Dr. Bae:
Great to see you, Greg.

LSU vs Texas

Greg:
Hey, you know, this has nothing to do with what we’re going to talk about today, but football is coming back really soon and our teams don’t-

Dr. Bae:
Hopefully.
Greg:
…play against each other.

Dr. Bae:
They are going to be playing this year together. Oh, actually you all might be joining the SEC Conference. You saw that, didn’t you?

Greg:
We are. We will playing-

Dr. Bae:
Texas and Oklahoma.

Greg:
We’ll be playing… No, we are definitely joining, and we’ll be-

Dr. Bae:
Okay.

Greg:
…rivals very quickly. So anyway, I want to throw that in there.

Greg playing with his Grandmother’s bat wings!

Greg:
But I actually wanted to talk about my grandmother. So I think I was telling you a story the last time I talked to you. The biggest trouble I got into when I was a little kid was she had this thing on her arm where it hung down, like lots of fat-

Dr. Bae:
Yeah.

Greg:
And I would touch it and play with it when I was a kid. And I got in a lot of trouble for doing that. And I was just wondering other than, you know, lifting weights and trying to tone yourself, what if you have something like that? Is there any way to fix all that hang-down from your arm? I don’t even know what it’s called.

Arm lipo vs Arm lift

Dr. Bae:
Yeah. Right. It’s not the nicest word, but patients come in and use the term bat wings. They come in saying they want to get rid of their bat wings. And I’m sure if your grandmother had bat wings, it’s like totally impossible for you to resist as a child, or maybe even now, to play with the bat wings. That does sound kind of fun. But yeah, bat wings is just the excess skin, excess fat that people get. Sometimes it happens with patients after they’ve had massive weight loss, and it really just depends on which procedure is appropriate for them based on the quality of their skin.

Dr. Bae:
So there’s the two options are arm liposuction or an arm lift, which can also be combined with arm liposuction. But if it’s somebody that’s got really good quality skin and they’ve got a lot of fullness to their arm but maybe doesn’t hang down as much as you’re describing, if they’ve got good quality skin, you can really just do arm liposuction and you can make the incision at the elbow and one at the front of the shoulder. And through those two tiny incisions that can be well hidden, you can go in, suck out a lot of fat, and if they have good quality skin like I mentioned, the skin will tighten up and arm liposuction is all they need to do.

Dr. Bae:
And if it’s somebody that I’m not sure if they have good quality skin, I will still start with the arm liposuction, at least I’ll offer it to them, because if they have to go to an arm lift, then that’s a longer scar. It goes along the entire, I don’t know if you can see this in the video, but the incision goes all along the inside of the arm and it’s kind of an unattractive scar. And so you got to really make sure patients are prepared for that before you do an arm lift on them. And you have to do an arm lift if they don’t have good quality skin, it’s just really hanging down, you’re afraid that arm liposuction alone won’t allow the skin to tighten adequately. And so then that’s when you make that decision to do an arm lift.

Greg:
But it can be fixed. One way or the other, it can be fixed.

Risk of scars with an arm lift

Dr. Bae:
Correct. It can be fixed. And the patients are usually very happy with it. The thing I found is that if they come in and they’re so over it, they’re unhappy with the hanging skin, and they ask for an arm lift and they know that there’s going to be that incision, then they are mentally ready. I find that they’ve done enough research online. They’ve seen the scars. Because the reason the scar is not that attractive is that we always like to make incisions as thin as possible, and scars will start to thicken or widen if there’s too much tension on the incision. And we typically can avoid putting tension on the incision, but when it comes to an arm lift, because we’re trying to remove as much skin as possible, we’re tightening it up as much as possible. And then that inherently puts tension on the incision. And that’s why the incisions sometimes widen when it comes to an arm lift more than other things like tummy tucks and things like that.

Dr. Bae:
So if they come in and they’re ready for an arm lift mentally, then they’re usually very happy with it. And then they’re okay with the scar at that point.

Greg:
I mean, just like everything else in life-

Dr. Bae:
Because they’re tired of their grandkids playing with the flopping, hanging skin.

Greg:
Well, exactly. I mean, when you’re a kid, you do those kind of things. I learned very quickly to not do that ever again. But you know what? Like with everything else, Dr. Bae, you can fix almost anything.

Dr. Bae:
That is true. The magic and the wonderment and the technology of plastic surgery. It definitely allows everybody to get something done eventually.

Greg:
All right, before we go, though, are you good at changing a dirty diaper?

Dr. Bae:
I’m much better at that now. I can do it one handed.

Greg:
Wow.

Dr. Bae:
I’m pretty proud of myself.

Greg:
All right. Well, you are always using both hands when you’re doing plastic surgery. I know that for sure.

Dr. Bae:
Right.

How to get in touch with Dr. Bae

Greg:
All right. Dr. Bae, tell everybody how they can book an appointment, consultation, or ask you any question, because I know you’re always great about answering anything on social media.

Dr. Bae:
Very easy to find me on social media. You can direct message us on Instagram @realdrbae, R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E. You can also watch us operate on Instagram, on Snapchat, on TikTok, all at the handle realdrbae, and also they can check pricing and all that good stuff on our website, which is realdrbae.com. So never a reason or an excuse not to be able to get in touch with us or get the answer to your question that you’ve been seeking so desperately.

Greg:
All right. Thanks, Dr. Bae. Have a good one.

Dr. Bae:
My pleasure. Great seeing you.

The post Bae Break with Greg: Arm Lipo vs Arm Lift [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Dr. Bae:
I’m great, Greg. Good to see you.

Greg:
It is good to see you too, especially now. I mean, have you noticed the weather’s getting a little bit better? We’re finally seeing the sun again. It was a bleak summer for a while.

Dr. Bae:
July. Yeah, we got out of July and it’s beautiful again.

Greg:
Yeah. July was pretty bad. Speaking of pretty bad, this new COVID variant, this Delta and Delta Plus I guess, is in the mix again. I mean, what is happening with the new variant and what can we expect over the next couple of months?

The Delta Variant

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, the Delta variant is… What they’ve said is about a thousand times more infectious than the original Wuhan variant, and what that means is that there’s just so many more viral copies of the virus that build up in your respiratory tract, specifically in your nose. And so that, back before you weren’t putting out as many viral particles, maybe you’d have to be in consistent contact with somebody for 15 minutes indoors to pass it along. Now you could be outdoors potentially and have just a passing interface with somebody. And because there’s more viruses that you’re expelling.

Greg:
Masks again, right? Pull out the masks again.

Dr. Bae:
Masks again for sure. And you know, some people are saying N95s, particularly in a close quarters, like an airplane. So yeah, we are going backwards. It’s very frustrating. And it’s because not everybody’s getting vaccinated. We’re allowing this new Delta variant to get a foothold on all of the unvaccinated people. Yes, there are some breakthrough cases of people who’ve been vaccinated getting the new Delta variant, but it’s definitely significantly fewer vaccinated people are getting sick compared to the unvaccinated people and more critically important as the unvaccinated people are getting seriously ill, more likely to be admitted to the hospital, more likely to die.

Dr. Bae:
Whereas the vaccinated people are less sick. And maybe after a 24 hours or 48 hours of feeling like you have the cold, those people get better that are vaccinated without having to go to the hospital. So obviously [inaudible 00:02:08]… I don’t think I have to say it again, but I will that it would be beneficial if you go get vaccinated, whatever data you’re reading out there that the vaccination is unsafe or something like that. I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of people you have to have entered into a study, getting a vaccine and obviously a huge majority of them, over 99% of them are doing fine with the vaccine. It’s going to convince you.

Long term immunization and boosters

Greg:
Well, let me say this. Yeah. Even though that is kind of the bad news that we’re getting right now and the Delta thing is going on, I do think there’s been two pieces of good news that have come out recently. Number one, we just found out that Moderna said that, I think, even after six months, that vaccine is still 93% effective. So that is great news to know that we now have that study. And of course my girl, Dolly Parton, she funded that one. So of course that one works.

Dr. Bae:
Of course, of course. Yeah. No, a lot of good studies coming out of Israel also, cause they’ve done a lot of the studies with Pfizer showing that, the more antibodies you have that the more protection you have. And so that’s why they’re talking about maybe getting a booster, which isn’t unusual. Because that’s what you do with the regular flu vaccine every year is you’re essentially getting a booster of the new variants that are coming out every year. So to some extent, this Delta variant is no different than… I mean it’s much more serious and obviously… But as far as getting the vaccine, it’s no different than what you would typically get annually for the flu vaccine.

Greg:
Because flu strains change, right? I mean they change every year.

Dr. Bae:
Every year. Exactly right.

Greg:
It’s not the same flu last year that it was this year. And so they change the vaccine every year a little bit.

Annual flu shot will include protection against COVID variants

Dr. Bae:
Exactly. And people think that this is a new thing just because it’s always in the news and you’re hearing about it more, but it’s just obviously rising to our top of mind because of the pandemic and everything. But yes, that is going to be a pretty typical thing I think is that maybe even the annual flu vaccine will include some aspects of the COVID virus in the future, moving forward as that variant changes. So, I think what I’ve read before is that the typical flu vaccine is trivalent, meaning it’s effective against three strains. Now it’s going to be four strains, five strains, but including these different COVID strains, it’s going to be a much bigger needle next year, probably.

Greg:
Yeah, well the other piece of good news is that with the Delta variant, which is not the good news, more people are getting vaccinated. I think people have kind of wised up to the fact that, okay, this is really serious. So we’ve seen numbers, I think going about the 50% range to going over 70% with people at least have one shot.

Herd immunity

Dr. Bae:
Correct. And I think what they were talking about with the original Wuhan strain, that if they got to 70% vaccination rate, that that would give us herd immunity. Now with this more infectious Delta variant, that has got to be closer to 90%, but yeah, we’re definitely moving in the right direction. I think people are getting scared now, they’re realizing, oh wow, this is actually happening to people I know. And so, yes, you’re right. I agree with you. More people are getting vaccinated. And I think just seeing those numbers from the hospital where a huge majority of the people admitted to the hospital are unvaccinated. So people are starting to realize that’s the way to go.

What if the Delta variant was around before the vaccine?!

Dr. Bae:
Something I’ve said before, that blows me away though, is that how many people are getting admitted to the hospital right now in Florida, Louisiana that are overwhelming those systems like no previous surge was overwhelming them. Keep in mind that with this Delta variant, that not everybody’s going to the hospital because we have the vaccine right now. But think about back in March of 2020, if we didn’t have any protection, no vaccine, if the Delta variant was the original strain back in March of 2020, how much more infectious it would have been, how much more sick everybody would have been, how many more people had been going to the hospital, it would have really been like Armageddon. It would have been unbelievable experience. Like we think this was bad. It would have been even worse.

Go get vaccinated!

Greg:
It could have been worse, but you know what, here’s the deal. I’ll make it easy for you. It is… So we were all begging to try to get the vaccine back in the day, right. A year ago, or whenever we started doing it, six months ago, it is so easy. The Safeway across from where I work out, you could walk in, it’s free. You don’t need an appointment. It takes under five minutes. I’ve seen people do it when I’m in there shopping. It is so easy to get vaccinated and it is free. So if you’re not… Go in and do it and you will feel so much better I think.

Dr. Bae:
It’s so true. Do you remember the days where people were getting up early in the morning to log in on multiple websites, trying to find an appointment? And now, the Walgreens in our building, they say walk-ins welcome, walking [crosstalk 00:06:46] available. [crosstalk 00:06:46].

Greg:
Absolutely. And we are lucky again. I know everybody knows this. We’re lucky to live in this country. I was just in Puerto Vallarta a couple of months ago for my birthday. Did you send me… You sent me an email, but where’s my card Dr. Bae? Anyway, there were people, 300 deep, around a building in sweltering heat, just waiting to get the vaccine. So we’re so lucky to be able to just walk into a Safeway. So please do that. And if you have any questions, Dr. Bae can answer them or get you to somebody. If he doesn’t know the answer, he’ll get the answer for you. You’re so good about answering everything on your social media. So can you tell people how to ask you anything really, right?

Where to find Dr. Bae

Dr. Bae:
Absolutely. Anybody can get in touch with us at Real Dr. Bae, R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and just direct messages. And then you can also come to our website and message us through our contact page, or even schedule a consult, well for cosmetic things, obviously, but if you have questions about COVID and the vaccine just absolutely go through our contact submission form at realdrbae.com, R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E.com.

Greg:
Great information. Great to see you again, Dr. Bae.

Dr. Bae:
Great to see you, Greg. Thanks for having me.

The post Bae Break with Greg: What is breakthrough COVID? [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Dr. Bae:
Doing great, Greg. Thanks for having me.

Greg:
Hey, I had a question. So I had a friend who went in for a consultation for some work, let’s just say, recently. And she went in thinking she needed one thing and the doctor told her she needed something completely different to help with her issue that she was having. So how often does that happen, and how do you guide patients into the right direction?

Dr. Bae:
Right. Usually when patients come in, they have an idea of what they want, and you might need to tweak that expectation. Maybe they’re coming in, they want a breast augmentation and they want really big implants. And maybe you need to tweak that and say, “Well, you know what? You’ve already got a lot of breast tissue. Just because you saw somebody on Instagram that had 500cc implants and you liked the way they look, maybe they didn’t have any breast tissue to begin with so they needed all 500ccs.

Dr. Bae:
But if you’ve got it, you got some breast tissue, maybe you only need 300ccs. So we’re not totally changing them from what they want in general, maybe just trying to give them a little nuance to what their expectations are. The one time that I find that I’m completely telling people a completely different operation than what they’re expecting, it ends up typically involving the neck or the jawline or the chin. And what I mean by that is that patients will come in and say, “You know what? I think I need a bigger chin,” or, “I need a more streamlined jawline.” And what it really is is they have a very full neck that’s enveloping their jawline and their chin. And so I’ll show them-

Greg:
Is that like the turkey neck or the overgrown thing?

Dr. Bae:
Exactly. They just have… The muscle that’s in the neck is called the platysma, P-L-A-T-Y-S-M-A. And it’s like this hammock across the neck, and it just kind of holds everything in.

Greg:
I love when you use big words like that.

Dr. Bae:
And sometimes the platysma… At least I’m spelling them for you. You can go back and check my spelling. But yeah, that hammock of muscle, the platysma, sometimes it’s really lax and it could cause the neck to look really full. And like I said, it just engulfs and swallows up the jawline and the chin. And they’re thinking, “Oh, I need a bigger chin. And like, “No, you really need a smaller neck.” Of course, I say it more polite and more diplomatic than that.

Greg:
You say it nicely.

Dr. Bae:
Exactly. But that’s one of the things that we’ll talk about, like doing the different neck procedures. Maybe they just need neck liposuction, or maybe they need that SIMI neck lift that I do, the single incision, minimally invasive neck-lift. Or maybe they even need a full neck-lift. But by contouring their neck, it shows their jawline better. It shows their chin. And I’m able to show them other photos of patients that I’ve operated on, where before, they looked like they had a really small chin, and that you would think, “Yes, they need a chin implant.”

Dr. Bae:
But that’s why you go to somebody that’s been doing this a while is that when I show them the after photo, they can see that the chin looks bigger, the jawline looks more refined. But I didn’t do anything to the chin. I didn’t do anything to the jawline. I just took care of the neck. So it’s really interesting to see when they come in thinking one thing. And I’m just glad that I have photos to show them to prove to them that I’m not making this up, that, “No, you really don’t need a chin implant,” which is nice if you can avoid certain types of implants, if you can just do some natural contouring to the body.

Greg:
Well, I can speak from experience because one of my friends flew from Texas to get this SIMI neck lift with you, Dr. Bae. And she always thought maybe she needed liposuction there, which I know you can do. Or she needed another procedure, because she was always worried she looked, she said, like a bullfrog. And she had a small frame, but big here, which made her look big and round. And since she’s had that procedure, she really has just slimmed up. She has a neck, she has a profile, she has a chin. So it’s a really amazing transformation. And she’s so happy.

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, no, no. I’m glad to hear that. Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. One other example of people coming in and thinking they want one thing and that they really maybe just need another is when it comes to fillers, this might be more applicable to more of the audience, is that people think, “Oh, I have these deep grooves in my face right here, the parentheses lines. And I need fillers there.”

Dr. Bae:
Well, that was one of the ways… It still is one of the ways to treat it. But there are other ways to treat that now. What you can actually do is kill two birds with one stone, is that you can actually give them a little bit more cheekbone fullness here by doing fillers to the cheekbones. And by volumizing the cheekbones, not making them look like a balloon face or anything, but by volumizing the cheekbones, you can actually lift the face and it makes these parentheses lines less deep.

Dr. Bae:
So instead of them having these deep lines, you lift the cheeks, and you can actually see in the video, how I’m making my parentheses lines look less deep by volumizing here. So now what you’re doing is, like I said, killing two birds with one stone. You’re volumizing the cheekbones, which is a nice look, if not overdone. And it can lessen the depth of these creases here without also putting in filler there.

Dr. Bae:
So pretty nice what we’ve learned over the years, techniques that have improved, and steering the patient towards the right thing, not necessarily what I want them to do or what they want to do, but just steering them to the right thing that’s best for them.

Greg:
All right. Well, if you’re watching this video, you’re already on the website, right? So-

Dr. Bae:
Correct.

Greg:
… check pricing right here. Use the price estimator. Also, you can book your appointment right here, or you can always book and ask questions on Dr. Bae’s Instagram, which is…

Dr. Bae:
Real Dr. Bae, R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E, not B-A-Y.

Greg:
All right. Thanks, Dr. Bae.

Dr. Bae:
Always a pleasure, Greg.

The post Are you getting the right procedure?! first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Dr. Bae:
Things are good, things are good. Baby’s sleeping well, and we’ve got a lot of surgery scheduled for all of our patients, and everybody loves to get their education on by watching us on Snapchat and Instagram. So of course, with the patients permission, but things are going well.

Greg:
What is the Snapchat and Instagram?

Dr. Bae:
Oh, it’s realdrbae, R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E, not B-A-Y, that’s realdrbae on Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok, and the website’s realdrbae.com. But hopefully, if you’re watching this video right now, you probably already know that.

Greg:
Yeah. I have a friend who’s fascinated with watching you do surgery. I sort of do it like this, I can back and forth, but she loves it. So I know some people are really into watching surgery, some people can’t stomach it as much, but it’s cool to be able to see the procedure, such transparency at your office, so we love that.

You can also check out videos of a Brazilian butt lift, I get asked a lot of questions about this people. This is the rage. It’s all over TV, all over reality TV, so what exactly is it and who is the right candidate for a Brazilian butt lift?

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, the Brazilian butt lift, along with all the other operations that we do, people love watching it. They love watching the surgery. Again, we get the patient’s permission to broadcast these things on our social media. And even though I know that you get a little squeamish by it, and obviously I respect people’s choice to turn it off and not watch-

Greg:
People are fascinated, yeah.

&Nbsp;

Dr. Bae:
But it’s the most educational way to show anybody a procedure that they’re considering. Think about before, how you would do a consultation. You would read about it, you would then go and talk to the doctor for 45 minutes for a consultation, who you’d never met the doctor before because you hadn’t seen them on social media. There’s so much more to be gained by watching the operation, by that doctor that you’re thinking about going to for months, and then you see the procedure, then you go in and you actually meet the doctor during the consultation. It’s much more educational now than it ever could have been.

But specifically with the Brazilian butt lift, what we’re doing there is it’s kind of a two for one operation. We’re doing liposuction first, to get fat, and then we inject the fat in the butt. Now, as far as the liposuction, we’re taking fat from the abdomen, the flanks, the love handles, the bra chub, 360 degrees around the torso. So by getting all that fat, you’re already just kind of slimming down, trimming down your torso, trimming down your body. But this being California, everybody wants to reuse, recycle, repurpose their supplies, including fat.

&Nbsp;

Greg:
And you can do that with fat as well, right?

Dr. Bae:
Might as well do it with fat. So we take that fat and we put it into the butt, and it used to be, years ago, just like get a big old butt. Like booty shaking, a hip hop video, or something like that. But people are coming in for all types of shapes and sizes and walks of life now to get it, and they’re not just getting a big butt. They just want to have a little bit more shape to that butt, they want more of that hourglass figure. They want a thin waist, which we can get with liposuction and a tummy tuck, and then they want to fill out the hips, the hip dips, and get a little wider hips. So we can get them that hourglass figure with liposuction and then with fat injections to the buttocks.

So it could be younger girls that feel like they don’t have a butt at all, and we can give them more projection, again, fill in the hip dips, but then also we’re seeing 50 and 60 year old women coming in. And before you think, “Wow, that’s crazy, they think they’re still trying to hang on to their youth.” It’s really not that. Think about older women, after breastfeeding or whatever, weight loss maybe, they get deflated breast. And then they come in and they get breast implants or a breast lift, we don’t think anything strange about that.

The same thing can happen to the butt. It can get deflated, and so you want to lift it up. And one of the ways we lift it up is to do liposuction to their whole body. As far as the abdomen, flanks, back, bra chub, take that fat and then put it in their butt, give them more volume, and that lifts their butt, doesn’t look as deflated, and they are really, really happy patients.

Greg:
Well, listen to this. I have one cheek that’s a little bit full fuller than the other cheek. But that could be fixed, right? You could make me more symmetrical?

Dr. Bae:
Well, that’s true, like a butt cheek. These cheeks or your butt cheek?

Greg:
Yeah. No, no, no, down here, I’m talking about down below.

Dr. Bae:
Absolutely, yeah. People will have, like for a good example, talking about what you’re referring to, is people will get a steroid injection into their butt at some point in their life. And we know steroids can cause fat atrophy, which is where the fat dies, and they get a little depression in their butt, or their whole butt is just a little bit smaller than the other. And so yes, you can take fat, fill in that little defect maybe that was caused by steroid injection, or fill in or just volumize the whole butt cheek to make it more symmetrical. The patient does have to understand, though, that 50% of the fat goes away after about six months, so we do tend to overfill. So I always warn my patients, “Your butt will be bigger than you want it to be, initially, but I promise it will go down.

Greg:
That’s okay, you can go to Brazil or you can go to Miami during those months where you got the really big booty, because they’ll love you down there.

Dr. Bae:
Right, exactly, right. And I have found that the patients who are going to Miami, they do want a certain kind of booty that I might not necessarily be giving them here.

Greg:
Of course, it’s a Miami booty.

Dr. Bae:
It’s a Miami booty, and so we’re giving them more of a San Francisco booty. A little more understated, really helps them fill out their clothes, and they’re very pleased with it. A Pacific Heights booty.

Greg:
All right, I love it. Dr. Bae, shout out your Instagram, and also where you can get pricing on this.

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, yeah. You can check pricing for all of our procedures at realdrbae.com/pricing. That’s R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E, not B-A-Y, and you can schedule a consult, virtual or in-person, at realdrbae.com/contact, and watch us on Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok at realdrbae, R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E.

Greg:
All right, thanks. We’ll see you again soon.

Dr. Bae:
Thank you.

Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.

The post Bae Break: What is a Brazilian Butt Lift [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Dr. Bae:
All is well. Thanks for having me, Greg.

Botched

Greg:
My camera’s sliding over here. I’ve got to be careful. I’m banging too much over here. Hey, Dr. Bae, I had a question for you. I’m sure you’ve seen some of this, but I know people are obsessed with that show, reality show, Botched, on E!, right?

But some people really do have an issue. Maybe they have bad plastic surgery. Maybe they had an accident when they were younger in life. Maybe there’s just something on their body that they look at, it just doesn’t look right.

Do you see these kinds of patients often? And I don’t know, I feel like some of them are embarrassed maybe to go talk to anybody about it, and how do you make people feel comfortable going to talk about these issues in your office?

Botched or postop complication?

Dr. Bae:
No, it’s a tough thing because when we’re talking about botched, we’re really talking about just a problem result, or it wasn’t a great result. It doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody did anything malicious, or it was an unqualified person doing it [crosstalk 00:01:10].

Greg:
Or it’s been overdone. Some people get something done five times. It’s like, “Enough already.”

Dr. Bae:
Exactly. There’s lots of different factors. Done too many times, overdone, didn’t stop when they should have, qualified person, unqualified person, or just something didn’t heal the way you wanted when nothing necessarily was done wrong. It’s… people just have to have an open mind that the body heals the way the body wants to heal. And yes, maybe somebody with a little more experience will be able to kind of push the healing in the right direction, but things happen.

It happens to me. It happens to any doctor, even the doctors on the show that talk about botched and look at other botched cases, they’ve had botched cases before themselves. Again, just cases that didn’t come out the way you wanted, but Botched is just a funner word that people like to use, but it really is just a case that didn’t turn out the way you wanted.

Reasonable Expectations

But we have patients who come in who’ve had surgery somewhere else, and that things didn’t heal the way they wanted, and they come in to see me. And so you really just have to start with what’s possible because the truth is the best chance you have of getting something right is the first time you operate on somebody because after that, scar tissue sets in, and so you don’t know how that’s going to respond if you go back in again and introduce more scar tissue because, obviously, you’re building up scar tissue every time.

So when people talk about, “I don’t like the way my scar looks. Can you fix the scar?” Well, they have to understand that to fix the scar as you’re cutting out that scar, replacing it with a new scar and hopefully, maybe this scar will stay thinner this time. Maybe it won’t spread, and you can’t really predict what’s going to happen to everybody for the first operation or even subsequent operations.

So yes, it is. These are tough cases. I do see them. I’m sure somebody else has seen a patient of mine that maybe that patient wasn’t as happy with the result as they wanted to be, and I may not have been as happy as I wanted to be, but you just got to talk to the patient about reasonable expectations of what’s possible. And you kind of hold their hand throughout the whole process and hope to get them where they need to be at the end of the day. And it may take multiple procedures to get them back to that point. And you may eventually be able to hit a home run, and they’re thrilled, or they’ll-

Greg:
And sometimes, you talk about managing expectations and stuff like that. You have to sort of get your mind right. You can’t… it’s like anything else. You have to get your mind right. I’m sure you talk to patients all the time and try to talk them through these things before you just boom, do the surgery.

Dr. Bae:
… right. That’s actually one of the hardest things is I’m here talking about having reasonable expectations, and I’m trying to get a sense from them whether they have reasonable expectations, but I don’t, at the end of the day, know really what’s in their minds’ eye.

I mean, they may say… I might say, “Hey, you may have a little bit of droop after this procedure because there was so much excess skin, and there’s a fear of injury to the nipple if we do too much of a lift.” And so they’re like, “Well, no, I’m all right with those scars. I’m all right with a little bit of droop.” But then after the operation, “Well, that’s too much droop, or are those too many scars?”

And even though we might’ve talked about all of these things explicitly, at the end of the day, you don’t really know what the patient’s thinking, and the patient maybe can’t read my mind either. So it’s a very tricky situation, and the only thing I can say is communication before, during, and after the operation is key.

That’s why I give patients my phone number. I call them the night after the operation, give them my phone number so that instead of them going online and reading things that may or may not be true that I wish they would just call me, text me, send me a photo, so we can hopefully nip any confusion or miscommunication in the bud.

Greg:
And I appreciate your honesty. I’ve been to your office several times, and I’ve asked you to make me look like Michael B. Jordan or Zac Efron. And I bring in the picture, and you’re just like, “Sorry, it’s just not possible,” and I go off again, then I come back with another photo. So I’ll just keep trying. We’ll see. But I would love to [crosstalk 00:04:54] with that perfect body.

Dr. Bae:
You come in wanting to look like Kate Middleton with the nose, and I’d tell you we can’t do that either.

Greg:
Well, I’d like you to stretch me. I’d like… I’d kill to be 5’11” or 6 foot.

Dr. Bae:
There are-
Greg:
That’s not possible, is that?

Dr. Bae:
… there are surgeons in the… I don’t know about the US, necessarily. I guess there’s surgeons everywhere, but I know for sure in Europe, there are doctors that do limb lengthening procedures, and they tend to lengthen the femur which is… I’ve seen these results, and maybe they’re getting better techniques now, but I’ve definitely seen patients who come in, and they want me to fix the scars associated with the pins that were going into their femur to lengthen their femur, so I know that this exists.

Greg:
[crosstalk 00:05:31].

Dr. Bae:
But the funny thing about it is that they lengthen their femur, and it’s all disproportionate. They got these shorter legs below their knee, and then they got these tall femurs and yes, it’s given them height, but you can kind of-

Greg:
It’s bizarre looking.

Dr. Bae:
… it’s bizarre… it’s reverse stilts. It’s very odd.

Greg:
All right. I’m going to skip that one, though. I’m fine.

Dr. Bae:
[crosstalk 00:05:48].

Greg:
I’ll just stay where I am. Dr. Bae, where does everybody find you?

Dr. Bae:
They can find me right on my website, www.realdrbae.com. Thanks so much for watching us.

Greg:
All right, thanks.

Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.

The post Botched, smotched with Greg and Dr. Bae [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Dr Bae:
I’m great, Greg. How you doing?

Greg:
I am amazing.

Dr Bae:
Well, you’re looking a little bit like, I wasn’t sure if I was with the Terminator or with Greg. What’s up with the sunglasses?

How to fix undereye bags

Greg:
I’ll be back. Listen, Dr. Bae. I had a late night last night and I’ve got a little problem. I usually don’t have such a deep bags under my eyes if I get a lot of rest. I do know that that is a problem for a lot of people. No matter how much sleep they get, they still have bags under their eyes. No matter how much concealer or lotion, is there something you can do about that?

Dr Bae:
Yeah. I mean, you can get deep bags under your eyes, possibly that could be genetic. It could be staying up late drinking, or at a library reading like you probably were doing.

Greg:
Did you say drinking?

Dr Bae:
I did say drinking, but you were probably at the library reading the latest Emily Bronte books.

Greg:
I was drinking at the library.

Dr Bae:
Is it Jane Eyre or Emily Bronte?

Greg:
Jane Eyre.

Dr Bae:
Jane Eyre. Okay. Anyways, so yes, you can get those deep bags under your eyes. Again, it can be genetic, if you look at your parents and they have it, then you’re probably going to have it too. So yes, concealer is the easiest thing to do. But, a lot of people mistake that the dark circles under the eyes are, because they’re just like capillaries, and things like that and it’s really not that. What it is, is that the areas under the eyes, they can kind of get deep and sunken in and in the shadow of the eye. So, one of the ways to treat that is to bring that out from under the shadow of the eye by injecting fillers and things. So you might be thinking, “Well, they’re puffy, is that really going to work?”

Puffy vs sunken eyes

So there’s two things going on there, sunkenness and puffiness, and you can treat both of them with fillers initially, at least non-surgically. So with the fillers, you can just bring out that sunken area out from under the shadow in the eyes and it’ll look a little bit brighter, not as dark. That’s one way of doing it. But the puffiness, that’s when you have the puffiness on the lower lid, and then you have this deep crease, which is called a tear trough, and then you have your cheek. And so what happens is, as people get older, the fat bags are always there, but the difference is that your cheeks are higher up on your face-

Greg:
You think.

Dr Bae:
… and as the cheeks descend and they sink, you start to uncover that deep crease. And then, you start to see those bags of fat. So, you can’t treat that with fillers, but all you’re really doing is camouflaging it. You’re just basically filling in filler in that tear trough area, that deep crease, so there’s a smoother transition from the puffiness of the eyes down to the cheek, so you’re using the filler to kind of fill in that gulf, so it’s a smoother transition. So, that’s the non-surgical treatment, is fillers. It does really work. But, if you’re looking to get something more surgical done, then as far as the puffiness under the eyes, that’s all made from fat. So, you can go on the inside of the lower eyelids, pluck out that fat to take down the puffiness, but then you’ll actually take some of that fat and you can fill in the tear trough that deep crease to help smooth that transition to the cheek, so lots of things to do.

Greg:
Its like with other parts of the body. You can suck out fat, maybe in your stomach and put it in your butt. You can take the fat out of here and put it here, and kind of fix everything.

Off-the-shelf filler vs fat

Dr Bae:
Exactly right. And, the other thing we do is, aside from taking the fat from under the eyes and putting it in that tear trough to fill that in, you can also take fat from other parts of your body to fill in the cheekbones, to fill in the nasolabial grooves of these parentheses lines. And typically, people are coming into the office and we’re just doing regular fillers, like Radiesse, or Juvederm, or Restylane things people have heard of, those are just off the shelf. We can fill in these lines, we can build up the cheekbone with Juvederm, Voluma or Radiesse, and you can still do that. But if somebody is already going to the operating room to get something done with their eyelids, then instead of them, it just seems silly to have an operation and then get discharged, and then come back a couple of weeks later and then get fillers right here. I mean like…

Greg:
Yeah, doing it all at once.

Dr Bae:
… why would you just do the fat, do it all at once, get all that good fat, and it’s also less expensive when you take it because you get voluminous amounts of fat, as opposed to one syringe here or one syringe there, you get a lot of fat. You can fill this in, you can fill this in. You can fill in the jawline, you can fill in the temples. I mean, fat is great. Might as well use it. We’ve all got it. And, if you’re already asleep for another procedure, then utilize it then as opposed to coming back repeatedly for fillers, because the fat does last longer. Some of it does die, no question about it. And, we always tell people after about six months, “50% of the fat dies, but whatever’s left over after six months, stays for good, so.” Long answer-

Greg:
That’s awesome.

Dr Bae:
… but that’s the right answer.

Greg:
That’s awesome. So, tell people how they can get a consultation at your office.

Getting a consultation

Dr Bae:
Yeah. So, if you feel like you’ve got puffy eyes or deep creases, like I said called the tear trough, or you don’t feel like you have enough cheekbone fullness here, then we can… Or the other thing is, we’ll talk about another time, but if you have a too much fullness here in the fat, that’s the buccal lipectomy, we can do, that chubby cheek treatment. But either way, you can come in for a consultation, you can book a consultation at realdrbae.com/contact, R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E, not B-A-Y. And before you schedule that consult, whether it’s virtual or in-person, we definitely want you checking pricing, go to our website, realdrbae.com/pricing, and you can see all the cost involved with all these procedures, no hidden costs. You can check out our chat bot on the homepage, which will give you pricing. So, we want everybody coming in fully informed for their procedure.

Greg:
Awesome. Thanks Dr. Bae. Great to see you again.

Dr Bae:
Always, always, thanks for joining me.

Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.

The post How to fix undereye bags with Greg and Dr. Bae [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
That’s right.

Greg Sherrell:
What’s going on Dr. Bae?

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Things are good. The baby is seven weeks old now.

Getting enough sleep?

Greg Sherrell:
Funny you mentioned the baby, because I was going to ask you about that. I was complaining to you in another video about the bags under my eyes. I wasn’t getting enough sleep. But, are you getting enough sleep? And, how do you prepare for surgery the night before? I think a lot of people might want to know. How do you get prepped and ready to go? Because it’s almost like you’re playing a football game. This is your big day.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
That’s right. Yeah, you definitely don’t want patients thinking that you’re too tired the morning of their surgery. They really want you to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. They know you have a life and everything. But that’s the thing, it’s kind of interesting with social media that we choose to put things out on social media about our lives, Kelsey and I. @KelseyKaplanFashion on Instagram by the way.

Greg Sherrell:
Check her out.

Residency training prepared Dr. Bae

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Or they’re also watching me @RealDrBae, R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E. Anyway, so they see that we have a baby. They see that we’re out walking. And they see we’re go out to dinner or something. And Kelsey’s taking pictures and food, which I still don’t really get. But, we definitely letting it out there that we have a child. And so, people know with a new baby, they typically don’t sleep very well. They might sleep two to three hours stretches at a time. So, you can’t hide that fact. When you come in the morning of surgery, you’ve got to be on point, ready to go. Because even though it may be the umpteenth operation you’ve done on that particular operation, it’s the patient’s first time doing it and they need to feel secure.

&Nbsp;

So it’s not as big of a deal as people think. Yes, the baby does wake us up. Yes, I get up and change a diaper and things like that. But I got all this training during my general surgery residency. When you would take call, you’d be at the hospital all night, and you would get woken up for trauma or emergencies, and you’d have to run downstairs to the emergency room and take care of something. And you would take care of things. It might take a few hours to take care of that thing. And then, you would just run back up to your call room. And with the training, you would fall asleep immediately. You wouldn’t [crosstalk 00:02:07]-

Greg Sherrell:
I bet everybody wishes we had that gift, especially during this COVID angst people have. They wake up, they can’t go back to sleep.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Right.

Greg Sherrell:
So, we all need that training.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. You start playing on your phone and all that stuff. But that was the beauty of surgery residency is that you would sleep when you can. I know people say sleep when the baby sleeps, but I don’t think that’s actually a good idea, because then you’re always sleeping because the babies are sleeping. And then, you’re just depressed because you’re not getting anything accomplished with your own life. But anyway, so whenever you had the opportunity in surgery residency, yes, you would do something. It might be something really intense. You just dealt with a gunshot wound or something. You had to cross-clamp something in somebody, a blood vessel in somebody.

But after you took care of business, you went back to your call room, you fell asleep immediately. And so, that’s what’s going on now is I don’t even have to be up that long anymore. So I wake up, I change a diaper, I can fall right back to sleep. Unfortunately, Kelsey has to breastfeed. So that’s why I do feel very comfortable, very well rested, when I come in the next morning to see a patient for surgery. Because, yes, it might’ve been interrupted sleep, but the hours added up to about six or seven hours ultimately. So, I’m in good shape and I’m able to reassure them of that as well.

Attending a Beyonce concert the night before surgery?!

Greg Sherrell:
Perfect. And now, I don’t want to see you at a Beyonce concert the night before my next surgery, Dr. Bae, okay?

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
I promise you, you will not see me at a Beyonce concert the night before your operation.

Greg Sherrell:
Well, and there’s no concerts right now, so we don’t have to worry about that. We know you’re locked in the house like the rest of us, so you’ll be tucked away. I feel safe there, me too.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah, I’ll be at the Lady Gaga concert, just FYI.

Greg Sherrell:
Awesome. Well, we both love her, I’ll see you there. All right, thanks Dr. Bae.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Great seeing you.

Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.

The post Is Dr. Kaplan (Dr. Bae) getting enough sleep? [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Greg:
Hey, this is Greg from Big Bay Mornings on 997 Now, and I’m here with a Board Certified plastic surgeon Dr. Bae. Good to see you again, Dr. Bae.

Dr. Bae:
Hey Greg.

Greg:
How’s it going?

Dr. Bae:
Going well, going well. I just want to point out that that is an awesome man-cave with those UT colors.

Greg:
Thank you. You look at that and look at my Longhorn thing back there. Yeah.

Dr. Bae:
And are you familiar with the actual name of the color? That type of orange?

Greg:
Burnt orange? How could I not be? I went to University of Texas.

Dr. Bae:
It’s actually burnt sienna. Yeah. It’s burnt sienna.

Greg:
That’s not what we say at UT. Here, I even have this for you, Dr. Bae, look at that. Hook ’em. I know you went to, not really a rival school, but close, close to University of Texas. You went to LSU.

Dr. Bae:
No, no. Well, for medical school, but I actually went to UT Austin for undergrad. We were a few years off though.

Greg:
Yeah.

Dr. Bae:
You’re getting confused, but it’s all right. Age does that to people.

Masks are coming off!

Greg:
Listen, don’t try to say I’m the older one here, but anyway. All right. I’ve got a question. Speaking of UT, since we both went there, I have this handy dandy mask. See my UT mask. I’ve got it all.

Dr. Bae:
Looks like a jockstrap, but okay.

Greg:
I’ve got those two, but I won’t go get it for you. I got the mask for you. I’m not going to get the jockstrap for you.

Dr. Bae:
And don’t get them mixed up and don’t get them mixed up putting the jockstrap on your face.

Greg:
I don’t know. In my world, that could be kind of exciting, but anyway, we better get back on track before we get in trouble here. Speaking to these masks though, we might not have to wear them forever. We are turning a corner here with the pandemic. Now, of course, we want people to keep wearing their masks right now. But I mean, one of the things that I kind of like about wearing the mask is it covers some of the things I don’t like about my face and the waddle, and maybe any imperfections, but that’s your specialty to fix these kinds of things.

Dr. Bae:
Yeah. I mean, it looks like things are getting a little bit closer back to normal. I mean, the CDC said this week that if you’re vaccinated, you can be inside with other people that are vaccinated and you could even be with other people that are unvaccinated as long as they’re not high risk. So the time of starting to remove masks is happening now. I mean, it is according to the CDC, I know that each state has different rules, but it’s happening. People are starting to take off masks and then you’re going to be able to start to see maybe the thin lips, the jowling, the full neck.

Greg:
I’m going to see the COVID-19, the COVID 19 that everybody gained.

Options for the lower face

Dr. Bae:
Right. So if anybody starts to get a little uncomfortable with that, people are still able to work from home so you can go get treatments and still recover from home, so that’s still pretty convenient, but yeah. When it comes to the lower face that was covered by a mask, yes, you can get lip fillers if you want. If you want to plump those up. If you have jowling, maybe just slight jowling, you can actually do liposuction along the whole neck, along the jaw line that can help with jowling.

Options for the neck

Dr. Bae:
If you have really bad jowling, then you need more of a facelift, but that’s obviously a bigger step for some people. And then when it comes to the neck, lots of different things, you can do surgical and nonsurgical. As far as the neck goes, if you have a little bit of folders here, there’s something called Kybella that will melt the fat, but keep in mind it will make your neck swell up like a bullfrog for about a week afterwards.

Greg:
Then you’ll need the mask again.

Dr. Bae:
That’s true. You’ll need the mask again. The other option is CoolSculpting, which it just freezes the fat and then the fat dies. The nice thing about CoolSculpting is that it doesn’t cause that big bullfrog swelling for the week after the treatment, so that’s good.

The SIMI Neck Lift

Dr. Bae:
And then if you really want to take it a step further, if you have a little bit of misplaced skin here, then you can do a surgical treatment, like I offer that I developed and I got published for. It’s called the SIMI neck lift, single incision, minimally invasive neck lift, where we just make one incision here, we undermine the skin, tighten up the skin here. And it avoids those big incisions behind the ears where you would normally remove excess skin. But for the patients who really do have that big turkey gobbler neck, have skin that they got to get rid of, then yeah, you would need to do a full neck lift for that, where you make those incisions behind the ears and remove the skin. So lots of options out there.

Greg:
And I have personal experience with this because my friend, Anna, she flew from Dallas. She came all the way from Texas to get her semi neck lift with you, Dr. Bae, And she absolutely is overjoyed with it. She loves the results.

Dr. Bae:
Well, thank you very much for the referral, Greg. You’ll get a little discount the next time you come in. Not that you are getting anything.

Greg:
I’m coming. I’m coming. You see this, I’m coming. Get your needle ready. Get that Botox ready for me.

Dr. Bae:
It’s ready. You’ve got a bottle of Botox with your name on it.

Greg:
Thank you, Dr. Bae. That’s good. All right.

Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.

The post The masks are coming off! What will they reveal?! [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Greg:
Hey, this is Greg from Big Bay Mornings on 99.7 NOW, and I’m here with our resident certified plastic surgeon, Dr. Bae. Hey, Dr. Bae.

Dr. Bae:
Hey, Greg.

Greg:
You look like you just got out of surgery. What you been doing today?

Dr. Bae:
I just dressed up in scrubs so people think I’m a doctor.

Greg:
That’s good. Well, I hope you are a doctor because you have one of the, or you do one of the most popular procedures out there right now. It’s a mommy makeover but I hear that phrase all the time, but I don’t quite know everything that’s going on during a mommy makeover.

Definition of the Mommy Makeover

Dr. Bae:
Every doctor maybe has a little bit different definition of a mommy makeover, but I’ll definitely try to explain what I think is the common denominator for all doctors and a mommy maker just includes making you over, getting you back to your pre-pregnancy state. And so that always includes at a minimum, something to reshape the breast and to reshape the abdomen, two things that are obviously affected by breastfeeding and pregnancy and everything. So a mommy makeover, you can be pretty confident in it, it involves a breast procedure and a tummy tuck. And just to clarify, a tummy tuck is when we remove excess skin, but also we tighten up the abdominal wall because it’s something called a rectus diastasis where the abdominal wall stretches out from pregnancy. And we reposition the belly button after removing the excess skin and the stretch marks. So that’s the tummy tuck.

Dr. Bae:
With the breast procedure, it could either be a breast lift where we just remove excess skin to lift the breast. If they’re looking pendulous from having by breastfeeding, we can-

Greg:
Love that word. [crosstalk 00:01:33]. Pendulous.

Dr. Bae:
Ain’t that a great word. I try to use it in every conversation. But we remove the excess skin to lift the breast at the very minimum, or if somebody doesn’t have really droopy breasts, but they’re deflated, then we can just put in implants. And if they have a combination of droopiness and deflation, then we can do a breast lift with implants. And the way I try to explain this to make it a little easier to remember for patients is that we talk about a mommy makeover, but then we talk about a type one, two or three. So mommy makeover, breast procedure, tummy tuck. Type one is just a breast lift. Type two is a breast augmentation where we put in implants. And type three is a breast lift with implants. So the types just help discern what breast procedure we’re doing, but hopefully that makes sense to the patient. But yeah, mommy makeover, great procedure. We can do all those procedures, the breast procedure, the tummy tuck, all in one operation.

Postop Recovery

Greg:
And the nice thing about that is if you get several procedures at once, you can do the recovery all at once and you’re not having to recover several different times.

Dr. Bae:
It’s true. Because I know people are worried about, “Oh, if I do the breast and the tummy tuck all at the same time, I’m not going to be in too much pain,” but the truth is if you get the tummy tuck, you might as well get the breast procedure because most of the discomfort or pain is going to be from the tummy tuck. You’ll have some abdominal cramping where we tighten up the abdominal wall and the breast procedure is maybe, yes, more painful, but within a couple of days, you’re going to be so happy you did them together because if you do them separately, then you have two recoveries and it’s more expensive when you do them separately, because we can save a little bit of time by combining them. So definitely [crosstalk 00:03:10] combining is the way to go.

Greg:
Save the money. Save the pain. Save the recovery. And my last question is, I don’t actually have to give birth to have a mommy makeover. Do I?

You don’t have to be a Mommy for a Mommy Makeover

Dr. Bae:
No, no. That’s a really good point. If, for whatever reason, you’ve lost some weight, maybe you’ve lost about 20 pounds, you had a gastric bypass, something like that. Surgical weight loss, medical weight loss, you’re just eating better and dieting and working out, if you’ve lost some fat and your abdomen is looking a little deflated, your breasts are looking a little deflated, then yes, you can do a mommy makeover without having kids. The other thing is we also can combine a Brazilian butt lift with a mommy makeover, because just the way the breast deflate, the butt can deflate. And we can take fat from your whole torso, liposuction, inject that into the butt. We call that a mommy makeover deluxe. That’s what I’ll say [crosstalk 00:03:59]. Every doctor has their different definitions of mommy makeover, so that’s kind of our made up term is a mommy makeover deluxe, which includes breast procedure, tummy talk, and then Brazilian butt lift. So now you know everything you need to know.

Greg:
The deluxe is with sour cream, because it always goes to the booty. Thanks Dr. Bae.

Dr. Bae:
Exactly right. My pleasure.

Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.

The post Bae Break: What’s a Mommy Makeover and does your mommy need one?! [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

The origin of Dr. Bae

Greg:
I got a couple things I want you to clear up for me. The two biggest questions I get. Number one, is Dr. Bae your real name? And when I go to the office, what’s the name I’m looking for on that thing?
Dr. Bae:
That’s a great question.
Greg:
Yeah.
Dr. Bae:
Yeah. When you show up to our office building is the 2100 Webster Building here in San Francisco in Pacific Heights. And yes, if you’re coming into the building and you’re looking on the marquee looking for Dr. Bae, you will end up at a Korean doctor’s office. You will not end up in my office. So you need to be looking for Jonathan Kaplan, K-A-P-L-A-N.
Dr. Bae:
But the reason we came up with Dr. Bae… I shouldn’t say “we”. Got to give a shout out to Dr. Miami and his CEO, Rosie. They had the idea for calling me Dr. Bae because I’m in the San Francisco Bay area, but it’s B-A-E, not B-A-Y, just to be a little more hip for the millennials.
Greg:
There you go.
Dr. Bae:
But, yeah. So look for Jonathan Kaplan. But it is funny how everybody when they come in, the patients and the families, they all refer to me as Dr. Bae. And I’m not sure they know what my real name is, and that’s fine. As long as they’re in my office and we’re having a good time, and I’m taking good care of them, it’s all good.

What makes someone Board Certified?

Greg:
Jonathan Kaplan or Dr. Bae. You can find him both ways. And Dr. Bae, here’s the other thing I wanted to ask you. I say it all the time, board certified plastic surgeon. What exactly does that mean? And what’s the difference between a plastic surgeon and a cosmetic surgeon?
Dr. Bae:
All right, yeah, this is a big can of worms that you’re opening up, but it is important. So, for the patient, if you’re going to somebody for a particular procedure, you want to make sure that they are board certified in the thing that they are doing on you. So for example, if you’re going to an orthopedic surgeon for a cosmetic liposuction procedure, that’s not a good idea. If you’re going to an orthopedic surgeon, you want them board certified in orthopedic surgery, and you’re doing an orthopedic procedure, that makes sense.
Dr. Bae:
The thing is, and this really comes down to money, is that over the last decade, as insurance reimbursements have gone down and doctors aren’t getting paid enough, a lot of them are looking for other alternative sources of revenue. So you’ll see ER doctors or OBGYNs looking for alternative sources of revenue, which means going outside of insurance and going to cash pay. And one of the things you can do that’s cash pay is cosmetics.
Dr. Bae:
So that’s why you really got to be looking for somebody that is not just doing cosmetics, but actually is board certified in plastic surgery. Or if they’re doing something on your face, you know that they’re a facial plastic surgeon or that they’re a dermatologist. You can find that stuff out on their website. But it’s tricky because-
Greg:
[crosstalk 00:02:53]. Yeah, what I was going to say is, just because you can stitch me up when I go to the emergency room doesn’t mean you necessarily are qualified to do my liposuction. And so, people need to be careful about that. You want somebody who specialized and went to school for plastic surgery like you did.
Dr. Bae:
Right. And so the thing is, saying they’re a cosmetic surgeon, that’s not really the same thing as saying that they’re a board certified plastic surgeon. And I’m not saying that anybody that says that they’re a cosmetic surgeon doesn’t have some technical ability to do a good job. I’m just saying that if it’s truth in advertising, let’s be honest about it.
Dr. Bae:
The thing is, anybody can say they’re a cosmetic surgeon. If they’re an ER doctor, OBGYN, and they’re doing Botox or liposuction in their office, they can actually call themselves a cosmetic surgeon. They’re not necessarily board certified in that in a way that’s recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties. You might think, “Well, that’s illegal. If they’re an orthopedic surgeon, OBGYN, or an ER doctor, how can they do cosmetic procedures in their office?”
Dr. Bae:
It’s not technically illegal. They just may not have gone through the formal training that you are thinking they went through. Like, yes, they did med school. Yes, they did at least one year of residency training. But they might not have gone through a plastic surgery training program, or a dermatology training program, or facial plastic surgery. So you just have to look on their website to read. And if they say they’re just a cosmetic surgeon, then they may not be telling you everything. Maybe they were a primary care doctor first.

Do your research!

Greg:
The key here is do your research.
Dr. Bae:
Correct.
Greg:
Do your research before you do anything. You don’t want a podiatrist doing your facelift.
Dr. Bae:
And you don’t want me doing your bunions. It’s not an unreasonable thing. It goes both ways.
Greg:
I’ll let you try. I’ll let you try. All right. Well, thanks, doc… Oh.
Dr. Bae:
Yeah, yeah, no. I was just going to say… Yeah, you’re trying to cut me off, man. All I was going to say is that if people have questions about this, it is very complicated and we just touched the surface of it. If people have questions about if this person is board certified in plastic surgery, or dermatology, or facial plastic surgery, you can direct message me on my Instagram, which is Real Dr. Bae, R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E. Not B-A-Y. If you direct message me and you say, “This is the doctor I want to know more about,” I can direct message you back and tell you what I think as far as their board certification. I’m not going to talk badly about the doctor one way or the other. I’m just going to state the facts of what I see on their website.
Dr. Bae:
The other option is you can go to our YouTube page, which isn’t as memorable a YouTube page. It’s youtube.com/pacificheightsps, as in Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery. If you go to that YouTube page, we have a video on there about how to look at a doctor’s website to determine what they’re board certified in. And a lot of people just, again, just type in a doctor’s name in the comment section. I get that message, and then I reply to them about what I think that that doctor’s board certified in based on what I see on their website.
Dr. Bae:
So if you’re feeling lazy and you don’t want to do all the research yourself, you just message me the doctor’s name, and I can get the information back. Again, I am not badmouthing anybody in the process. I am just stating what I see on their website.
Greg:
I was going to say, then you don’t have to do the research. Let Dr. Bae do the research for you. He’ll do it all. All right.
Dr. Bae:
What else do I have to do?
Greg:
All right, now go edit this video, Dr. Bae. Thanks.
Dr. Bae:
Thanks. Great seeing you.

Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.

The post Bae Break: The meaning behind “Board Certified” [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Greg:

Hey. This is Greg here with board certified plastic surgeon, Dr. Bae, This time via video. I love this. I love this new look you got going on here, Dr. Bae.

Jonathan Kaplan:

Thanks. Appreciate you joining me. This is going to be our new vlog, Bae Break Example thing that we’re going to roll out and see how it goes. But I appreciate you working with me. We’ll hopefully work out all the kinks in this first pilot episode.

Greg:

Yeah. I’m super excited. And you can also sort of give me a consult to at times via video. You can tell me if I need a touch up here or there, when I do this.

Jonathan Kaplan:

Except that everybody else can see this video. So they’ll see the few imperfections you have, let’s be honest, the very few imperfections.

Greg:

But see? That’s okay. I can have them, because you can fix them.

Jonathan Kaplan:

That’s true. Fair enough. Fair enough. Point taken. Touche.

Three Vaccines

Greg:

All right. Well, I know what you do for a living is do things like this, help me look better, but you also know quite a bit about what everybody’s talking about. It’s the different vaccines for COVID. And we just had our latest one come out. Johnson & Johnson hit the Bay Area recently. But there are some differences and everybody wants to know between Johnson & Johnson, the Moderna, Pfizer. And some people have even suggested, “Ooh, do I want to get the Johnson & Johnson?” So fill us in and tell us what’s your best advices.

Jonathan Kaplan:

Yeah. So go through whatever website you can or whatever, Walgreens, Rite Aid. Do your best to kind of just sign up as soon as you can, as soon as your tier opens up. And don’t worry about which vaccine it is. They’re all life-saving vaccines. Yes, there are three that you hear about in the news, the Pfizer, the Moderna, the Johnson & Johnson. And yes, there is maybe higher effectiveness for Pfizer and Moderna, 94 1/2% versus 95%. Moderna’s 94.5%. Pfizer’s 95%. but don’t let that scare you, that Johnson & Johnson, the published report, [inaudible 00:01:57] from 66 to 71%, because it’s all about what they’re measuring there. The thing to keep in mind is while yes, maybe Pfizer and Moderna will keep you from getting a milder case, whereas that might get past the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the thing that really keep in mind is that all three of them, after about two to three weeks after you’ve gotten any three of those vaccines, that you will not be hospitalized statistically speaking and you will not die if you catch COVID.

Jonathan Kaplan:

So that’s what’s really important, is that these are lifesaving vaccines that will keep you out of the hospital. Doesn’t matter what those percentages are that you may be hearing on the news. So please, whichever opportunity you get, whichever vaccine you get the opportunity to get, like I was saying, sign up, get that vaccine, go take that vaccine, the one that’s available to you tomorrow. Take it. Don’t say, “Oh, I’m going to wait for the Pfizer,” because you just never know when you’re going to get a chance to get that vaccine if you don’t take the chance when you have it.

Greg:

That’s true. And every day without a vaccine is a day that you could possibly encounter COVID. And so you don’t to have to go through that. And something you brought up and I just want to emphasize is I believe it’s 100% of the studies for all three nobody died, nobody went to the hospital under these vaccines. So it’s going to keep you from getting super sick, no matter which one you take.

Where we were just a year ago

Jonathan Kaplan:

Right. I mean, it’s so insane to think that we have three vaccines not even a year after the first shelter in place order was put in place in the United States, which happened to me in San Francisco. So that was March 16th, 2020. We’re not even to March 16th yet and we’ve got three fully-functional vaccines, that like you said and like I’ve said and which you can never reiterate it enough, it will keep you from dying and will keep you from getting hospitalized. Because that’s the thing, is if you say, “Oh, well, you know what? I want to wait for the Pfizer one,” well, let’s say that’s two weeks away and you go and you get a mild case or what you hope is a mild case of coronavirus, but then you get hospitalized and you get put on a ventilator, maybe you survive, great, but if you would have just gone with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is supposedly around 66%, you would have completely avoided the hospital, you would have avoided being on the ventilator. So it seems very obvious to me.

Jonathan Kaplan:

The benefit also of this Johnson & Johnson vaccine is it is one shot. The other two are two shots. But they are looking to see if you get a… They’re doing another study of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, that if you get a second booster shot, kind of like what you’re doing with Pfizer and with Moderna, that that will actually get your levels up to where the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are. So they’re still studying that. But either way, if you can avoid being in the hospital, why take the chance and wait on another vaccine?

mRNA vs other technology

Jonathan Kaplan:

The other thing that’s really I find interesting about the different vaccines is people talk about, “Oh, well, I’m not sure about Pfizer and Moderna because their messenger RNA vaccines,” which nobody knows what that means. I don’t know why you all of a sudden they’re drawing a line in the sand that, “Oh no. No messenger RNA vaccines.” It’s just that that is a newer technology. Or excuse me, I should say it’s a technology that’s been around for 20 years. Just this is the first time it’s been used as a vaccine. And there was some concerns about fertility. All of that is unfounded. There’s no evidence of that.

Jonathan Kaplan:

So whether it’s a message RNA vaccine or whether it’s the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is a vector-based vaccine, you have to become an epidemiologist of virologist to understand any of this, but just believe that smarter people than all of us have done the research and these things are safe. The FDA has viewed these things as safe. And even though they just came out a few months ago, 100s of 1000s of people were included in the studies for all three vaccines and now millions of people have gotten these vaccines in the United States. So they are safe. They really are.

How to get your vaccine!

Greg:

All right. If you haven’t already, get online now, find all the websites, there’s several of them, where you can sign up to get in line to get your vaccine. You can’t just wait around and think you’re going to get a phone call from somebody. You’ve got to go online and be proactive. You can go to your doctor’s website. You can go to a lot of different other websites that you can search and Google, but it’s important to find out where your tier lies, get signed up and get your vaccine.

Jonathan Kaplan:

And what’s kind of cool, and this isn’t technically skipping the line, because obviously I would never encourage that, but if you go Google Dr. B, B as in boy, Dr. B vaccine, it’s a website.

Greg:

[crosstalk 00:06:15].

Jonathan Kaplan:

And maybe you’ve heard… You’re shaking your head. You’ve heard about it? Yeah.

Greg:

Yes.

Jonathan Kaplan:

It’s a website that will let you know if there’s a place where they’re going to have to throw away some vaccines at the end of the day that they don’t have enough people who scheduled or signed up and they’re going to have to throw them out anyway. And so you sign up for that. My boxing instructor, Magic Sean Hall, give him a shout on Instagram, he went last Thursday to the Oakland Coliseum and was able to get a vaccine because of the fact that he signed up on that website and they were going to throw it out. He’s definitely not in the right tier yet, but because they were going to throw it out, it’s totally legit. And he went and got it.

Greg:

Absolutely. The more shots we get in the arms, it doesn’t matter. We would much rather it get into an arm than get thrown away. So you can also show up the Moscone Center on a random Saturday, if they have extras, people don’t show up. That’s another thing. There are no-shows. So you could try it. You could try to show up somewhere. Be polite. And if they have it and it’s going to get thrown away, they will give it to you. Okay. Well, Dr. Bae, this is all great information. And if somebody maybe wants to see you for your real specialty, which is making us all look and feel better, I know you’ve done that for me and 1000s of others in the Bay Area, tell them how they can reach you.

Learn more

Jonathan Kaplan:

Yeah. It’s very easy. On Instagram or on Snapchat, they can message us, direct messages us, at realdrbae, R-E-A-L, D-R, B-A-E, not B-A-Y. And they can also go to our website, which is realdrbae.com. And we have a price estimator on there, a chat bot where you can check pricing, because I know that’s always… Ultimately, everybody’s question is how much does it cost? So we make it very easy for people to check pricing before they come in for the consultation, so nobody experiences any sticker shock.

Greg:

He can definitely help you get rid of that COVID-19 that you’ve gained, if that’s what you’re looking to do or-

Jonathan Kaplan:

[crosstalk 00:08:01] we all gained.

Greg:

Or any wrinkles, because you’ve been worried for a year and a half. Thank you so much, Dr. Bae. It’s been a pleasure.

Jonathan Kaplan:

Always a pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much for joining me.

The post Bae Break: Discussing the Three Vaccines [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.