Surgeon’s Journal

Dr. Rothaus writes candidly about facial rejuvenation, aesthetic surgery, and what the evidence actually shows. No filler, no trends — just straight talk from a board-certified plastic surgeon with decades of experience.

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Energy Devices for Skin Tightening: Do They Actually Work?

Walk into almost any cosmetic surgery practice or medical spa today and you’ll hear remarkably similar promises: tighter skin, sharper jawlines, collagen stimulation, lifting without surgery. The devices themselves keep changing names. The marketing language keeps getting more sophisticated. But the underlying question patients ask me remains the same:

Do these treatments actually work?

Platelet-Based Therapies in Aesthetic Medicine

Purpose: This blog is intended to be an educational review of published medical research

Platelet-based therapies, most commonly called platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and platelet-rich fibrin (PRF), have been studied with increasing frequency in aesthetic and reconstructive medicine over the past decade. PRP and PRF are created from the patient’s own blood and produce a concentration of the patient’s own platelets. This creates an autologous (from one’s self) product that can play a key role in healing and tissue repair.

Complication Rates Across Liposuction Techniques: Surgeon Commentary on a 2025 Nationwide Study

A recent paper published in Aesthetic Surgery Journal analyzed complication rates associated with multiple liposuction techniques across a large national patient database. Given the frequency with which patients ask about differences between liposuction technologies, this study is worth close review.

Clinical Takeaway
In patients undergoing liposuction alone, laser assisted liposuction was associated with a lower overall complication rate compared with traditional suction assisted liposuction. While complication rates were low across all techniques studied, meaningful differences were observed.