Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Upper eyelid surgery · measuring skin against lid closure · crease height and revision of over-resection
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.
On this site his part is the measurement that comes before the operation. He works out how much skin the lid can spare by pinching it with the brow held in its resting position, checks that the lid closes fully and that the tear film is adequate, and establishes whether the real finding is skin, a brow that has descended, or a lid margin that sits low. He marks the crease with the patient sitting upright and awake rather than estimating it on a face lying flat, and he treats deliberate under-resection as the safer error, because the hollow lid left by taking too much is a harder problem than the fold it was meant to remove. Where the honest answer is a different operation, an eye that should not be operated on, or no treatment at all, he says so at the assessment rather than after the event.
Clinical focus
The measurement is the operation
Almost everything that goes wrong on an upper lid goes wrong in the measurement rather than in the stitching. A strip of skin that was one or two millimetres too generous is the difference between a lid that closes over the eye at night and one that does not, and the patient notices it long before anyone else does. That is why the assessment takes longer than the operation, and why a surgeon who argues for less skin than you asked for is usually the one to listen to.
