subject: How Safe Is Large Volume Liposuction? [print this page] For many people, large volume liposuction sounds like the perfect solution. In one surgery, a doctor removes large amounts of body fat from your body, leaving you thin and attractive with little effort on your part. You enter obese; you leave as a size zero.
This dream is perhaps especially alluring in America, where over half of the adult population is overweight, and where the most popular Hollywood stars hardly carry any excess fat at all. Throughout America, much of the population equates (consciously or not) body weight with attractiveness, with success, with intelligence, and even with worth.
So, of course liposuction (also called lipoplasty and lipectomy) is popular, and of course large volume lipoplasty is an even more appealing idea. However, one has to stop and ask oneself a very important question: is it safe?
In terms of overall safety, one can generally answer that lipoplasty is safe, when performed properly. The procedure has been approved by the FDA, and when performed by a properly skilled and experienced surgeon, rates of death and serious complications are rather low.
However, large volume lipoplasty is another story. There isn't much of a standard definition of what constitutes a large volume liposuction. A simplistic answer would simply be when too much fat is removed. Exactly what too much is varies depending on which doctor you ask.
Some of this is based on the doctor's own personal opinion. The amount that it is safe to remove may also depend on the doctor's skill. It will also vary depending on the health of hte patient. Healthy people can recover more easily from body trauma like the sort one experiences during a surgery. Even the size of the patient affects how much fat can safely remove. Removing twenty pounds of fat will be far more traumatic for someone who only weighs 110 lbs than for someone who weighs 250.
However, one ballpark definition that can be given is that a large volume lipoplasty is one which removes more than 5 liters of body tissue (including fat, lost blood, etc). Many doctors agree that large volume liposuction is a bad idea. Increasing the amount of tissue removed during a surgery dramatically increases body trauma and the risk of complications. It also increases the risk for negative aesthetic results.
Be extremely wary of surgeons who claim to be able to take you magically down to a size zero, no matter where you are currently. While some surgeons may be able to perform large volume lipoplasties safely, it is nonetheless true that there are more complications and more problems asociated with large volume lipoplasty than with normal lipectomies.
