Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Staged return to activity after aesthetic and reconstructive surgery · recognising a problem after training · revision and its limits
Dr. Tongchun Mao is an aesthetic surgeon at Chongqing West District Hospital, where he is Deputy Director and Head of Aesthetic Surgery in its Plastic Surgery & Aesthetics Medical Center and the responsible physician for this site. He personally performs more than 700 operations a year, within hospital standards of assessment, anaesthesia and follow-up.
He sets the staged return operation by operation rather than by a general rule, because the strain an activity puts through a fresh wound depends on which layer was divided and how it was closed. He tells patients that an ache arriving after a new activity and settling by the next morning is the ordinary pattern, that the test is the morning rather than the moment, and that a symptom still there a day later is what he wants to hear about. What he asks in return is that no one restarts an activity to see whether it happens again, because that second attempt is how a strain becomes a collection or an opened wound. He stops someone rather than clears them when a wound is not sound, when a collection is present, when the swelling is not following the expected course, or when the clot findings are there — and he says plainly that a further operation is a further recovery rather than a reset.
Clinical focus
The morning after is the test
There is no way to test at home whether a wound is sound, and no way to undo a session that has already been done. What a patient can do is apply one simple test to the day after a new activity: if the area has settled by the morning, the activity was within the plan, and if it has not, that is the finding worth reporting rather than repeating. It is the reason this site puts the emergency routing above every explanation it offers, and the reason the staged return is described stage by stage rather than as a date.
