VASER Hi Def Lipo Sculpture
PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. - Kendy Mendez isn't happy with his 37-year-old body. He says he's tried everything to shape up, but the results haven't lived up to his expectations.
"I've dieted, I've worked out, I've had trainers..my arms will grow and my chest will puff up a little bit, but I'm still not getting that definition that I want, especially in my abdomen, which is the hardest part for me to lose the inches," said Mendez.
So now he's gone to Dr. Dan Shapiro to undergo a minimally invasive procedure called a high-definition lipo-sculpture.
"My age..it's getting a little harder to get the results that I want in the gym, so I figured what better than something quick and fast that's going to give me the results I want," said Mendez.
A board-certified plastic surgeon, Shapire went to South America last fall to learn how to perform the procedure from the doctor who invented it. He was blown away by what he saw.
"They were beautiful..they were guys that started out in okay shape and then were finished..had rock hard abdomens..they had small, tiny waists..they had beautiful pectorelis muscle..women that had longer waists with really voluptious rears," said Shapiro.
On our first visit to the doctor's office, he was marking Mendez's body for the upcoming procedure.
"We have kind of a roadmap that we make based upon someone's muscles," said Shapiro.
With standard liposuction, Shapiro says there is not a lot of finesse involved. It just basically reduces volume and a patient looks like they did before, only smaller.
But with high-def liposculpture, "..we can change it..we can enhance it and really make someone quite beautiful in terms of their body with this procedure," he says.
Shapiro sculpts and literally reshapes his patients' body by first drawing out the fat from places where there is too much. Then he re-injects some of that same liquified fat. Shaprio says it's like a sculptor's putty - into the areas that need enhancing.
"Really what the six-pack is when we do that we are defining the muscle groups..we're also leaving fat in certain areas so you see the three dimensional contours," said Shapiro.
He says most of the patients he sees for this procedure feel they're not in the shape they used to be or they just want a tighter waist.
"A middle-aged woman thinks she's losing her waist and getting kind of wide..a guy who wants a six-pack abdoment and tight chest muscles," said Shapiro.
Surprisingly, or maybe not, half of Shapiro's patients having the high-def liposculpture done are men.
Though the procedure doesn't leave any big scars, you should be back to work in just a few days. A complete recovery can take a few months, which really isn't that bad according to Mendez.
"I mean it's taken me how many years and I still don't have the results, so what's a couple of months," he said.
As for Shapiro, after nearly 18 years of trying to make people happier with their bodies, he's found something that his patients are really happy with.
"This is something where you plan it and you execute it like an aesthetic procedure and it's remarkable..I've never seen anything like it," he said.
Daniel Shapiro, M.D., F.A.C.S. offers breast augmentation surgery in:
