In breast augmentation it is critical to pick a natural implant for the patient.
Most of my patients are looking for a natural result, and what people notice is that breasts are too small, or too big. If its a perfect woman, she would be born with a C cup. Then you don’t even notice the breasts, you take in the whole figure.
The critical determinant is the measure of the size of your chest. So in other words you want to measure where the cleavage starts in the midline, and where the breast just covers the outer part of the chest. That diameter should be the correct diameter of the implant. And every implant has a set diameter.
If you pick a diameter too small, you’re going to have a wide cleavage even with the breasts out. If you pick a diameter too big, it doesn’t fit, and you get that artificial ring at the top of the breasts that most patients don’t want.
So once we find the correct diameter, then we talk to the patients. Do you want a full C? One implant above that, or a small C, one implant below that?
With every one, you are going to have different widths of their chests, so everyone is going to have a unique implant size to give them the absolutely most natural C cup.
Almost all my patients, the implants are put in below the muscle. Three reasons: less apt to feel the edge of it, massaging acts of the muscles keep it soft, and it is better for mammography in later years because it separates the breast tissue from the breast.
If you go into the muscle, that’s probably the part of the experience that can make you most sore, and takes time to recover from, and it is usually just the first 72 hours. It usually feels like you over worked out. So what I tell my patients is that in the first 72 hours, we will give them some valium, which is a muscle relaxant, usually a light pain pill, but by 72 hours you should be on just extra strength Tylenol.
Most of my patients can return to work within four to five days. Heavy exercise is two to four weeks.
This blog post is based on an interview of Dr. Mark Prysi about Determining Breast Implant Sizes and Location at the 2014 ASAPS conference in San Francisco, CA.
