CoolSculpting® is a revolutionary non-surgical contouring treatment that freezes stubborn fat, which then is naturally eliminated from your body.
No needles, no special diets, no supplements, no surgery. And most importantly, no downtime.
It’s safe, FDA-cleared and effective. Results look natural and can be seen as early as three weeks following treatment, with the most dramatic results after one to three months.
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CoolSculpting
Featured Speaker:
More on CoolSculpting® here.
Reza Momeni, MD, FACS
Board-certified New Jersey plastic surgeon, Reza Momeni, MD, FACS, has expertise in cosmetic surgery of the face and body, as well as extensive experience in hand surgery and cancer reconstruction. To achieve natural and functional results that enhance his patients’ lives, Dr. Momeni consults with patients to understand their needs and provides honest and personalized recommendations to each patient, keeping treatment safety and effectiveness in mind. In aesthetics, Dr. Momeni is particularly interested in minimally invasive techniques and nonsurgical facial rejuvenation.More on CoolSculpting® here.
Transcription:
CoolSculpting
Melanie Cole (Host): CoolSculpting is a revolutionary non-surgical contouring treatment that freezes stubborn fat, which then is naturally eliminated from your body—no needles, no special diets, no supplements, no surgery, and, most importantly, no downtime. My guest is Dr. Reza Momeni. He’s a board certified New Jersey Plastic Surgeon with Summit Medical Group. Welcome to the show, Dr. Momeni. Tell us about CoolSculpting.
Dr. Reza Momeni (Guest): Well, hi, Melanie, and hello to all the listeners. Thank you again for having me again on this radio program today. This is really exciting development. CoolSculpting was FDA approved a couple of years ago, and it is the first time that we have something not just a real and FDA-approved and safe but also actually effective to offer the patients who are looking for a non-surgical alternative to liposuction. What’s really exciting about this treatment device is that it actually produces the results that we’re trying to get with a lot of our surgical tools but doesn’t require patients to go to the operating room. It doesn’t require anesthesia. You don’t need even a Percocet or even Novocain or Lidocaine to be injected. So it’s a matter of coming to the office and spending, depending on the amount of the treatment that you want to have, anywhere between an hour to five or six hours in an office, try to target those areas of fat that you want to get rid of.
Melanie: That’s amazing, Dr. Momeni. How does CoolSculpting work?
Dr. Momeni: Well, the history of it is really, really exciting. Some years ago, probably about 30, 40 years ago, reports in literature actually appeared that a few kids here and there would come in to the dermatologist’s office and these were kids who in the summer would put a really cold popsicle inside their mouth, and that cold, freezing popsicle against the fat of the cheek would actually cause some of the fat cells to go away. So moms would bring these tiny cute little kids to the office who’ve been sucking on the popsicles all over the summer, and by fall, they would have an area of almost like a little fat loss or a cheek dimple. It took the smart dermatologist in Harvard a couple years to put these things together, and what they realized was that fat cells are extremely susceptible to freezing temperatures. So we can take advantage of that quality of fat cells, and we can deliver freezing temperatures to particular areas of unwanted fat, and what you will see is a body response over the next few months is that the areas were crystallized or frozen in the fat cells, about 15 or 20 percent of that fat ends up slowly dying and essentially disappearing forever. Now, what happened? You might be concerned about those cute little kids. In kids, what happens is that they tend to actually overcome this in after a few months. They don’t really have any long-term effects from this. But in adults, the effects of CoolSculpting, which is the fat freeze device, are actually permanent. And so that’s why it’s really exciting because we can offer this now as an option for patients who would otherwise not really consider a liposuction type treatment or a tummy tuck type of treatment because they might be concerned about anesthesia.
Melanie: Who can have CoolSculpting? Are there certain people that are not able to or would be eliminated from the need for this?
Dr. Momeni: Right. So that’s a really great question. Maybe in order to answer it more completely, I’ll categorize the patients who are good candidates and the patients who really should never even think about having CoolSculpting. I’ll answer the second question first. There are a couple of very rare medical conditions. Cryoglobulinemia is a condition where your blood is very susceptible to cold temperatures and you may actually have a sort of blood disorder that causes your blood to slow down in its circulation and cause blood clot. Now, this is extremely rare, and most people who have anything like this or have it in their family would know about this. These are the very small set of patients who are absolutely contraindicated for a freezing type treatment. But I can tell you that most of your average primary care doctors would go through an entire career without ever meeting such a patient, so this is not the kind of thing that your average plastic surgeon might even encounter in an entire career. The real question that I think we should talk about a little more is, who are good candidates for CoolSculpting, and the answer to that question is that the most important thing for a person to consider is that this is not a weight loss technique. This is not something like a Lap Band or Gastric Bypass that is really meant for patients who are obese or morbidly obese and trying to get their weight down into a closer to normal range, really, for the sake of their health. This procedure, CoolSculpting, is really meant for patients who are at a steady healthy weight. Now, they might be a little bit overweight or at a normal weight, but the ideal patients are the ones who are maintaining a healthy diet and healthy lifestyle but they have spots that are just resistant. We all have it. We all know where they are. Some of us carry it on our love handle, some of us carry that little pooch underneath the belly buttons, some of us have that saddle back on the side to this side or the inside of this eye, where the skin of his eyes may erupt together. Each one of us genetically is designed to have some areas of fat storage that just tend to be resistant, and my patients will often tell me, “You know, it doesn’t matter how much I diet, how much I exercise. This darn area, I just can’t get rid of.” Most of the patients that are perfect candidates for CoolSculpting -- because what you can do with these treatment device is you can treat the area where their fat is resistant to diet and exercise, and you can cause 15, 20 percent of that fat to go away forever. If a patient wants to have a repeat treatment done, based on whatever their body size is, or based on what their wishes are, they certainly can have additional treatments if more than 15 or 20 percent is what’s the desired in order to be targeted. But that’s where we really want to target the treatment of this device so that we can not only keep it safe but also have happy patients. Again, remember, not a weight loss device. This is really a shaping device. Ideal patients for this are people who have one or two spots or three spots that they just can’t get rid of no matter what they do.
Melanie: How long does it take, or what is the treatment like? What can people expect?
Dr. Momeni: The typical treatment is really custom-tailored to the wishes of the patient and their body shape, so it’s hard to say to a patient. It’s not like a tummy tuck that’s always take two hours or breast augmentation that always take about an hour. A patient might want just one area treated, and the minimum that we would spend on this device is about one hour. Or we have patients who have six or seven or eight areas that need to be treated, and that means that they would spend about six or seven or eight hours. On average, any area that you’re trying to target takes about an hour, because the way that the device works is it has a suction cup and the sides of the suction cup are on with the cooling panels. So let’s say that we’re treating somebody’s love handle. What we do is we position them on a comfortable chair right in the office. We usually have cable television if they want to listen out in into a programming or watch a program. A lot of people like to bring their iPads. We’ve even had patients take naps during this or read a book. We position the suction cup of the device on the area that we’re trying to treat. As we turn on the device, it lifts the skin up into the suction device. So imagine if you were to kind of grab yourself on the love handle or pinch yourself on the love handle. As soon as the tissue goes into the suction cup and it seals around the suction cup, we can flip on the cooling panels and the device, over about a 4- or 5-minute period, freeze down the temperature of that area to a near freezing temperature. It’s actually a little bit above freezing. It’s more like your refrigerator than it is your freezer, but that’s enough at about 3 or 4 degrees Celsius, which is about 36, 37 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s enough to preserve the skin’s integrity and prevent any damage or problems with the skin but drop down the temperature of the fat underneath the skin to the point where it crystallizes. That means that the fat cells actually freeze. And because we can manage with this really careful controlling of the temperatures, to manage 15, 20 percent of the fat getting frozen, that’s the 15, 20 percent of the fat that over the next two to three to four months will slowly die off and your body eliminates it naturally. So we don’t have to go in there and get the dead cells. Your body has its own little clean-up mechanisms where the immune system and the body’s clean-up system will essentially take away the broken down cells into the bloodstream and everything like gets eliminated as we go to the bathroom.
Melanie: Dr. Momeni, how long will the effects of CoolSculpting last, and does it make the contours seem odd if it’s contouring, say, your love handles, or those sides of your thighs? Does it then make it look odder? Does your body naturally retain the shape?
Dr. Momeni: Boy, these are really great questions. Let me address the first question, which is how long does it last. Well, here’s the good news. It lasts forever. One of the curious things about fat cells is that we’re all born with a certain set of fat cells that we maintain for a lifetime. Imagine your fat cells are a little bit like luggage. If you have three suitcases at home, you have three suitcases. Now, when somebody is really obese, they don’t have more fat cells, so they don’t have more luggage. What they have done is they they’ve just stuffed more into their luggage. So they’re really expanding and enlarging their fats up. Now, what CoolSculpting does is it literally removes one of those pieces of luggage out of your luggage set, so now you only have two luggage pieces. What that means is you have less place to store fat in that area. So the effect is permanent. The fat cells that die never come back alive. They’re gone after about two or three months. The second question is a very good question and a very interesting question. What does it do to the contour of the area? The answer to your question is that if somebody has a truly isolated area—let’s say it’s just a love handle or just a little pooch underneath the belly button on the abdomen or just a saddleback on the outside of the thigh—well, usually one treatment on the area where the fat is excessive causes that to go down to the point of matching the rest of the tissue. If, however, somebody has more of a fat ringed around their trunk, so not only do they have a love handle but they have a little fat that goes up towards the back, to the bra fat area in the women or comes to the front, where you have a little pooch above the lower part of the bikini, well, then you’re right. You wouldn’t want to just treat the love handle because once you make the love handle fat go away, then those other areas are still standing out. So those are patients that when they come to us, we give them good advice and we try to give them honest advice about how this works and to make sure they’re educated and they understand that what you want to do is you want to try to treat the person to a full transformation. You wouldn’t want to just think of a person who has more of a high roll around the belt area as a love handle patient. So a complete consultation with the patient usually means that we have the patient in a comfortable room, with a chaperone. We take a look at all the areas that may concern them, but then we also make suggestions that are really geared towards making them have as optimal, as ideal, a result is possible, not just sort of have a factory set when people come through and they treat the area with a device. And I think that’s where although that the device from one office to the next is the same, you really want the advice of an experienced and board certified plastic surgeon who can work with you to try to project ahead of time, so what would happen if we treat just one area or two area? The good news is that if you treat one area and later on it looks like other areas also need treatment, there’s no bridge that’s burnt. You can certainly come back in for additional sessions. We try to project ahead and determine exactly what might be needed so we can make complete recommendations right off the bat so we don’t have to do a lot of catch-up later on.
Melanie: Dr. Momeni, in just the last minute, tell people why they should come to Summit Medical Group when they’re considering CoolSculpting.
Dr. Momeni: Well, the Summit Medical Group has been around for 80 years or so now, and our aim is not to have a patient only be healthy and stay well but also to live well. What we have here is an integrated system where we have not only plastic surgeons but also all sorts of other specialties and support services, and you have the backing of a group that’s been around for 80 years and we have doctors who are supremely trained and very experienced and really served as local and regional resources as Department Chairman and as section chiefs, and they’re the go-to guys in the area. So usually, what I tell patients is that when you’re looking for a doctor or, particularly a plastic surgeon, you want to find out where other doctors send their family members. And we’re very fortunate to be one of those sets of practices where we have the trust of a lot of the local physicians and nurses.
Melanie: Thank you so much, Dr. Reza Momeni. You’re listening to SMG Radio. For more information on CoolSculpting, you can go to summitmedicalgroup.com. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening.
CoolSculpting
Melanie Cole (Host): CoolSculpting is a revolutionary non-surgical contouring treatment that freezes stubborn fat, which then is naturally eliminated from your body—no needles, no special diets, no supplements, no surgery, and, most importantly, no downtime. My guest is Dr. Reza Momeni. He’s a board certified New Jersey Plastic Surgeon with Summit Medical Group. Welcome to the show, Dr. Momeni. Tell us about CoolSculpting.
Dr. Reza Momeni (Guest): Well, hi, Melanie, and hello to all the listeners. Thank you again for having me again on this radio program today. This is really exciting development. CoolSculpting was FDA approved a couple of years ago, and it is the first time that we have something not just a real and FDA-approved and safe but also actually effective to offer the patients who are looking for a non-surgical alternative to liposuction. What’s really exciting about this treatment device is that it actually produces the results that we’re trying to get with a lot of our surgical tools but doesn’t require patients to go to the operating room. It doesn’t require anesthesia. You don’t need even a Percocet or even Novocain or Lidocaine to be injected. So it’s a matter of coming to the office and spending, depending on the amount of the treatment that you want to have, anywhere between an hour to five or six hours in an office, try to target those areas of fat that you want to get rid of.
Melanie: That’s amazing, Dr. Momeni. How does CoolSculpting work?
Dr. Momeni: Well, the history of it is really, really exciting. Some years ago, probably about 30, 40 years ago, reports in literature actually appeared that a few kids here and there would come in to the dermatologist’s office and these were kids who in the summer would put a really cold popsicle inside their mouth, and that cold, freezing popsicle against the fat of the cheek would actually cause some of the fat cells to go away. So moms would bring these tiny cute little kids to the office who’ve been sucking on the popsicles all over the summer, and by fall, they would have an area of almost like a little fat loss or a cheek dimple. It took the smart dermatologist in Harvard a couple years to put these things together, and what they realized was that fat cells are extremely susceptible to freezing temperatures. So we can take advantage of that quality of fat cells, and we can deliver freezing temperatures to particular areas of unwanted fat, and what you will see is a body response over the next few months is that the areas were crystallized or frozen in the fat cells, about 15 or 20 percent of that fat ends up slowly dying and essentially disappearing forever. Now, what happened? You might be concerned about those cute little kids. In kids, what happens is that they tend to actually overcome this in after a few months. They don’t really have any long-term effects from this. But in adults, the effects of CoolSculpting, which is the fat freeze device, are actually permanent. And so that’s why it’s really exciting because we can offer this now as an option for patients who would otherwise not really consider a liposuction type treatment or a tummy tuck type of treatment because they might be concerned about anesthesia.
Melanie: Who can have CoolSculpting? Are there certain people that are not able to or would be eliminated from the need for this?
Dr. Momeni: Right. So that’s a really great question. Maybe in order to answer it more completely, I’ll categorize the patients who are good candidates and the patients who really should never even think about having CoolSculpting. I’ll answer the second question first. There are a couple of very rare medical conditions. Cryoglobulinemia is a condition where your blood is very susceptible to cold temperatures and you may actually have a sort of blood disorder that causes your blood to slow down in its circulation and cause blood clot. Now, this is extremely rare, and most people who have anything like this or have it in their family would know about this. These are the very small set of patients who are absolutely contraindicated for a freezing type treatment. But I can tell you that most of your average primary care doctors would go through an entire career without ever meeting such a patient, so this is not the kind of thing that your average plastic surgeon might even encounter in an entire career. The real question that I think we should talk about a little more is, who are good candidates for CoolSculpting, and the answer to that question is that the most important thing for a person to consider is that this is not a weight loss technique. This is not something like a Lap Band or Gastric Bypass that is really meant for patients who are obese or morbidly obese and trying to get their weight down into a closer to normal range, really, for the sake of their health. This procedure, CoolSculpting, is really meant for patients who are at a steady healthy weight. Now, they might be a little bit overweight or at a normal weight, but the ideal patients are the ones who are maintaining a healthy diet and healthy lifestyle but they have spots that are just resistant. We all have it. We all know where they are. Some of us carry it on our love handle, some of us carry that little pooch underneath the belly buttons, some of us have that saddle back on the side to this side or the inside of this eye, where the skin of his eyes may erupt together. Each one of us genetically is designed to have some areas of fat storage that just tend to be resistant, and my patients will often tell me, “You know, it doesn’t matter how much I diet, how much I exercise. This darn area, I just can’t get rid of.” Most of the patients that are perfect candidates for CoolSculpting -- because what you can do with these treatment device is you can treat the area where their fat is resistant to diet and exercise, and you can cause 15, 20 percent of that fat to go away forever. If a patient wants to have a repeat treatment done, based on whatever their body size is, or based on what their wishes are, they certainly can have additional treatments if more than 15 or 20 percent is what’s the desired in order to be targeted. But that’s where we really want to target the treatment of this device so that we can not only keep it safe but also have happy patients. Again, remember, not a weight loss device. This is really a shaping device. Ideal patients for this are people who have one or two spots or three spots that they just can’t get rid of no matter what they do.
Melanie: How long does it take, or what is the treatment like? What can people expect?
Dr. Momeni: The typical treatment is really custom-tailored to the wishes of the patient and their body shape, so it’s hard to say to a patient. It’s not like a tummy tuck that’s always take two hours or breast augmentation that always take about an hour. A patient might want just one area treated, and the minimum that we would spend on this device is about one hour. Or we have patients who have six or seven or eight areas that need to be treated, and that means that they would spend about six or seven or eight hours. On average, any area that you’re trying to target takes about an hour, because the way that the device works is it has a suction cup and the sides of the suction cup are on with the cooling panels. So let’s say that we’re treating somebody’s love handle. What we do is we position them on a comfortable chair right in the office. We usually have cable television if they want to listen out in into a programming or watch a program. A lot of people like to bring their iPads. We’ve even had patients take naps during this or read a book. We position the suction cup of the device on the area that we’re trying to treat. As we turn on the device, it lifts the skin up into the suction device. So imagine if you were to kind of grab yourself on the love handle or pinch yourself on the love handle. As soon as the tissue goes into the suction cup and it seals around the suction cup, we can flip on the cooling panels and the device, over about a 4- or 5-minute period, freeze down the temperature of that area to a near freezing temperature. It’s actually a little bit above freezing. It’s more like your refrigerator than it is your freezer, but that’s enough at about 3 or 4 degrees Celsius, which is about 36, 37 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s enough to preserve the skin’s integrity and prevent any damage or problems with the skin but drop down the temperature of the fat underneath the skin to the point where it crystallizes. That means that the fat cells actually freeze. And because we can manage with this really careful controlling of the temperatures, to manage 15, 20 percent of the fat getting frozen, that’s the 15, 20 percent of the fat that over the next two to three to four months will slowly die off and your body eliminates it naturally. So we don’t have to go in there and get the dead cells. Your body has its own little clean-up mechanisms where the immune system and the body’s clean-up system will essentially take away the broken down cells into the bloodstream and everything like gets eliminated as we go to the bathroom.
Melanie: Dr. Momeni, how long will the effects of CoolSculpting last, and does it make the contours seem odd if it’s contouring, say, your love handles, or those sides of your thighs? Does it then make it look odder? Does your body naturally retain the shape?
Dr. Momeni: Boy, these are really great questions. Let me address the first question, which is how long does it last. Well, here’s the good news. It lasts forever. One of the curious things about fat cells is that we’re all born with a certain set of fat cells that we maintain for a lifetime. Imagine your fat cells are a little bit like luggage. If you have three suitcases at home, you have three suitcases. Now, when somebody is really obese, they don’t have more fat cells, so they don’t have more luggage. What they have done is they they’ve just stuffed more into their luggage. So they’re really expanding and enlarging their fats up. Now, what CoolSculpting does is it literally removes one of those pieces of luggage out of your luggage set, so now you only have two luggage pieces. What that means is you have less place to store fat in that area. So the effect is permanent. The fat cells that die never come back alive. They’re gone after about two or three months. The second question is a very good question and a very interesting question. What does it do to the contour of the area? The answer to your question is that if somebody has a truly isolated area—let’s say it’s just a love handle or just a little pooch underneath the belly button on the abdomen or just a saddleback on the outside of the thigh—well, usually one treatment on the area where the fat is excessive causes that to go down to the point of matching the rest of the tissue. If, however, somebody has more of a fat ringed around their trunk, so not only do they have a love handle but they have a little fat that goes up towards the back, to the bra fat area in the women or comes to the front, where you have a little pooch above the lower part of the bikini, well, then you’re right. You wouldn’t want to just treat the love handle because once you make the love handle fat go away, then those other areas are still standing out. So those are patients that when they come to us, we give them good advice and we try to give them honest advice about how this works and to make sure they’re educated and they understand that what you want to do is you want to try to treat the person to a full transformation. You wouldn’t want to just think of a person who has more of a high roll around the belt area as a love handle patient. So a complete consultation with the patient usually means that we have the patient in a comfortable room, with a chaperone. We take a look at all the areas that may concern them, but then we also make suggestions that are really geared towards making them have as optimal, as ideal, a result is possible, not just sort of have a factory set when people come through and they treat the area with a device. And I think that’s where although that the device from one office to the next is the same, you really want the advice of an experienced and board certified plastic surgeon who can work with you to try to project ahead of time, so what would happen if we treat just one area or two area? The good news is that if you treat one area and later on it looks like other areas also need treatment, there’s no bridge that’s burnt. You can certainly come back in for additional sessions. We try to project ahead and determine exactly what might be needed so we can make complete recommendations right off the bat so we don’t have to do a lot of catch-up later on.
Melanie: Dr. Momeni, in just the last minute, tell people why they should come to Summit Medical Group when they’re considering CoolSculpting.
Dr. Momeni: Well, the Summit Medical Group has been around for 80 years or so now, and our aim is not to have a patient only be healthy and stay well but also to live well. What we have here is an integrated system where we have not only plastic surgeons but also all sorts of other specialties and support services, and you have the backing of a group that’s been around for 80 years and we have doctors who are supremely trained and very experienced and really served as local and regional resources as Department Chairman and as section chiefs, and they’re the go-to guys in the area. So usually, what I tell patients is that when you’re looking for a doctor or, particularly a plastic surgeon, you want to find out where other doctors send their family members. And we’re very fortunate to be one of those sets of practices where we have the trust of a lot of the local physicians and nurses.
Melanie: Thank you so much, Dr. Reza Momeni. You’re listening to SMG Radio. For more information on CoolSculpting, you can go to summitmedicalgroup.com. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening.