Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Nasal framework surgery · airway assessment · revision rhinoplasty
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.
Dr. Mao reads a nose in a fixed order, and the order is the argument. He examines the airway first, because the septum and the valves share their structures with the profile and a plan made without them can leave a patient breathing worse. He then separates the complaint into regions: what sits on the bridge line, what the tip is doing, what the base is doing, and how much of the impression comes from proportion rather than from size. He examines the skin envelope next, because its thickness sets the ceiling on how much of a framework change is likely to show. Only then is a route discussed, and both routes are named, including the ones he does not perform. In his practice the commonest honest answer to a nasal request is that the region the patient is looking at is not the region holding the problem, and he says so before a plan is agreed.
Clinical focus
One concern, two routes
Almost every concern a patient brings to a nose can be answered with or without an operation, and the two answers are not versions of each other. An injectable works on the envelope and on proportion; an operation works on the framework. Where the complaint is a cartilage shape under thin skin, the non-surgical route can disguise it and cannot correct it. Saying that plainly at the start is what makes the choice a real one rather than a preference between two sales pitches.
