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 cheekbone body and the arch · planning around the zygomatic branch of the facial 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 asking whether the cheekbone is producing the width at all, because a wide midface can be made by the masseter, by the fat over the cheek, or by a hollow temple above a cheekbone of ordinary size. He examines the face in the frontal and oblique views rather than in profile, since profile hides the measurement the patient cares about, and he uses imaging to measure each side separately and to establish how thick the bone is along the planned line. Where the width is not skeletal he says so and describes what would address it instead. Where the bone is the finding, he plans the reduction around the course of the zygomatic branch and around how much support the cheek can lose, and he tells every patient that the change is permanent, that the swelling will hide the result for months, and that hollowing is a property of the operation rather than a complication of it.
Clinical focus
The width may not be in the cheekbone at all
A wide midface looks the same whether the cause is the cheekbone, the masseter below it, the fat over it, or a hollow temple that makes an ordinary cheekbone read wide by comparison. Only one of those 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.
