Bad News and Good News About Gynecomastia Revision

In our cosmetic surgery practice, we perform a lot of gynecomastia revision surgery. And we’ve been doing so for more than 35 years. Therefore, we have a career’s worth of knowledge we enjoy passing on to candidates for man boob do-over surgery in South Florida and online.

If your first surgical procedure did not produce the results you were hoping for, here are some considerations for you now.

Bad News: Craters, or hills and valleys, are probably the number one problem inexperienced surgeons create, and they can make a chest look worse than it did before man boob surgery.

Good News: An uneven looking chest can often be improved. It takes a practiced eye to know where to fill craters with fat flaps, and perhaps fat injections, and where to perform light liposuction to even out the surrounding area. Read more about craters here.

Bad News: Internal scarring makes revision man boob surgery more difficult. Scarring is the body’s way of healing from trauma, whether planned or accidental. Scars can feel knobby and sometimes appear lumpy under the skin.

Good News: We explain to those considering a surgical do-over that scarring is actually a good thing. The cross-hatched tissue makes the impacted area stronger, and if you can only feel it and not see it, we usually recommend leaving it alone. If it does indeed look lumpy, steroid injections can often smooth it out and eliminate the need for revision (which would create more scarring!).

Bad News: External scars cannot be avoided. There’s just no way to make an incision that doesn’t leave a scar.

Good News: In the hands of an experienced gynecomastia surgeon, patients with moderate sized breasts should have minimal traces of their surgery after healing. If that isn’t the case for you, doctors have several options for improving external scars, from topical treatments to injections. In the worst cases, scars can be excised if the surgeon believes the second scar may be less noticeable than the original.

Bad News: Gynecomastia revision specialists are not numerous. If you have done your research, especially on gynecomastia.org, you may know that true gynecomastia specialists aren’t the norm in every cosmetic surgery practice. We mean surgeons who perform 50, 100 or even more man boob surgeries annually. This means that gynecomastia revision specialists are even more scarce.

Good News: Contrary to what one doctor commented on RealSelf a while back, gynecomastia revision specialists do exist. Our practice is one example, and there are others in large cities in the U.S. These experts are worth traveling to work with and they have ways to accommodate out of town patients.

Bad News: Chances are, your poor results can be improved, but perhaps not “perfected.” This is something you should understand going in, and something you should be prepared to hear from your plastic surgeon.

Good News: If you’ve chosen a gynecomastia revision specialist, they will be honest with you. Performing man boob surgery many times each year, he or she will not be struggling to expand their practice and they will have no desire to take on a patient they feel they may not be able to help. Your job will be to listen carefully as they give you an honest assessment of your prospects.

Bad News: Whether to move forward with revision surgery is your choice, and yours alone. We can’t make the decision for you!

Good News: We can and will have an open discussion with you about your expectations. We will also probe to try to determine whether you might be unnecessarily obsessed with tiny details that others would never notice. We’ll try to point this out if warranted, and will not hesitate to suggest you live with your good, if not perfect, outcome if we feel that’s best.

We have worked with thousands (literally!) of man boob patients over three decades, so we have a pretty good idea about whether revision is a reasonable course of action for any given patient. It would be our pleasure to advise you.

We look forward to hearing from you! Give us a call at 561-367-9101 today.