How Many Plastic Surgery Procedures can be Done at a Time?

Some people who want plastic surgery think, "If I'm going to be under anesthesia anyway, why not have several plastic surgery procedures all at once?" Indeed, this is often done on television programs about plastic surgery. There's no one real answer to the question of how many procedures you can have at once. Some surgeries can be done at the same time with minimal chances of problems, while combining other procedures can be dangerous.

There are some advantages to having multiple procedures at once. You recover from several procedures simultaneously rather than one at a time if you spread the operations out. Your overall costs will drop, since you're using the operating room one time and having anesthesia one time. A study published in the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgeryreported that the length of time a patient spends under anesthesia during outpatient facial plastic surgery does not appear to be linked to a higher incidence of injury or death.

When the television series Extreme Makeover first came on, the concept of having multiple procedures at once was new and didn't happen often. But now, patients go over their "wish list" with their surgeons wanting several procedures at the same time. Many surgeons are OK with this, but most doctors agree that more than six hours under general anesthesia pose too great a risk. But in otherwise healthy patients, two or more surgical procedures can be done at a time.

It is a general rule of thumb that the longer a patient is under general anesthesia, the longer it takes to recover. Anesthesia has a significant effect on the cardiovascular system. Therefore some surgeons believe that it is better to put their patients through one surgery for a longer duration rather than two separate surgeries. However, after multiple cosmetic surgery procedures , soreness and swelling usually last longer, so multiple operations at once are only an option for people who have enough time to recover. There are other surgeons who would rather perform procedures one at a time and gauge progress after each surgery, and perhaps fine tune anesthesia for future surgeries.

Having multiple surgeries at one time, or having plastic surgeries on separate occasions both have advantages and disadvantages. The multiple procedures that you want may or may not work well in one session, and your surgeon should be able to adequately explain why or why not that is the case. A Board Certified plastic surgeon in partnership with a skilled and experienced anesthesiologist make the best surgical teams, whether they are able to do all your procedures at once, or whether they want to do them separately.