Video Transcription

Dr. Brian Pinsky: Hello. I’m Dr. Brian Pinsky with the New York Plastic Surgical Group. One of the areas of plastic surgery that I’m very passionate about is post-weight loss reconstruction. There are lots of important details to discuss for the patients, and I thought I would go over some common questions that I receive from all the patients coming in for consultations as an overall informative video.

The first thing to understand is who is a good candidate for this type of surgery? Nowadays, young people have weight loss through many different avenues. There’s post-surgical weight loss in people that have had either a gastric sleeve or gastric bypass surgery. There’s obviously the new medications that have come out that have been very effective, such as Monjaro, Wegovy, Ozempic. Patients maybe find success with that. And there’s always diet and exercise.

And although there’s some subtle differences, many of the reconstructive procedures are the same for all those different types of patients. The most important thing is you want the patients to have a low, stable weight, their lowest stable weight for about six months. Post-surgical, this comes at about 12 to 18 months after surgery. So although it seems exciting that you’re losing a lot of weight after surgery, you really have to wait until you’ve stable for about 12 to 18 months following the initial surgery. So I like to see patients about a year after their operation. That way, we can get to know each other and start planning for the future.

Obviously, all the other medical problems, medical conditions have to be under good control, either hypertension, diabetes, or any other issues. And overall, it really depends also on the desires of the patients and what goals they’re trying to achieve.

Second question, which is maybe the elephant in the room, is how much of this is covered by insurance? Unfortunately, probably not as much as most patients would like. Insurance really covers functional problems. So people with very large hanging panus or lower hanging skin, with problems such as mobility, infections, hygiene issues, this is really what insurance is designed to cover.

Now, we’ll often offset some other more cosmetic procedures, such as a tummy tuck or lower body lift, with some insurance coverage, but there is an out-of-pocket cost to most of these procedures that the patients will bear. This depends on how extensive of a surgery it is, how much time it takes, and what we’re going to do. And so that is really individualized for each patient.