Brazilian Butt Lift Safety with Dr. Josef Hadeed

Good afternoon everybody. Dr. Josef Hadeed here. I am a board-certified plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, California, and a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. I’m going to talk to you today about a BBL, or Brazilian Butt Lift, which is a procedure where we take a patient’s own fat and transfer it to the gluteal region to augment the shape and volume of the buttocks.

If you’re someone who’s considering this procedure, one of the most important things you could do is to make sure that your surgeon is actually a plastic surgeon and not just any surgeon who says that they could perform the procedure. Additionally, you want to make sure that your plastic surgeon is board certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery, which means that they are held to a much higher standard of outcomes, safety, and ethics than other surgeons are.

Ask your surgeon how often they perform the procedure and how many of these procedures have they done. If you’ll ask any plastic surgeon, they’ll tell you that patient safety is the number one factor that’s important to the surgeon when performing not just a BBL but any procedure in general.

There are many things that set plastic surgeons apart. One of them being is that we critically evaluate our own outcomes, and most plastic surgeons who perform a BBL will enter the results into a national registry called GRAFT. One of the advantages to having access to this registry is that we could not only look at our own outcomes but also compare them to our peers as well who are performing this procedure. This gives us a lot of data that lets us know are we performing this procedure safely, and are the outcomes that we’re getting good outcomes and in the patient’s best interest? So that is one of the things that plastic surgeons constantly look at when we’re educating ourselves is are we doing the best things possible for our patients?

Now, one of the things that plastic surgeons as innovators have recently been doing with the BBL procedure is injecting the fat with the assistance of ultrasound in the operating room. You may have heard that there have been a lot of very severe complications resulting from patients who have undergone this procedure. When you go to a plastic surgeon who does use ultrasound, you can feel very confident knowing that your plastic surgeon knows the exact area to inject the fat in—that will be the safest area to inject it in to minimize the risk of having any adverse reactions when you have the procedure done.

You also want to make sure that your plastic surgeon is performing the procedure, your surgery, in a fully accredited facility, whether it’s a hospital, an ambulatory surgery center, or an office-based OR.

So these are all the things that you have to keep in mind if you are considering having a BBL procedure. Again, make sure that your plastic surgeon is board-certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery and ask them the appropriate questions, including whether or not they use ultrasound.

Thank you.