Today, we’re doing a short scar breast reduction. Now, a short scar breast reduction means that we’re going to make it vertical scar without a horizontal scar. So, what we’ll have is…we’ll have a scar around the nipple in vertical, like a lollipop without the horizontal scar. I believe this has a lot of advantages. One, it pulls the breast over and makes a narrow breast. It gives a better support and more longevity. And you have less scar and less chance for keloid hypertrophic scar.

The real problem with the horizontal scar is that it keloids. Now, what we’re trying to do is what’s called a central pedicle breast reduction. So what we’re going to end up doing is I’m going to lift the skin here and lift it away from the breast tissue, take away breast tissue from the side of the breast and the inside the breast. Now, reshape the breast, move the breast to the chest and reshape the breast to the chest. And then, we’re going to close the scar along these lines like this. And this is going to be our idea for the breast reduction.

Breast reduction is necessary because of back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain. People with large breasts have pain all day long. At the end of the day, they are in pain. They can’t exercise, can’t move. This whole idea that the insurance companies tell people, that losing weight makes breast pain go way, is just false. In 20 years of doing these things, I’ve not seen one patient lose weight and their back pain go away. So we’re going to try to get this person feeling better and get her out of a bra with these breast lifts so that she can wear a sundress when she wants.

All right, we’re halfway through our short scar breast reduction and what we’ve tried to do was decrease the weight of the breasts by taking away breast tissue and lift the breasts. Now, essentially, what we’ve done is we wanted to raise the nipple to this point, so we’ve made an incision [inaudible 00:01:49] and lifted the skin away. Then I’ve taken away breast tissue from the inside, put them in the [inaudible 00:01:54] the tissue I took away from the outside. So, all this extra breast tissue that’s off the side was removed and that’s removing weight. Now, if you look at the sternum here, a notch here, there’s breast tissue on our lifted side above that notch and our non-lifted side all the breast tissue below that notch. So, essentially, we’ve repositioned the breast tissue from here and moved it up to here. So now, the breast tissue is here and we caught it. We’ve done that.

So, what this will do is it will take the weight that is below the ribs and pulling the person down and now on the chest with the weight on the chest. Now, there is no pulling on the bra strap. So the shoulder pain and neck pain is gone because the only function of the bra is to lift the breast to the chest. And now, since the breast is on the chest, there’d be no weight pulling on the shoulders. And this is going to be a big thing, a big part of reducing the back, neck, and shoulder pain. Now, the person can wear a sundress if she wants to wear a sundress without a bra because the breast is actually suspended and supported on the chest wall. So, this is our halfway mark. And then, we will show you our completion. We’ve probably removed 40% of our breast tissue now.

Okay. We finished our breast reduction and what we’ve done is a short scar breast reduction, scar around the nipple, a vertical scar. There is no horizontal scar on the knee, and that’s much better because it’s horizontal scars. The scars [inaudible 00:03:25] into keloid especially in black patients. Our big thing was creating cleavage. Now, we see the end of our breastbone is down here. We have breast tissue above the sternum here. So everything is here. We’ve moved the breast tissue and recreated cleavage. So I think we have a nice look. This is very swollen initially after surgery. It’s going to look much better when the swelling goes away in two to three months. But so far for, you know, just completed it’s a great shape with good cleavage and a pretty good symmetry. This patient will have less back pain after this surgery because the weight is to her shoulder instead of down near her belly button. So she should have no problems with the bra strap pain because the weight of the bra, the weight of the breast on the chest, so the strap will not be cutting her shoulders. If she wants to go, not wear a bra with a sundress, she can do that because the breast is secured to the chest wall. So, I think she’ll have a nice result. I think she’ll have much less pain.