Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Body contouring · arms, thighs and trunk · skin redundancy
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.
The arm is the area where Dr. Mao most often advises a patient against the operation she came in asking for, because the finding that decides an arm result is the skin, and the skin is not what the patient is looking at. His assessment runs in a fixed order: what the arm looks like raised as well as lowered, whether the tissue between finger and thumb is fat or a thin cover over a fold, what the weight history has been over the last two years, and what the arm has already been through — lymph node surgery, breast surgery, radiotherapy, or any episode of swelling. If the lymphatic history is not clear, he does not proceed to a plan. If the fullness is skin, he says so and describes the operation that would actually change it, which is not this one. Where the finding is fat in skin with tone, he treats the arm as a small-volume site and plans a modest change deliberately, because taking a little more is the instinct that produces the dents.
Clinical focus
The arm is not a small abdomen
On the abdomen a modest irregularity can hide in a soft curve. On an arm there is nowhere for it to go: the volume is small, the skin is thin, and the arm is seen from every angle in ordinary movement. That is why the plan for an arm should aim at a modest change and protect the surface, rather than chase the largest possible reduction.
