The benefits associated with having large breasts are in some cases outweighed by the many discomforts associated with it. Women with overly large breasts can find it difficult to find clothing and bras that would fit well. Also, they might have difficulties in performing physically demanding activities and even develop an abnormal body posture due to the pressure the volume of the breasts is putting on the spine.
While breast augmentation surgery is without a doubt one of the most sought after procedures worldwide, breast reduction surgery is gaining more and more awareness and interest every year. Before coming to the plastic surgeon’s office for the pre-operative consultation for breast reduction surgery, some patients look if there are other alternatives to breast reduction. They hope that maybe a cream, special massage, or a diet will help them reduce the size of their breasts without having to undergo plastic surgery.
To understand whether there can be alternatives to breast reduction surgery, we need to discuss how the overdevelopment of the breasts occurs and in what way it affects the breasts. There are multiple causes for breast hypertrophy, and it can occur when the patient is a teenager, after pregnancy, and also in different stages of the patient’s life. This means that we can even have girls as young as 13 or 14 years old with excessively developed breasts, but also young mothers and older women as well.
The breasts are made out of skin envelope, fat tissue, and mammary gland tissue. When the breasts are overly large, some people believe it is because there is an excess of fat tissue, and that maybe losing weight might help reduce the size of the breasts. When we are talking about breast hypertrophy, usually this means an excess of glandular tissue, not fat tissue. A doctor would need to perform a medical examination on the tissues of the breasts to see what causes their excessive size, but in a vast majority of cases, we are talking about mammary gland tissue in excess. This is even easier to diagnose if the patient has a normal weight.
If the excessive size of the breasts is due to the overdevelopment of the glandular tissue, this means that no diet or physical exercise will be effective in reducing its size. Of course, weight fluctuations, as well as physical exercises, will leave their marks on the body and also the breasts, but while the shape of the breasts might change, their volume is unlikely to be affected by these methods.
This is the reason why there are no other alternatives to breast reduction surgery. It is just the surgical procedure that can reduce the size of the breasts by excising the surplus of glandular tissue and additional skin tissue. The procedure is safe when performed by a board-certified plastic surgeon in an accredited medical facility.