Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Body contouring and abdominal surgery · separating the four causes of a protruding abdomen · the safety ceiling on a single session
Dr. Tongchun Mao is an aesthetic surgeon at Chongqing West District Hospital, where he is Deputy Director and Head of Aesthetic Surgery in its Plastic Surgery & Aesthetics Medical Center and the responsible physician for this site. He personally performs more than 700 operations a year, within hospital standards of assessment, anaesthesia and follow-up.
Dr. Mao's assessment of an abdomen starts by separating four things that look alike from the outside: fat under the skin, fat inside the abdominal cavity, skin that has lost its recoil, and muscle that has separated. Only the first is reached by a cannula, and he says so before anything is scheduled — a firm, round abdomen that does not pinch is a reason to discuss weight and medical treatment rather than an operating date, and a true separation down the midline is a reason to discuss a different operation. He treats evenness as more important than volume, stages a plan when two smaller sessions would be safer than one large one, and tells patients plainly that the first look at the abdomen will be swollen, uneven and discouraging. An assessment that ends in fat removal not being the answer is, in his view, an assessment that worked.
Clinical focus
Four causes, one operation
An abdomen protrudes for four different reasons and this operation addresses one of them. Patients who arrive believing that fat is the problem and leave knowing which of the four they actually have make a different decision — sometimes the operation, sometimes a different one, and sometimes none.
