Preparing for your Consult with Dr. Teitelbaum

Plastic Surgeons    California    Santa Monica    Steven Teitelbaum, MD

Steven Teitelbaum, MD of Santa Monica

Preparing for your Consult with Dr. Teitelbaum

There are four key steps in your breast consultation with Dr. Teitelbaum:

Tell Dr. Teitelbaum exactly how you want to look. Fake or natural? Proportional to your shoulders and hips? Breasts looking dominant, or breasts looking diminutive? Round with the noticeable implant edges, or blended inconspicuously into your body? Do you want the upper part of your breast to be bulging, or do you prefer it straight, or perhaps dipping inwards? Would you like just enough to look more feminine or to fill out a breast emptied by babies or weight loss? Or something that is eye-catching, and gets noticed?

Dr. Teitelbaum will examine and measure you in order to determine the extent to which your wishes can be fulfilled. Every woman’s breast skin has a certain volume that it can hold. If you fill it up beyond that, in the short term the edges of the implant will be visible through your skin, it will look more round, and the upper pole will bulge. Over the long term, the pressure will make your skin stretch and it will compress and thin your breast tissue. If you are already a little droopy, the heavier the implant, the more it will sag. If you fill it less, it will not look full, the upper part may be concave, and it may not be proportionally shaped.

After understanding your desires and examining you, Dr. Teitelbaum and you will reconcile your “wishes” with your “tissues.” Do you want to be big and natural looking, yet your skin is already tight and full? Do you want to be small, round, firm and perky, yet your breasts are wide, loose, a little droopy, and empty? Do you want large, natural looking breasts to balance out relatively large shoulders or hips, yet you have such a narrow chest with small breasts so that an implant large enough to balance your hips would look fake? Most often, women have a sense about what works on their body, and so most often their request is attainable. But occasionally their wishes and tissues are not in sync, and they will need to choose what will be their priority, e.g. becoming a certain size, or remaining relatively natural. Dr. Teitelbaum is very experienced and articulate in providing you with the information so that you can make these choices.

Lastly the doctor will help you to imagine what you will look like. Dr. Teitelbaum wants you to know ahead of time what you will look like; there should be no anxiety about size. He wants no one to ever wake up bigger or smaller than they were expecting. Speaking in cup sizes is not helpful; patients frequently wear the wrong size, and bra manufacturers vary in what they call each size. He will do two things. He is proud to be one of the first physicians to have a three dimensional computer breast imaging system that can take a 3D photo of your body and simulate what you will look like with the implant size you selected.  You can do this both undressed as well as with a bra on. Second, he will give you a ‘sizer implant’ to put inside an unpadded bra, and you can put your clothes back on over it to see roughly how you will look. Neither of these is precise, but they will at least let you have some idea of what the implant size selected will look like on your body.