In this video, Dr. Gavin Sandercoe of Norwest Plastic & Cosmetic Surgery in Sydney talks in depth about Brachioplasty and it’s after effects.

Brachioplasty, he says is the removal of excess skin and fat from the arm. The scar after Brachioplasty Sydney is very visible and the procedure is like trading off excess skin for scar because some patients have skin that do not hold stitches in multiple layers or do not dissolve stitches. They are more prone to get bad scars. The ideal case is for patients with skin that gradually turn over quite slowly and get rid of the dissolving stitches and heal up.

In some cases Dr. Sandercoe has had to cut back the stitches and re-stitch it back with fewer stitches and stitches that are finer to reduce the scarring effect.

However, in spite of the scar, most patients are happy that they have got rid of the excess skin.

Brachioplasty is removal of the excess skin and fat from arm. Many women that get older and/or have lost weight have got excessive folded skin there and it impacts on their ability to exercise or their choice of clothes. The most important thing about Brachioplasty is that you’re trading off that flap of skin that you hide for scar. The scar of Brachioplasty is very very very very variable. I’ve got some great scars and I’ve got some scars that I am not very proud of. Those scars, sometimes they are predictable sometimes they are not. The things that we find much more common is that patients that need they have got skin that doesn’t really want to hold stitches in multiple layers or dissolving stitches. They are more prone to getting bad scars, that’s just the body’s need to elicit much more inflammatory response to get rid of those stitches.

There are people that do more, they have more scars, they have scars that are less good, tend to be younger patients. And it’s natural to think, look I’m younger, I’m going to heal up well, I’m going to heal up quickly, it’s all great, why would I have bad scar. And it’s actually the opposite in plastic surgery, especially in body contouring surgery where we are removing skin and trying to stitch it back together under a little bit of tension. What we want to do is we want to have skin that’s going to gradually turn over quite slowly and get rid of the dissolving stitches and heal up.

Patients that are younger, their collagen turnover times much much faster than all the patients and they are much more likely to have a bad scar. Those bad scars can be made better over time with laser treatments and silicone cheating. And in some of the worst cases we have cut it back out and re-stitched it again with fewer stitches this time and stitches that are finer. Not that we know that your skin doesn’t like to dissolve stitches, we are going to use less and less and support your skin with tape rather than stitches.

It’s a procedure that we do a lot of and it’s got a very very high satisfaction rate. But then again, the most important thing is like most body contouring surgery for excessive skin, it’s a trade off of the folded skin for the scar.

It’s a procedure that has a very very high satisfaction rate, but the only patients the patients that are not happy with the bad scar but to be fair, some of the patients that have bad scars are happy with what they have got. They have got rid of the additional folded skin and the scar bothers me more than it bothers them.