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 large weight loss · staged excisional surgery · wound and scar management
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 a large weight loss he works from the weight trend outwards. The first questions are how long the weight has been still, what the treatment behind the loss is, and what is expected to happen to that treatment afterwards, because a plan fitted to a body that is still changing is a plan built on a moving target. The second stage is a map: which regions carry excess skin, how much of each is skin rather than fat, and which of them a single anaesthetic can reasonably carry. Bloodwork comes before a date, and where protein, iron or vitamin status is low, the operation moves and the hospital's dietetic service takes the case first. He advises against operating when weight is still trending downwards, when reserves have not been corrected, when a pregnancy is planned inside the recovery window, and when the expectation is that the operation continues the weight loss rather than dealing with the skin it left. The plan he writes down names the stages in order and says plainly which regions are not in the first one, so that the list can be read again at home.
Clinical focus
Stability is a prerequisite, not a formality
The single most common reason a plan is postponed is that the weight has not stopped moving. That is not a delay in the work; it is the part of the work that decides whether the result holds its shape a year later.
