Did you miss Dr. Koenig‘s interview on the Radio 95.1 Wease morning show? Dr. Koenig discussed his low complication rates, the dangers of having surgery abroad, and his use of the Keller Funnel in breast augmentation surgery. Hear the full interview below.
Wease 0:00
Radio 95.1 Brother Wease morning radio program, up on top of the Five Star National Bank building downtown. Our regular contingent of DiTullio King ceric, Paulie G and Billy joined by plastic surgeon, is that right? Mr. Koenig, Dr. Koenig is in the house from the Quatela Center. Is it the Quatela Center for Plastic Surgery?
Dr. William Koenig 0:27
That’s the name, yup.
Wease 0:28
No funny, cutesy.
Dr. William Koenig 0:30
No just that.
Wease 0:32
One guy, I was talking about it off-air to somebody, and they go, Oh, you mean the Lindsay House? But that’s just the building. Not the name of the joint.
Dr. William Koenig 0:42
That’s correct. Yeah, the Lindsay House is the building and then the name of the practice is the Quatela Center.
Wease 0:48
Dr. Koenig co-authored something, wait a minute, you invented this thing?
Dr. William Koenig 0:53
No, no, no. It was just we, I just had a paper accepted at one of the big meetings about using the Keller funnel, which is a, just a safety kind of precaution when you’re doing breast surgery.
Paulie G 1:03
He’s got some really impressive statistics about how safe the surgeries that he does are compared to elsewhere in the country or outside of the country, I guess I should say,
Wease 1:12
Basically, do you mean the stats with the, with the Keller funnel? As opposed to non-Keller funnel?
Dr. William Koenig 1:19
Well, actually, in general, just our stats in general, you know, we have an incredibly low complication rate with you know, anything that we do, you know, in our operating room, we have a really, you know, it’s dedicated to just doing just plastic surgery. We don’t have a lot of, you know, people with infections and things like that don’t come through our building, it’s basically a very clean place to do surgery and our infection rate, you know, is very, very close to zero, which is very, very impressive compared to the national rate, which is always you know, one or 2%.
Wease 1:45
Now, most of you, you, Dr. Koenig specializes in the breast augmentation. It says some other things, but do you do 90% augmentations?
Dr. William Koenig 1:57
No, I’d say about half my practice is breast surgery. Then the other half is body contouring, tummy tucks, a lot of liposuction, things like that. Yeah.
Wease 2:04
All beautifying.
Dr. William Koenig 2:05
Beautifying, yeah. All cosmetic, yes.
Wease 2:07
Beautifying action.
Speaker 4 2:08
Thing called mommy makeovers. Do they have those? Like, right after you have a baby?
Dr. William Koenig 2:13
Well, not right after you have a baby. Usually when you’re done having kids, you know, basically, that implies you’re doing something to the belly, usually a tummy tuck, and then something to the breasts because the breasts usually need some more fat.
Speaker 4 2:22
Yeah, can I get your card?
Wease 2:25
Anyways, Dr. Koenig has been noticing he’s been fixing. Now I gotta, this is gonna sound weird, but Joe T. and I used to have Physical Graffiti tattoo studio, and people would come often, not that often, and want us to fix one that got screwed up at another tattoo joint. And the fellows there felt semi-insulted, they would do the gig, but why didn’t you come here in the first place? You’re talking about people going on trips to get breast augmentation out of country. And it kills me because I want to compare this which is silly, but what it is what you do for beauty, and no one’s dying. So when people came for the tattoos, we were insulted. You have met, people are going out of the country for breast augmentation for one thing, price. And I used to tell people that used to go shopping for ink, people that would shop for tattoos and go by price. I go, What is wrong with you? Why would you go shopping for price when you’re putting something on your body forever? I mean, that’s ridiculous.
Dr. William Koenig 3:41
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.
Wease 3:42
Yet people are leaving the country for augmentation. What are you seeing?
Dr. William Koenig 3:46
Well, it’s interesting. Actually, it’s not as much augmentation because augmentation is relatively at a price point that most people can afford. It’s the women who go for a mommy makeover. So basically, they’re going to the Dominican, they get there and they stay, they’d like to have them stay for at least a week afterwards. But at least as big, these are big surgeries, and when I do these here, I see these patients all the time. I see them you know, the first day, I see them two days later, I see them after a week, I see them after two weeks, I see them after three weeks, really keeping a very close eye on them because complications with these big body contouring things are significant. They’re unusual to get a complication, but if you do get one it can actually be life threatening kind of complications. So you know safety is my absolute number one priority. No one wants to have cosmetic surgery and then end up in the hospital for it. Unfortunately, when you travel to these places, I mean you’re basically you know, giving it up to these guys you don’t know, there’s no reputation, there’s no safety standards in the hospitals, so you know again our the American Society of Plastic Surgery has put a warning on these things. There have been I think 14 deaths now that
Wease 4:47
For real?
Dr. William Koenig 4:47
Yeah, yeah. So these people go over there to have surgery, they come back and they die. It’s crazy. But anyhow, in the Rochester area, we’ve seen a few, a whole handful of these now. Every surgeon in town has seen, you know one or two of these, come back from the Dominican with a problem. Yeah, with needing, needing help. Yeah. And some of them have resulted in, you know, ICU stays. You know, I just saw someone recently who needed some blood transfusions, and I’ve done this stuff for 25 years. I’ve never, you know, knock on wood, I’ve never given anyone a blood transfusion after any of this stuff. But, so it could happen, but, you know, I think that probably 80% of the time, you’re gonna go over there and do okay, but I don’t know if you want to take that, you know, 20% chance that you may have a, you know, bad, bad problem.
Wease 5:30
Well, I know that scares the crap out of me. I don’t know, what about you Johnny?
John DiTullio 5:34
Automatically. Me? Soft.
Wease 5:36
I mean, I mean, I feel privileged enough to live here in Rochester, where I think we have some of the best medical delivery anywhere. We have major guys in all areas. And I don’t know why, I feel bad for people that go here to the wrong place. No less Santo Domingo.
Dr. William Koenig 5:57
Exactly. And we see people from you know, other areas that you know, don’t get the care they get in Rochester. Rochester is incredible. We have a great medical community and the plastic surgeons in Rochester are great. You know, as a, as a group, yeah. And there’s really, you know, a lot of communities have these guys who are just trying to get into plastic surgery and not really, they haven’t been trained. But here in Rochester, you know, every guy, I would vouch for myself, they all do good work. And you know, some people specialize in different things. And obviously, you can have good and bad results. But you know, as far as being safe, I think you’ll be safe no matter where you go in Rochester.
Wease 6:28
Well, I’m glad you’re saying that because my wife might be listening. And she has a reconstruction in August. I think it’s August, in late August. You know, she had a double mastectomy. She has the expanders in now, now she after chemo and everything else. She has to go back for the next operation. And hearing you probably scared the crap out of her earlier, talking about infections and stuff.
Dr. William Koenig 6:57
Yeah, but that’s, that’s all very, very rare. And you know, in Rochester. Yeah. It is, yes, it’s extremely rare.
Paulie G 7:04
So what do you think when you look at Hollywood stars, like Joan Rivers before she passed, or, for example, like Meg Ryan, where you just see surgeries? I don’t know if they’re doing too much, or if it’s botched surgery, obviously money’s not an issue for them. What’s happening there that they’re getting odd-looking
Wease 7:19
Great question.
Speaker 4 7:20
Kanye’s mom, right?
Paulie G 7:21
Kanye’s mom died, I believe during it, yeah.
Dr. William Koenig 7:23
She did. Yeah, it’s a fine line I think between trying to make yourself look better, and then if you cross that line, then you get to the point where you actually look kind of unusual. But a lot of this is really patient driven. I mean, sometimes we’ll see people who I want this, I want this, I want this and you say, you know, I really don’t think this is in your best interest. You know, rethink this. And then almost always, they’ll just go to someone else’s office and get the same thing done. Because they will shop, if they want, people want something, they’re gonna get it. So I’m sure these stars are basically, you know, go to a good guy in the beginning, they get some good work done. And then they say, Well, I want this more tight. I want this more here. More there. And then suddenly, he says, No, this is good. I’m not gonna do any more. And they go to see someone else and they just Okay, I’ll do
Speaker 4 8:07
A lesser doctor. So have you had to cut people off like say, That’s it, I’m not doing any more.
Dr. William Koenig 8:12
Oh, all the time. Yeah, we cut people off all the time. Because you kind of get to a point where, you know, you’re not gonna look any better. You’ll look different. And you run the risk of looking kind of funny and weird. And, and
Wease 8:16
Meg Ryan.
Speaker 4 8:18
Nicole Kidman.
Dr. William Koenig 8:22
There’s a whole list of people who just look weird. Yeah. And it’s never after the first surgery, I would say, it’s usually after multiple things, they just keep going and going and going.
John DiTullio 8:31
Renee Zellweger got a whole different face, didn’t she get a whole different look?
Speaker 4 8:35
It seems like a lot of them have fillers, that’s too much. Fillers in the wrong place or too many.
Dr. William Koenig 8:40
I think fillers are a big problem. Unless you go to someone who really knows what they’re doing with it.
Speaker 4 8:43
It can be great.
Dr. William Koenig 8:44
And most of the time, I mean, the ones you don’t know about look great.
Speaker 4 8:47
Absolutely.
Dr. William Koenig 8:48
It’s the ones that you know are overfilled or over done. And it’s like uh geez,
Speaker 4 8:51
They look like a lion face.
Dr. William Koenig 8:52
Yeah. Sometimes you drink from the fountain of youth a little bit too much.
Wease 8:55
So at the Lindsay House, that’s an, you do surgery there? Right in the, right at the Lindsay House.
Dr. William Koenig 9:02
Yeah, there’s actually certified AAAHC, which is one of the big certifying groups of surgery centers in the country. And they come by every couple of years and they go through everything you know, with a fine tooth comb and make sure we have all of the safety things, make sure everything is proper, all the emergency things.
Wease 9:17
So you have one operating room?
Dr. William Koenig 9:18
We have two operating rooms.
Wease 9:19
Right there. In case you don’t know, this is like a mansion.
John DiTullio 9:23
Beautiful.
Wease 9:23
On East Avenue, I grew up behind there. So it’s a, yeah. If you drive up East Avenue going towards downtown, from Wegmans, I can use now, it’s you know, maybe 500 yards towards downtown on your left. Yeah, just another big mansion in a row, a row of mansions, which I would think, if you’re showing up, that it would make you feel a lot less uptight than going to the hospital.
Paulie G 9:50
I’ve been in that building, actually I had my boobs done a little while ago. But I know, I’ve been in that building and it is, it’s beautiful. Obviously from the outside, but on the inside too. It’s, it’s great.
Speaker 4 10:00
Someone wants know what he can do for stretch marks. That’s not me. That’s someone.
Dr. William Koenig 10:06
So stretch marks. Um, you know, there’s some good technology on the horizon, but it’s not quite out yet, possibly to make them look a little bit better. The bottom line is the best thing to do for stretch marks is probably a tummy tuck because that gets, most people have their stretch marks below their belly button. And a tummy tuck’s gonna get rid of that whole area.
Wease 10:21
I would like to say that I know a woman who he did. That had the tuck, that had the marks. Goneski, completely gone. She looks like she’s 18 after two kids, swear. You’d all know her too, but off air. So that’s, but what about their legs, cottage cheese,
Speaker 4 10:43
Cellulite.
Wease 10:44
Cottage cheese on the tushy and legs. Can that be fixed?
Dr. William Koenig 10:48
We have a good, I have a good treatment for cellulite, actually, it’s called Cellulaze. And it doesn’t erase it 100%, it’s about a 60% improvement. And so it really helps, people who have worse cellulite actually do a lot better. The worse it is, the more improvement you’ll see. If people who come with just subtle cellulite, it’s not a huge improvement. But people who have pretty bad cellulite, it makes it really great.
Wease 11:08
And what’s the treatment?
Dr. William Koenig 11:09
It’s called Cellulaze. It’s a laser treatment. It takes a couple hours to do so it’s a pretty, pretty time-intensive kind of a treatment but it does give some good improvement so we’ve been happy with it.
Speaker 4 11:19
Sometimes thin people have cellulite, which is so sad. Yeah, I know this real skinny girl and she’s got cellulite on her legs. It is sad, there’s nothing you can do. Life is hard.
Wease 11:34
That poor girl. Cellulite’s the cottage cheese?
Dr. William Koenig 11:37
Yeah. Well, supposedly, only women get it, men don’t get it.
Wease 11:41
Yeah, what is that?
Speaker 4 11:42
That is even more sad.
Dr. William Koenig 11:43
And no one’s looking at men’s legs anyhow, so it’s not that big of a deal. But um, because it is only women and it doesn’t really have anything to do with weight because you could certainly get it even in a slim person, it’s genetics and hormones and like a whole bunch of factors.
Paulie G 11:56
What about varicose veins? Can those disappear?
Wease 11:58
That’s a whole ‘nother dude because I know who that is.
Dr. William Koenig 12:02
That’s a whole ‘nother dude. But they, they almost never disappear because they’re usually, it’s a structural problem with the veins so instead of, because usually the superficial veins are supposed to just send blood to the heart, whereas it backs up in that system so they get, they get thick, so there’s some good people in town that take care of that.
Wease 12:19
Vascular surgeons row which is you know, what are there, two, three in town?
Dr. William Koenig 12:24
Yeah there’s a couple that are really good at it.
Wease 12:26
Vascular surgeons. Doreen had very close veins they took out. They take them out, right?
Dr. William Koenig 12:35
Yeah, they will, a lot of times they laser them, sometimes they actually take them out. The old way they took them out, now they laser them. And it works.
Wease 12:42
Because this girl I used to, Cindy Shortell, you ever know her?
Dr. William Koenig 12:47
I’ve heard of her, yes.
Wease 12:48
She was a vascular surgeon, which was a big deal. She wanted to be a heart surgeon, and they wouldn’t let her in. She felt actually like she got sexism’ed out of it. And she was vascular surgeon, which is a big deal, right?
Dr. William Koenig 13:04
Yeah, that’s the big deal.
Wease 13:06
Dr. Koenig has performed over 1600. That’s 3200 boobs. 3200 boots made new.
Speaker 4 13:18
A good way to put it.
Wease 13:19
3200 boobs. He’s using the Keller, the Keller funnel. Which is, what do you think, out of all the boob operations? How many you think are using Keller?
Dr. William Koenig 13:32
Right now, I use it on pretty much all the augmentations. So you know.
Wease 13:35
That’s you. I’m saying how many docs around the country? What percentage?
Dr. William Koenig 13:39
Yeah, very few actually. You know, I was the first guy in Rochester to do it, and I’ve been doing it for about five years. And then I think probably 20% of the country are using it.
Wease 13:45
And that cuts down on infection?
Dr. William Koenig 13:49
Cuts down on implants getting hard, called capsular contracture because that’s probably due to not necessarily infection, but just kind of micro contamination with bacteria. So by using that, I have almost a zero capsular contracture rate which is, which usually most people are getting 10 or 15%.
Wease 14:08
Brothers got a zero. Dr. Koenig if you want an appointment ladies, or dudes. How many dudes do you do?
Dr. William Koenig 14:15
About 10%.
Wease 14:16
10%?
Dr. William Koenig 14:17
Yeah, mainly lipo.
Wease 14:18
Lipo? Friggin.
John DiTullio 14:21
Right? What do you think Wease?
Wease 14:25
I will do like Paulie. Go and call Ashley Leathersich. I only doing this because I like her name. Ashley Leathersich.
John DiTullio 14:35
Leathersich.
Wease 14:35
Is that right?
Dr. William Koenig 14:36
Yes.
Wease 14:37
Sister Ashley, at 244.1000 and you go see the Lindsay House. 244.1000. Doc. Thanks for coming in.
Dr. William Koenig 14:47
Great, thank you Wease.
Wease 14:48
I often thought I needed breast cut off surgery.
Dr. William Koenig 14:53
Man boob removal, yeah.
Wease 14:55
Yeah. Do you ever do it?
Dr. William Koenig 14:56
Oh yeah, all the time.
Wease 14:57
Come on. Here that John.
John DiTullio 14:59
Is it quite a few? You said 10%, how much is that?
Dr. William Koenig 15:04
10% men, of the lipo, I’d probably say a third of them are man boobs.
John DiTullio 15:09
Wow. Okay, that’s a big number.
Wease 15:11
Oh you can lipo man boobs?
Dr. William Koenig 15:12
Oh you just lipo them. Yeah, there’s no scars.
Speaker 4 15:15
Easy peasy.
John DiTullio 15:16
Yeah, but yours went away Wease. Where do they,
Wease 15:18
No they didn’t.
John DiTullio 15:19
but they used to be
Speaker 4 15:20
He’s wearing better bras now.
John DiTullio 15:21
You were like a B, I think at one time. Were you not?
Speaker 4 15:22
Now he’s a handful.
For more information on any of the procedures mentioned or breast and body surgery at the Quatela Center, please call (585) 244-1000 to speak to a Patient Consultant.
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