The thigh is a relatively challenging area to treat with body contouring surgery.  In the non-MWL (massive weight loss) patient, a little liposuction and tuck is usually all that is necessary, and this is quite a simple procedure.

However, in the MWL patient, things are more complicated.  The outer thighs are the area that sags the most, and these are treated very effectively as part of the lower body lift.  See our page on LBL for more details about that procedure. 

The "inner thigh", which we call the medial thigh, is treated with - you guessed it - a medial thigh lift.  There are many different techniques for medial thigh lifting.  I perform the two variants which I have found the most effective.  One is a "direct" or "crescentic" medial thigh lift which excises a crescent of skin starting anteriorly in the groin, extending along the inner thigh, and then back along the fold underneath the buttock in the back.  This is less involved than the "vertical" medial thigh lift.  The crescentic lift is appropriate for patients who do not have much fat in the thigh, and whose skin excess is limited to the upper third of the thigh.  This usually occurs only in young MWL patients with very good skin quality.

In patients with skin excess extending along the whole thigh, involving the knee area, or with significant skin excess in the circumferential dimension, we need to extend the incision down the inside of the thigh to or below the knee.  This is known as the "vertical medial thigh lift."  The scar on the inside of the thigh is not always favorable, so this is reserved for the patient with substantial skin excess who is willing to exchange their skin excess for scar.

Some MWL patients come to us with still a large volume of fat in the thighs.  In these patients with selective fat in the thighs and/or high residual body mass index (BMI) over 32, we cannot achieve an adequate result with a thigh lift and the complication rate is extremely high.  These patients either have to lose substantially more weight, and/or they may require one or two stages of aggressive liposuction with the thigh lift done as a second or third procedure.  The procedures are separated by at least 3 months when this is required.