I've seen the future.... and it's Richard Ellenbogen

There's a great,great interview with him about "volumetric facelifts" and fatty stem-cell injections on Make Me Heal that got me thinking. A reprint of a 2004 article on this concept from the Aesthetic Surgery Journal can be read on his website here.

Dr. Ellenbogen, who was famous within Plastic Surgery circles prior to his Dr. 90210 gig, has been an innovative visionary in my field since I was just out of diapers. I've never had the pleasure of meeting Dr. E, but the more I observe in practice, the more of his ideas about facial aging I find myself coming to independently. Dr. Tony Youn featured his mentor on his blog in April which can be read here.

Concepts of how facial volume loss (both fatty tissue and bony wasting) contribute to the aging face are becoming increasingly in vogue now in the Plastic Surgery literature. Dr. Ellenbogen has been preaching this for nearly two decades against a tide of "wind swept" facelifts as mocked in director Terry Gilliam's 1985 opus "Brazil" on actress Katherine Helmond.