Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Breast surgery · asymmetry planning and the reference side · combining a lift with an augmentation
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.
His assessment measures the two sides separately before any operation is named: volume, the height of the fold beneath each breast, the height of the nipple, the width of the base, and what the chest wall is doing underneath. He establishes which side will become the reference and how much change the other will have to carry, because that decides the recovery and the risk. Where the difference is a shape or fold finding rather than a volume one, he says that adding volume will not correct it. Where the difference is new or changing, he arranges the diagnostic assessment before discussing any plan at all, and where a patient is asking for a matched pair he says at the first appointment that no operation produces one.
Clinical focus
One operation, two patients in the same body
Asymmetry surgery is not an augmentation performed on two breasts of different sizes. It is two assessments carried out in one consultation and two plans carried out under one anaesthetic, and the recovery is that of the larger of the two. A patient who understands that before the operation reads a small residual difference as the normal outcome. One who expected a matched pair reads it as the operation falling short.
