A woman came to me fourteen days after she had a lipo-abdominoplasty performed abroad...
She could not stand upright. Her abdomen was enormously swollen. Her incision had opened. And she had been told, by someone she had every reason to trust, that the firm areas she could feel were fibrosis.
Whether that was what she actually had is another matter entirely.
What those firm tissues really are decides everything that happens next, because your treatment approach for one thing makes the other one worse.
During the webinar, I am going to introduce you to her. Tell you what the procedure actually did to her body, what I felt under my hands when I first assessed her, and what she needed treatment-wise when I saw her.
I'll tell you live what happened.
What this webinar will help you recognise
By the end of the webinar you will be able to see:
- What firm, thickened tissue actually is in the early weeks after surgery, and why it is so often given a name that may not be correct
- Why an abdomen that has been operated on may not have the same drainage pathways as the body you trained on does.
- When a patient in front of you is not yet ready for the treatment she is expecting, and how you make your decision.
- Why two patients with a similar presentation can need completely different treatment approaches.
What this session is
One thing I want to be clear about.
I am not teaching you a protocol during this webinar. It simply isn't possible to teach a protocol specific to any plastic surgery procedure or patient presentation online.
What I will show you is what a surgical procedure of this kind does to a body, why the protocol you already know may not suit the patient in front of you, and how a therapist can unintentionally end up doing harm while following exactly what she was taught.
This webinar will change what you are thinking before you put your hands on a patient.
If that is useful to you, you are very welcome.
Who this is for
This session is for you if you are:
- A qualified MLD or lymphoedema therapist already treating patients after aesthetic plastic surgery, or wanting to start doing so.
- A qualified therapist with postoperative training
- A qualified therapist seeing patients arrive swollen, anxious, and sometimes with complications nobody has explained to them.
It is probably not for you if you are:
- A massage therapist without MLD training. This evening assumes you already hold the qualification.
- Looking for a routine you can apply to every patient
- Looking for a protocol to apply without assessing the patient in front of you.
RESERVE YOUR PLACE
Meet Your Webinar Host
Hey! I'm Petra.
I have spent over twenty years in clinical practice, in two of London's biggest teaching hospitals, I've worked in a hospice, run my own private practice and worked in a plastic surgery clinic where we were the first clinic in the UK providing aftercare for surgical patients. I've worked alongside surgeons, dermatologists, oncologists and clinical nurse specialists.
Most of what I know about postoperative patients I learned from the more complex ones. The ones who were not straightforward. The challenging complications, the ones I had to refer back to the surgeon and the ones everyone else was scared to treat.
I have also stood in theatre and watched these procedures being performed, which transformed the treatments I provided more than any course I have ever taken.
I now train qualified therapists in advanced postoperative care through The Aftercare Academy.
"Plastic surgery involves considerably more disruption to the subcutaneous lymphatic channels than most people appreciate from the outside. Observing this surgery can help therapists to understand why the tissues behave as they do afterwards, and in my experience that changes how they work. It is a level of understanding that is difficult to acquire any other way." Mr James McDiarmid, MSc, FRCS (Plast)
Why attend live
I am running this live, once, on the 26th of August.
I would rather spend ninety minutes with therapists who are actually there, because the discussion goes wherever the room takes it and no two of these evenings are the same.
There is time for questions at the end. That is usually where the most useful part happens, so come with yours.
RESERVE YOUR PLACE
What this changes for you
Most therapists treating these patients are working on an anatomy that changed during surgery. They are competent, they are careful, but they are still guessing.
The therapist who understands what the procedure changed can assess an unfamiliar presentation without freezing.
She knows when to treat and when to delay.
She can tell a surgeon what she is seeing in language he recognises, and she can explain to a frightened patient why her body is doing what it is doing.
That is what this webinar on the 3rd of September is for.