Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Tip support and projection · skin envelope assessment · revision tip surgery
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.
Dr. Mao assesses a tip in a fixed order, and the order is the argument. He starts with the airway, because changing tip position can change airflow and that is not a trade most patients intend to make. He then examines support: the strength and shape of the lower lateral cartilages, the ligaments holding them and the septum behind them, felt rather than estimated, because this decides whether a reshape can hold at all. Then the envelope, since skin thickness is the ceiling on how much of the change will show. Only then does he ask what the patient dislikes, and he separates the answer into projection, rotation and definition rather than accepting a general wish for a better tip. Where the skin will not show the change being requested, he says so before the operation, and the recommendation becomes a more modest plan or a different operation. Where the complaint belongs to the base, the bridge or the chin, he declines the tip and says where it belongs.
Clinical focus
The envelope decides, not the wish
The most frequent disappointment after tip surgery is not a complication. It is a tip that was changed competently and reads almost the same because thick skin blunted the framework beneath it. Skin thickness cannot be operated on, so it is discussed before the operation rather than after it. Patients whose aim is a sharply defined tip in thick skin are told plainly that the tissue will not deliver it, and are offered the version the tissue can deliver, a different target, or nothing.
