RECOVERY
All About Gynecomastia:
The pain after treatment of gynecomastia is usually fairly mild. It feels like you had worked out too hard or had been punched in the chest. Patients describe it as more sore than painful per se. And we give you strong pain medicine; if it hurts, the pill will work to take it away.
Right after surgery, you will have a special foam pad over your chest and a vest over that. That original dressing is left in place for two days. On the second day after surgery, you will remove the vest, throw away the foam, wash the vest, and put the vest back on. The longer you wear the compression, the faster the swelling and bruising will go away. In general, I like men to wear some compression day and night for the first month. But you needn’t always wear the surgical vest we give you; most men will buy a tight nylon/spandex undershirt that fits slimly under their clothing.
Some men barely bruise; most will have some diffuse bruising and discoloration over their chest. This usually resolves between 10 and 14 days after surgery.
If you have an excision, you will have a scar around the lower half of your areola. The sutures are all dissolvable and hidden beneath the skin. If there is any hair at all, this is usually well concealed.
For liposuction, we usually use a ¼” incision at the edge of the areoloa, plus either one in the outer part of the crease under the chest or near the shoulder, just in front of the armpit. These can look pink for the first year, but usually fade after that. If you would like to see what these scars look like, please look at the Photo Gallery, where there is a section called, “Swelling, Bruising, and Recovery.”’
Gynecomastia Surgery - Male Breast Reduction
It is undesirable because it makes men reluctant to take their shirt off. Some wear two shirts everyday just to conceal it. Even thin men who work out regularly at the gym and otherwise have put the effort into developing bodies that would look good in tight shirts and sweaters cannot do so. Gynecomastia can make men who are just a few pounds overweight look much heavier than they really are.
In the past, gynecomastia surgery was mostly done on teenage boys sent to plastic surgeons by their pediatrician. Weightlifters that developed gynecomastia from steroid or supplement use learned about surgical options from reading muscle magazines or from trainers at the gym.
But in the past few years, the treatment of gynecomastia has finally become mainstream. It is not just the weightlifters and teenagers with the really bad cases seeking male chest reduction; it is the men in their 20s and 30s with just enough extra tissue in their chest for them not to look as good as they should.
Unlike women who talk to one another about their breast augmentation or liposuction, men do not talk to one another about gynecomastia. They hide it under their clothes, and so even their best friends are often totally unaware. Once fixed with surgery, they go forward with their lives as if they never had it. But thanks to the Internet, men can now privately research words such as, "gynecomastia," "male breast reduction," "males breasts," "man boobs," "male chest reduction," etc., and learn that there is a very effective solution.
There are two methods for treating male chest enlargement: liposuction and excision. In the pre-liposuction era, the only thing to do was to cut out the tissue ("excision"), usually using a small incision around about half the diameter of the areola. This worked great when there was a small and well-demarcated and circumscribed gynecomastia mass under the areola. But it didn't work well when there was fat spread throughout the chest. Liposuction is ideal for the reduction of fat, because fat is soft and is easily removed through the liposuction instrument (much like a straw.) However, firm and glandular gynecomastia tissue cannot be removed by liposuction; it needs to be excised. If you are interested in seeing what this looks like, refer to the section of the Photo Gallery titled, "What Gynecomastia Looks Like."