Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Facial bone contouring · the jaw angle and the mandibular border · planning around the marginal mandibular nerve
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.
His assessment begins by establishing which layer is producing the width, because that decides whether there is an operation at all. He asks the patient to clench, feels the masseter, allows for the fat over it, and then looks at what the bone is contributing, which is where imaging takes over. Where the width is muscular or fatty, he says so and describes the non-surgical route rather than proposing a bone operation. Where the bone is the finding, he plans the reduction around the course of the nerve and the thickness of the mandible rather than around the amount of narrowing the patient hopes for, and he tells every patient that the swelling will hide the result for months and that numbness of the chin and lower lip is expected rather than a complication.
Clinical focus
The width may not be in the bone at all
A wide lower face looks the same whether the cause is the mandible, the masseter or the fat over either. Only one of the three is treated by removing bone, and the commonest disappointment in this area comes from a bone operation performed on a finding that was never skeletal. The examination exists to establish which it is, and it frequently ends in no operation on the bone.
