You work hard on staying healthy and in shape, yet you have that area of fat that you just can?t get rid of. Maybe it?s that small bulge in your abdomen or the sides of your abdomen or perhaps your have always wanted less volume in the buttocks or your thighs. The pockets of fat that you have may actually be quite small, but they bother you. And they bother you enough to do something about it, but not surgery. You just don?t feel ready for the ?S? word yet.
Coolsculpting is proving to be a powerful new tool in plastic surgery?s body contouring arsenal which includes liposuction, abdominoplasty, and various technologies such as radio frequency, low level laser energy or ultrasound. Coolscupting is anout patient method of reducing localized fat is easy, painless and cost effective. And it works.
Coolsculpting freezes fat in a process called cryolipolysis, which uses controlled cooling to kill the targeted fat cells. We have learned from the Harvard scientists who invented it that fat is more sensitive to cold than skin, muscle, nerve or bone. Fat will die when exposed to specific levels of cooling but the skin, bone, muscles and nerve are left unharmed. Within a few weeks, targeted fat is eliminated naturally through the lymphatic system. Treated fat cells are gone permanently because you are born with a specific number of fat cells which do not grow back.
Over a period or 2 to 3 months, 25 to 30% of the fat in the treated area is gone. Further treatments eliminate increasing amounts of fat until you feel fully satisfied with your results, giving you liposuction-like results without the surgery and at a lower price point.
In August, 2013, the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons published results of a formal study, ?Freezing the Fat Away: Study Suggests Cryolipolysis is Safe and Effective? which focused on the trends in fat removal, whether the same safety and efficacy is found in actual practice as in studies in clinical trials and how in-demand coolsculpting has been as a body contouring option.
Among the findings by the Southern California plastic surgeons who conducted this study were that ?cryolipolysis was highly effective at reducing subcutaneous fat volume and was associated with few adverse events: only three cases (out of 528 cases in the study) of mild or moderate pain/neuralgia were noted in the retrospective chart review, all of which rapidly resolved.?
The interest and demand for this procedure has outstripped expectations. The study also showed that the popularity of Coolsculpting grew dramatically over the two years of the study, (over 800%) with a growing demand among men.?Our review showed that cryolipolysis is not only safe and effective for nonsurgical, localized fat removal, but also provides high patient satisfaction levels,? said lead author and plastic surgeon Grant Stevens, MD. ?With careful treatment planning, proper applicator placement, and multiple treatment cycles, cryolipolysis can produce results comparable to those of liposuction.