Plastic surgery websites often offer online guides or tools billed as pre-screening instruments for procedures, especially for breast enlargement. However are these tools useful? Do they inform potential patients of important information that can prepare them for the decision of electing the plastic surgery procedure considered? Looking at the tools, most of them seem to be marketing gimmicks that are of little use, but some can be quite useful in giving patients a basic sense of what each operation entails.



Of Course You're a Candidate!

The Consumer Guide to Plastic Surgery offers a guide called "Am I a Candidate for Breast Implants?" Prior to taking this test, you must acknowledge that the guide's verdict does not constitute medical advice. Hopefully, no one will make that mistake, because as a guide to breast enlargement, this tool is not informative at all. Although the screening test claims to offer "a personalized report" after you complete it, the result is not personalized. The so-called breast enlargement screening tool offers three levels of evaluation: "you are a good candidate," "you might be a good candidate," and "you are not suitable for breast implant surgery." The screening tool utilizes 11 basic questions on breast enlargement, and the scale is heavily weighted in favor of suitability, with candidates eliminated only on the basis of a few parameters, such as being under 18, or the presence of active infections, or existing autoimmune disease or breast cancer. The screening questions are too general to be of use as a tool. And because the questions are very basic, the guide is not informative to anyone who has done research on breast enlargement surgery. The screening might be a reasonable starting place, but most likely breast implant manufacturer Mentor started it as a market research device.

To Visualize Breast Enlargement Results: Use Your Imagination

Mentor's main competitor in the breast enlargement prostheses market, Inamed aesthetics, now a subsidiary of Allergan Corporation, offers the Inamodel, a 3-D breast enlargement visualization tool prominently used on plastic surgery clearinghouse Lookingyourbest.com. This tool's main shortcoming is that it doesn't work. The version on Lookingyourbest.com has never worked for me, even after updating my media plug-ins. Browsing the Internet, I located a site where it would give an initial visualization: an improved polygon image of a 3-D body. The perspective can be rotated and zoomed, but the visualization never changed to reflect changes in the parameters, so it didn't help visualize the results of breast enlargement surgery. This tool is an amusing toy, but as a whole it is worthless.

What, no Peaches?

More useful is the LoveYourLook.com body model, again, offered by Mentor. This 3-D visualization tool allows you to control variables such as ethnicity, weight, body shape, and pre-op and post-op breast sizes. The body shape can be set to apple, hourglass, pear, and straight as options. The weight options are slender, athletic, curvy, or a few extra pounds. The breast sizes available are very small, small, medium, large, and very large. The models have disturbing facial expressions, the model does demonstrate the effect a woman's general size and shape has on the results of breast enlargement surgery. The model shows, for example, that the best results in breast augmentation surgery will probably be seen by women with pear-, or hourglass-shaped bodies, emphasizing the importance of balance in a woman's figure. Women with apple or straight bodies will not see as significant an aesthetic improvement, because the shape of their bodies conceals the results from some angles, especially if they are overweight. Women with these body shapes might see more improvement from other body contouring techniques before seeking breast enlargement. The model's main shortcoming, other than its disturb factor, is that the tool doesn't address implant size at all.

Simplicity Itself

Breastdoctors.com offers an Interactive model that addresses implant size. Overall, it is a good, informative tool. The logo is unclear and unfortunately suggestive, but that is perhaps its worst feature. This model has sufficient merit that a number of plastic surgeons use it on their websites. It is helpful, straightforward, and avoids some of the difficulties posed by the Body Model. The interactive model focuses on the chest region, eliminating difficulties caused by representing faces. The model allows you to set your weight, shoulder, waist, and base of breast. The model saves your parameters, then you use a slider to visualize how several different sizes of implants might look on your frame. This tool uses a simple line drawing on graph background, appearing like a schematic, which helps it appear authoritative. The tool's main limitation is that it doesn't seem to account for initial breast size, and the size of implants only run from 250-650 cc. As an imaging tool, it can be quite useful, allowing you to get a basic idea of what size implants might be good for your breast enlargement surgery.

Learn (and maybe Laugh) a Lot

The most useful interactive tool is called Virtual 3D, developed by understand.com and endorsed by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). This tool presents a useful amount of information, not only on breast enlargement, but on many other plastic surgery procedures as well. This tool utilizes a graphic format that is clear, straightforward, and memorable, and demonstrates breast implant options, types of incisions used in breast enlargement surgery, and the difference between submuscular and subglandular placement of the breast implant. The only problem with the breast enlargement illustrations is that they are a little cartoonish. For example, when the surgeon is creating the pocket for the breast implant, the contrast between the style and the content of the illustration is slightly disturbing. I do not know why the designers at understand.com used a different style than they used for the breast lift tool, which is just as informative without the distraction factor provided by some of the animations in the breast enlargement tool.

Overall, the quality of the tool is related to its purpose. Tools designed to give general information about procedures are good, while those that claim to give individualized or personalized results are far less useful.