Nancy: I just have a general question. What do you think of the lifestyle lift?

Dr. Salzhauer: Okay. Well, you know the lifestyle lift, it’s in the same category as the S-lift, and the face lift and all these procedures that are designed to give you an improvement in the contour of your lower face with as little incision and as little downtime as possible. The problem is you tend to get what you pay for, like anything in life. And whether it’s money of surgical risk or down time the more you invest in it, the better the results. So I’ve had many many patients come in that have had life style lifts within the last year or two, and they’ve had basically a reoccurrence of the original problem. It’s not back to the way it was before the surgery, it’s 90% of the way there, and they come into me for a full face lift. The lifestyle lifts can last a year or maybe up to 5 years. But because the dissection, you know, the amount of tissue that they pull and the way they fix the muscles underneath and so forth is not as aggressive. It tends to last not as long. Of course the benefit of not being that aggressive a surgical procedure is that the recovery can be quicker. So the only person I would recommend it for is someone who has like a wedding to go to in 3 or 4 months, cannot take the downtime, doesn’t mind if in a year from the now the face looks exactly the way it was before the surgery but they just want to get something out of the way quick that will look better for that one day or something. I’m not a big fan of the lifestyle lift for that reason. I just don’t think that - you may save some money and you may save some down time but I think in the long run if you want something that’s gonna last 5 or 10 or 15 years, you’re going to have to invest the time and the money in a real face lift to get the result that people want.  A life style lift is very popular, and it’s just not something that in most cases, most of my patients don’t want that. When we sit down and we discuss frankly the risks and benefits of everything most of them end up choosing afar more formal face lift.  I know I should mention this is just my opinion. IF you ask 10 board certified plastic surgeons, you may get 10 separate opinions for every procedure that we talk about. There is an art to this type of medicine and this type of surgery, and what works well in one surgeon’s hands may be terrible in another surgeons hands and vice versa. So whatever I say needs to be understood in the context that I mean it. So again, my opinion is that a formal face lift is a much better thing for your buck.

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