Wall Street Journal-get a 6-pack from your doctor

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Health Blog

Six-Pack Surgery:

From Puffy to Buff

By JACOB GOLDSTEIN

October 30, 2007

Despite spending a few years in Miami, land of cosmetic surgery, the Health Blog hadn't heard of doctors carving out the washboard abs that some old-fashioned guys still get by following grueling exercise routines.

So we couldn't help but notice these before and after pictures among the studies being presented this week at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons' annual conference. The technique, called abdominal etching, is a kind of precision liposuction. The doc sucks out the fat that's standing between the patient and, if everything goes well, the six-pack.

The suction six-pack costs between $4,000 and $7,000 and is only suitable for certain patients, Aldo Benjamin Guerra, the Arizona plastic surgeon who authored the abstract, told us. "I probably turn down about twice as many patients as I work on," he said. "You have to have a certain amount of fat. If you have too little or too much you're not going to get the definition."

The magic number, he said, is one to two centimeters of pinchable belly fat. Patients also have to be in good physical shape, and if they've already dropped a lot of weight, they'll probably have too much extra skin for the procedure to work.

The technique has been around for more than a decade, but abdominal etching has never really taken off, Guerra said. One reason, he thinks, is because it's more popular among men, who tend to be in the minority of cosmetic surgery patients. You'd also have to really, really want flashy abs to go through the whole process.

The procedure takes an hour or two. But pain can persist for days afterward. Swelling can last for weeks or even months. (The after picture was taken a little over a year after the surgery.) And there can be complications, such as infection and bleeding.

Guerra's paper looked at the experience of 32 patients. Several had post-operative complications. Six of them had a buildup of Fluid known as seroma, which can be drained with a needle. Three had scarring serious enough for Guerra to give them a shot of cortisone. And two patients needed a second surgical procedure to get the desired results.

Eighty-six percent of the patients were satisfied with the results.