Breast Reduction

Breast reduction is a surgery to reduce the size of your breasts.  During this surgery, the doctor removes excess skin and breast tissue and lifts your breasts into a higher position.  If your breasts are excessively large (typically a DD or bigger) and combined with symptoms such as back, neck, and shoulder pain, your health insurance may consider covering the costs of this operation.

Breast reduction surgery takes anywhere between 2-5 hours to perform, and you either head home afterwards or spend a night in the hospital.  It’s not considered a real painful operation, and many women even find that they feel better immediately after the surgery than they did before, due to the reduction in the weight of their chest.

The big drawback for this surgery (and it’s quite big for some) is that it creates lengthy, permanent scars.  These scars typically extend circumferentially around your areola, vertically down, and horizontally along the crease under your breast.  This is called an inverted T or anchor scar.  The scars never disappear, although they often fade with time.

Some doctors perform shorter scar breast reductions, where the scars just extend around your areola and vertically downward (called the lollipop scar).  Although some plastic surgeons can get reasonable results with these alternative techniques, I haven’t found the same in my patients.  It often becomes a “Rob Peter to Pay Paul” situation, where instead of the underneath scar you may get an areola that widens or changes shape, or a scar that looks really wrinkled up.  For this reason, I don’t recommend shorter scar breast reduction surgeries, as enticing as they may sound.

Breast reduction patients are some of the happiest patients in all of plastic surgery.  As long as you are aware of the scarring associated with this procedure, it may help make you happier and feeling better.

To learn more about Dr. Youn performing your breast reduction, click HERE.