Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Body contouring after weight loss · staged surgical planning · skin removal
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.
In an assessment after major weight loss he works in a fixed order, and the first part of it is not surgical. He asks how long the weight has been steady and what the trend has been over the past year, what the blood work shows and when it was last repeated, how much muscle and physical function remain, and whether any skin fold is causing inflammation, odour or restriction. Only then does he examine the skin itself, region by region, separating skin that has lost its recoil from fat that is still present, because the two need different operations and the wrong choice leaves a scar without solving the problem. He writes the sequence down with the patient: which region first, what has to be true before the next stage, what each stage costs in recovery, and where the plan stops. He advises against operating while weight is falling, while a deficiency is uncorrected, when the problem is muscle or nutrition rather than skin, and when a patient wants one long operation to settle everything at once.
Clinical focus
Waiting is a plan
The most useful thing said in many of these assessments is that nothing should be booked yet. Weight that is still moving, a reserve that is still low, or a shape that is still changing can all turn an operation into a second operation. Waiting for those to settle is not a delay in the plan; it is the first stage of it.
