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A SURVEY of plastic surgeons suggests that
more people die during liposuction than during many other kinds of
operations, perhaps because the procedure is often done quickly and without
due care in doctors’ offices instead of in the hospital.
“Outpatient elective lipoplasty may not be
quite the safe procedure it is purported to be,” Dr. Frederick Grazer of
Penn State University and Dr. Rudolph de Jong of the Thomas Jefferson
Medical College wrote in their report, published in the journal Plastic and
Reconstructive Surgery.
Liposuction, referred to as lipoplasty by
surgeons, has become the most common cosmetic plastic surgical procedure in
the United States, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons
(ASPS).
ASPS members performed 109,353 lipoplasty
procedures in 1996 — perhaps not surprising in a country where more than 50
percent of the adult population is overweight.
Dr. Gerald Pitman of New York University,
and a privately practicing plastic surgeon, said the problem is that it
seems too easy.
“It is so conceptually simple that it lends
itself to fantasy,” Pitman said.
“You make a tiny incision in the skin, a
quarter of inch , insert a tube and you vacuum out the fat. The physician
who sees this as a money-maker thinks it’s easy, a piece of cake, but it’s
not. Some surgeons try to do too much. They try to use it as a weight-loss
technique.”
Grazer and De Jong polled 1,200 members of
the American Society of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgeons (ASAPS), asking them
if they knew of any patient who died after liposuction.
The 917 who answered reported 95 deaths in
more than 496,000 operations.
That works out to one death in 5,224, or 19
per 100,000. The most common reported cause was a pulmonary thromboembolism
— a blood clot. The generally accepted death rate for any kind of elective
surgery — the kind not needed to save someone’s life — is 1 in 100,000.
‘LUNCHTIME LIPOSUCTION’
“The problem with liposuction is not that
it’s unsafe. The problem is that neither the surgeons nor the patients take
it seriously enough,” Pitman said.
“There should be no such thing as ‘lunchtime
liposuction’. It is surgery and you have to think of it as surgery.”
The researchers and the journal admit their
survey was not strictly scientific, but said the numbers were disturbing.
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