Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Alar base surgery · nasal airway assessment · rhinoplasty revision
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.
Dr. Mao assesses an alar base in a fixed order, and the order is the argument. He starts inside the nose, because a plan that ignores the airway can leave a patient breathing worse than before; then he reads the width in front and profile views, separating what the base contributes from what a low bridge or a heavy tip contributes; then he examines the skin for thickness and how it tans, and marks where the line would fall at conversation distance. Where the width is not at the base, he says so and declines the operation, which he describes as the most common outcome of an alar assessment in his practice. Where it is, he plans conservatively, because tissue removed from a base cannot be put back, and he tells patients before the operation that the honest judgement of the result is a year away.
Clinical focus
The base is not always the problem
The most frequent result of an alar base assessment is that the base is not the target. Where a low bridge or a heavy tip is carrying the width, narrowing the base alone tends to leave the nose reading wide with a tighter bottom, and the operation has cost a scar for nothing. Those patients are redirected to the plan that matches the finding, which is sometimes a whole-nose operation and sometimes no operation at all.
