which is a local anesthetic, coupled with a solution to tighten or constrict the surrounding blood vessels (often epinephrine). Note that this blood vessel constriction is one reason why the risk of blood less is minimized in the tumescent lipo technique.

For all these reasons, tumescent liposculpture immediately became a widely adopted preference for performing various liposuction treatments all over the body. The benefits it carries – improved recovery, less anthesthia complications, less blood less, less risk of liposuction scars, and improved cannula technology – cannot be ignored!

Despite claims to the contrary, liposuction no longer holds the reigning title as the king (or queen) of cosmetic surgery procedures. As of 2008, it’s no longer true that liposculpture, or liposuction, is the most popular non invasive cosmetic surgery procedure performed in the United States of America.

In May of 2009, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, more informally known as ASAPS, released their annual survey on surgery trends from over 15,000 surgeons. The year 2008 marked the 12th year they’d been doing such a survey and tracking numbers for such things.

This survey reported a number of interesting changes and trends in the cosmetic surgey world. Here’s a few of the highlights you might be interesting in, such as:

• 2008 was the first year in which there was more than a 10% drop in the amount of plastic surgeries performed. This was the first time this had happened since 2002, 6 years ago.
• Despite the drop in overall numbers, 2008 still saw a total of over 10 million cosmetic procedures (this includes both surgical and non surgical cosmetic procedures)
• This number is approximately a million less than their report showed the previous year in 2007
• Despite the decrease in the number of customers, overall the industry reported over 12 billion dollars in income still.

For an industry like cosmetic surgery / plastic surgery to exist right now in a bad US economy, who is able to report a 10% drop in its customer base yet still report 12 billion dollars if income is amazing.

The survey goes on to report the most popular cosmetic surgeries. Let’s take a look them now. Here are the top 5 surgical cosmetic procedures:

1. Breast Augmention
Breast augmentation is a surgical procedure to change the size and shape of the breasts. This typically translates to the use of silicone and saline breast implants.

2. Liposuction (liposculpture)
Liposuction involves having fat removed from the body, along with body sculpting and skin tightening in the treatment area.

3. Eyelid Surgery
Eyelid surgery is done to remove fat, skin, and muscle from the eyelids. This is sometimes described as fixing drooping eyelids. The technical name for this surgery is called blepharoplasty.

4. Rhinoplasty
Rhinoplasty is more popularly known as a nose job.

5. Abdominoplasty
Abdominoplasty involved removing extra skin in the stomach and often tightening the abdominal muscles and skin. This is commonly referred to as a tummy tuck.

The big difference between 2007 and 2008 is that liposuction is no longer the number cosmetic surgery being performed in the United States. The two actually traded positions between 2007 and 2008, swapping each other out for number one and number two of the most popular cosmetic surgery procedures done.