View successful before & after photos of tumescent liposuction patients who have been treated by various plastic surgeons.
Tumescent liposuction is one technique of liposuction in which a solution of saline and local anesthesia is injected into the surgical field before fat aspiration. This is done to minimize bleeding and limiit the amount of sedation or general anesthesia needed.
Tumescence refers to a technique that involves infiltrating tissue with one of the Intravenous solutions (i.e. Ringers Lactate) containing a local anesthetic [i.e. lidocaine] and the blood vessel constricting drug epinephrin.
The infiltration is continued until the tissue involved becomes boggy and thick or in other words tumescent.
Tumescent infiltration is used to initiate several surgical procedures such as Facelift and Tummy Tuck. For these procedures, it supplies the local anesthetic and reduces bleeding during the surgery. Tumescence is most commonly employed in preparing the patients’ tissue for liposuction.
The tumescent solution used to infiltrate the fat can provide the anesthesia necessary to perform the liposuction. It also reduces the rapidity of blood loss and allows more fat to be removed before the maximum amount of allowable blood loss is reached.
Because Tumescence is so commonly used with all forms of liposuction it has become synonymous with liposuction itself.
With pure Tumescent Liposuction (which is first described by Dr. Klein in Southern California, utilized by most dermatologic surgeon), the procedure is performed under mild sedation and there is no general anesthesia, the procedure can take half of a day if not whole day, and patients can provide feedback if the liposuction surgeon is too rough.
With traditional plastic surgery approach, tumescent lipsuction is performed under general anesthesia with IV infusion of fluids, procedure typically gets done in a couple hours, with larger cannula, occasionally done by a nurse while the plastic surgeon is working on facelifts or other procedure.
There are good surgeons and suboptimal liposuction surgeons performing both techniques.