The La Jolla Cosmetic Surgery Podcast - With San Diego’s Most Loved Plastic Surgeons

For a lot of women, the most intimidating part of a cosmetic procedure isn't the operating room. It's the money, and the quiet worry that asking about it makes you look like you can't afford it. LJCSC built its whole intake process around taking that fear off the table long before you walk through the door. Janelle Robinson returns to show how the LJC team takes the mystery out of the price from the very first phone call. Ballpark pricing is published online and quoted right over the phone, so y

There's a reason a lean, sculpted chest can still carry a stubborn bit of fullness right behind the nipple — and it's the one spot a thousand reps will never flatten. Dr. Hector Salazar-Reyes explains why glandular breast tissue in men sits exactly where it's hardest to hide, and why building up the muscle around it can make it stand out even more. Across the conversation with hostess Monique Ramsey, Dr. Salazar walks through the “polo shirt test” that tells most men whether they're a candidate,

A woman walks into the office holding her phone, points at a stranger’s before-and-after, and says she doesn’t want that result. Dr. Luke Swistun’s answer is almost always the same: that isn’t you. The photo shows someone with different tissue, different proportions, and usually a different surgery — none of which predicts where her own breasts will settle. Dr. Swistun is the explant expert at La Jolla Cosmetic Surgery Centre, and women fly into San Diego from all over to see him. With hostess M

Around 48 to 72 hours after surgery, swelling peaks, the anesthesia haze lifts, and a lot of women look in the mirror and feel like they've made a mistake. Dr. Diana Breister has been in plastic surgery long enough to know that feeling almost never means what people think it means. Most of the time, it's not regret — it's chaos. Dr. Breister, who came to La Jolla Cosmetic after years of reconstructive work at City of Hope, walks Monique through what's actually happening between day one and day f

At ten or eleven years old, Dr. Hector Salazar watched his grandmother step off a plane looking dramatically younger than she had a month earlier. She had quietly traveled out of town for cosmetic surgery, healed through the swelling and bruising in private, and come home presentable. That moment redirected a kid who, a few years earlier, had been caping the family dog like a bullfighter — toward seventeen years of training that would make him a board-certified plastic surgeon. Monique talks wit

Dr. Diana Breister, a board-certified plastic surgeon who has done mommy makeovers in San Diego for over twenty years, joins us to talk about everything that happens after the six-week post-op visit. You can do planks, but no crunches for at least a year. The rectus muscles she stitches back together during a tummy tuck stay hyperactive long after the skin looks healed, and trying to fire them up too early can send them straight into spasm. Scars are still maturing for up to two years. Future pr

Six months after her breast implants came out, a young woman handed Dr. Luke Swistun a full, untouched bottle of Xanax — the same prescription she had been burning through at three to four pills a day before the explant. Stories like hers are why Monique Ramsey is marking 230 episodes and five years of the La Jolla Cosmetic Podcast by going back to the archive. Monique counts down one moment from each of the five LJCSC surgeons — Dr. Johan Brahme on why a brow lift feminizes women but makes men

When breast implant illness support groups started telling each other to ask their plastic surgeon for an “en bloc capsulectomy,” they were borrowing a term from cancer surgery — and asking for something most surgeons knew was impossible. The plastic surgery community didn’t correct them. They listened, and then they renamed it. Dr. Luke Swistun walks hostess Monique Ramsey through the Breast Surgery Collaborative Community Consensus and the four types of capsulectomy that came out of it: total

Most patients walk into a breast augmentation consultation hoping to leave with answers. Ella walked in with research, reference photos, and a clear vision — and then made the deliberate decision to trust her plastic surgeon’s judgment in the operating room. Born and raised on Oahu and a self-described petite, very active person, Ella spent over a year researching plastic surgeons in Hawaii and San Diego before booking a consultation at La Jolla Cosmetic Surgery Centre with Dr. Hector Salazar-Re

Filler is an easy first step — quick, pretty much reversible, affordable. But there’s a moment patients know well: you’ve been filling the same area for years, and something still isn’t quite right. Dr. Kiersten Riedler, facial plastic surgeon at La Jolla Cosmetic Surgery Centre who operates and injects, walks us through the three most common filler-versus-surgery conversations she has in the consult room — chin implants, rhinoplasty revisions, and tear troughs, where filler and fat transfer eac