Douglas Steinbrech, MD - Plastic Surgeon in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago

Eva Sheie (00:03):
The purpose of this podcast is simple. We want you to get to know your doctor before meeting them in person, because you're making a life-changing decision, and time is scarce. The more you can learn about who your doctor is before you meet them, the better that first meeting will be. There's no substitute for an in-person appointment, but we hope this comes close. I'm your host, Eva Sheie, and you're listening to Meet the Doctor. Welcome to Meet the Doctor. Today my guest is Dr. Douglas Steinbrech. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, Dr. Steinbrech? 

Dr. Steinbrech (00:40):
Yeah, I'm so excited to be here. It's nice to talk with you today. I am a board certified plastic surgeon specializing in aesthetics and particularly aesthetics for men. That's my interest. That's, uh, we, we started doing it about 10 years ago and we found that, um, we have a great patient population. There's a demand for it, and these poor guys have never had the right techniques or the right surgeons doing what they need to have. So we decided to completely focus it. It's completely changed my practice. It's completely changed my practice base. It's completely changed my life and my life for my family, so I'm really excited to be here to talk about that. 

Eva Sheie (01:24):
Any kind of man, a specific type of man, a specific age? Is it even more focused than just men or just any man? 

Dr. Steinbrech (01:32):
It's all men. Uh, this, but this is a great thing about it, is we have it to the different, what I call icona types. So if you go to my website and there's a, uh, male plastic surgery.com, that's the main website, but then we also have one for New York, Chicago, and LA. But when you go to it right away, you get an opportunity to pick what type that you wanna be. So our, we have five different icona types. We have the male model, we have the daddy next door, we have the executive, we have the bodybuilder, and then we have the, it's sort of a play on the biggest loser. We have the biggest winner, somebody that's lost a lot of weight. And what you can do is you men, men like to just get right to it and they just want to click on the one that agrees with what they're looking for. And once you press that button, then it goes right to another area of the website that says, these are most likely the procedures of improvement you'd be looking for. And that cuts right through everything, because then it really helps patients. They know what kind of person they are and it helps 'em find what they're looking for immediately. 

Eva Sheie (02:41):
That's really smart. Why three cities? Why not just one city? What, what prompted you to move into three, three big markets? 

Dr. Steinbrech (02:50):
Well, we noticed, I've been in practice since 2004 and I started on Park Avenue in New York like everyone else. And I noticed that there were so many people, I thought I had great training, even wrote a textbook. But there were so many people that were doing exactly what I was doing. And I had a lot of buddies that wanted to have, you know, a little bit of liposuction or have their abs done. And we'd noticed that there was a demand there. And we started doing more and more and more. And our, my team got really good at doing it. And so there was one key moment in time where my patient coordinator, she said, you know what, Dr. Steinbrech, you need a patient education website, a website that caters to men or educates men, because there's no one else that had that. So we made that website and boom, it went viral. 

Dr. Steinbrech (03:43):
That's when everything happened. That's when I went from doing 15% men up to 85% men in New York, in la, a hundred percent. And in Chicago about 95%. And why did we go into different cities? Because we saw that the, the number two market or people that really wanted this and weren't getting it was in Los Angeles. And why did we go to Chicago? Because in Chicago, I'm from the Midwest, I'm from Iowa, hello Solan, Iowa, right between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. I grew up there and I know how Midwesterns think cuz I'm Midwestern. And we all think in the Midwest, if you can't find it in the Midwest, then it's then it's not worth getting. So they will go to Mayo, they'll go to Chicago, and that's why we went to Chicago. People in New York or LA they'll fly all over the world to find the right person to do it, but Midwesterners wanna stay local. 

Dr. Steinbrech (04:40):
So we knew, we kind of have had a captive audience that, a group of people that were, that, that needed these services, but they wanted them to be brought to them. And so that's why we went in. But the real thing is, is what I wanna do is build something. We're building these other cities and then putting other surgeons in to help us to make great teams and create really three centers of excellence nationally for men's plastic surgery. So you have, wherever you're in the country, you have one regional area that you can go to. Now as things continue to expand, we may go into Miami, Dallas, San Francisco, and then other more regional sub areas. But for now we want three centers of excellence. We wanna just always focus on quality. And that's, uh, that's why we went to those three places. 

Eva Sheie (05:30):
Let's go back to Iowa for a second. I'm from Minnesota.  

Dr. Steinbrech (05:34):
Oh, that's great. I thought it was pronounced Minnesota. 

Eva Sheie (05:37):
It used to be <laugh> when I was younger. <laugh>, that's how we said it. 

Dr. Steinbrech (05:41):
I'm just teasing. 

Eva Sheie (05:42):
<laugh>. So you grew up in Iowa? 

Dr. Steinbrech (05:45):
Yes. 

Eva Sheie (05:46):
And then how did you get out of Iowa? 

Dr. Steinbrech (05:49):
So I was in Iowa and I went to undergrad at the University of Iowa and the medical school there. And I really loved it. But during that period of time, I did some research at the NIH. So that's in Maryland, in Washington DC really. And one of my doctors said he was this really smart guy, Steve Rosenberg. He was head of the Cancer Institute, the National Cancer Institute and head of the surgery branch. And he said, he said, Doug, he said, you can always go back to Iowa, but if you can do your training, you just need to have a little hybrid vigor. You need to go to the go the, he said, go left to right, which means go to the east coast, go to the west coast. There are a lot of great institutions in the Midwest, but you just need to go back to the Midwest and bring something back. So I took that advice to heart. I really interviewed all over the country and I just loved NYU. It has an incredible plastic surgery reputation. It's really one of the top, top places for plastic surgery and aesthetic plastic surgery in particular. And I, I was lucky enough to, uh, train there. Then I ended up having so many friends in New York. I just never got back to Iowa. 

Eva Sheie (06:55):
That's how it happens. 

Dr. Steinbrech (06:56):
But I love it. Iowa gave me great values. The Midwest gave me great values. It gave me this work ethic that there's no way that I would've been able to do the, the things that our team has been able to do if I didn't have that work ethic. That, and I attributed that to the Midwestern values. 

Eva Sheie (07:14):
Do you still go back there ever? Are your parents there? 

Dr. Steinbrech (07:17):
Yeah, we lost my father, sadly. But my mother's still there and my family, a lot of my brothers and sisters actually moved back to Iowa, sort of to, to be with the family. And I do go back, but a lot, most times I, I try and get them to come out to New York <laugh> and see us out at the beach in Long Island. 

Eva Sheie (07:37):
Which beach? 

Dr. Steinbrech (07:38):
East Hampton. 

Eva Sheie (07:40):
My dad's from, uh, Uniondale. 

Dr. Steinbrech (07:43):
Oh yeah, sure, sure, sure. I know that.

Eva Sheie (07:45):
Long Beach. 

Dr. Steinbrech (07:46):
Yep, That's great. 

Eva Sheie (07:48):
Okay, so you land in New York, you've decided you're gonna do something completely different and you hit on something. You said it was your website. So what year was that, if it was your website that went viral?

Dr. Steinbrech (08:00):
Yeah, that was made the website in 2014. So it's almost been 10 years. And we've been in, we've been in LA for seven years now, Chicago for three years. 

Eva Sheie (08:10):
Was there a social media aspect to that explosiveness? 

Dr. Steinbrech (08:15):
Yeah, there, there definitely was. I mean, we started on Facebook because Instagram really hadn't caught on then. And then, uh, once Instagram happened, that was a huge dynamic because it also was a huge part of the reason why more men are having plastic surgery now is because they never used to see their friends from high school until the 25th year reunion. Now they're seeing their friends every single day and everyone's keeping tabs of everyone else. And they also see a lot of different things because on Instagram, you're, you're looking around the world and, and they'd start to see guys. They used to be, the only time a guy would take off his shoes is you play like shirts and skins play basketball. Other, other than that, you'd never see it except on underwear models. Now guys that go in the gym, they're taking off the shirts, they're flexing in front of the mirror in the, in the locker room and everybody's showing their abs, they're showing their chest, they're showing these body parts and their face. And they weren't doing that before. And now guys are, it's a lot more of a visual thing and guys are seeing this and they, they wanna stay fit. And that, that has created a huge demand for men's plastic surgery in the last five, 10 years. 

Eva Sheie (09:26):
What kinds of photos do you post on Instagram? 

Dr. Steinbrech (09:30):
Progress photos. So mainly before and after photos. But a lot of times there are videos about our procedures that we do. And then a lot, uh, many times it can just be a testimony from the patients about how they're, you know, so happy with the result. So, and then we have some kind of fun staff things where staff will ask me questions or I answer questions for patients. All those things. It's all about education for, you know, for a prospective patient or for patients that we've had all along. 

Eva Sheie (10:01):
Are there specific procedures that you see come back over and over and over? 

Dr. Steinbrech (10:05):
Yeah, I started a couple things. One's called body banking, and that is sort of what I'm known for by everybody knows what, well, a lot of people know what a BBL is. So it's this like a, a gluteal augmentation that a lot of women have done or Brazilian butt lift. Now it's sort of debatable whether or not it's appropriate to use words Brazilian butt lift, but it's still in the sort of common vernacular. But I did something a little different. Instead of putting all that fat in the glutes, I took for men, I took all that fat and I isolated the cells for structure and volume and injected them into the dude's shoulders, the anterior lateral posterior deltoid up into the trapezoid region. So they have a nice thick, muscular neck and into the chest, upper inner chest. And then we can put it anywhere else. 

Dr. Steinbrech (10:52):
We can put it in the glutes, but not a Kardashian kind of thing. We keep it more centrally located, very athletic, or we can put it in your quads, your calves, your biceps, we can put it wherever you want it. So that's been a game changer because if you don't do body banking, if you don't put those cells into another desired area, if you only do liposuction, number one, aesthetically, you are designing a surgery where you're only doing half the surgery. So as a patient, you're getting only getting half your money's worth because the whole power of changing your shape is not just by subtraction, subtraction and addition. Does a artist who has a lump of clay,, does he just take the clay away and put it in a bucket? No, he, that clay is valuable. He doesn't waste a drop of it. He takes that clay and he puts it back some, somewhere else. 

Dr. Steinbrech (11:38):
So by subtraction and addition, that artist sculptor can make a more artistic, more athletic look. If he's making a male and I can do the same thing, but instead of the clay, my clay are the fat cells and I can do a more complete job, give superior results versus Dr. Johnson down the street that just does liposuction, sucks out a little bit from your love handles and sends you on your way. And the other thing about this, Eva, is if you don't bank, we call banking the fat. If you don't bank them somewhere else, then you will guaranteed, it's not a myth, you will get rebound fat in other undesired areas. Usually it's visceral fat, inner or outer of the thighs, other areas. So we're setting up an insurance policy. So we say guilt-free after a year, you go and enjoy that bread with dinner or enjoy that dessert and you can even have a beer. 

Dr. Steinbrech (12:34):
And don't worry about, don't feel guilty about those carbs. Those carbs are making your shoulders wider. They're giving more definition, you're making your traps pop. But they're also not gonna come back as visceral fat or catch, I call it catch fat, compensatory, atrophic, cellular hypertrophy, all that fancy mumbo jumbo just means rebound fat, leftover fat cells that you couldn't get with the liposuction because we're not allowed to pop the cannula, intra abdominally, all those fat cells are gonna compensatorily get larger after surgery unless you bank the fat cells on the outside where they take up the carbohydrates that come in afterwards. It really works. And that's why we're doing so much of this in three different cities. 

Eva Sheie (13:21):
It seems like fat is starting to become better used in plastic surgery and there's a lot of people working on this and getting better at it all the time. One of, I assume you're one of those people? 

Dr. Steinbrech (13:33):
That is such a, I just gave a lecture today and I said it all of you out there in, in these days and these times, if you're not utilizing. Eva, only once, and I just got done saying this in this lecture, only once or twice a year do I have patients that I don't put it somewhere just because they just don't get it. They refuse to believe it. They have it locked in their head. Fat equal, bad fat need to go. Even though I tell them, you may get rebound fat, you may get catch fat, you're not gonna like it. I don't care. I don't get fat gone fat need to leave. So unfortunately, once or twice I, I do and I don't get a better result cuz I can't edit it back in to give them these beautiful shoulders or traps or whatever chest. 

Dr. Steinbrech (14:14):
But I told people in this lecture, and I tell people in all the lectures that I give that they're cheating their patients. They are only doing half of the case. They're only giving patients half of the value and all that beautiful, I call it gold because when you're suck out the fat, you've probably seen it on, on either YouTube, on my YouTube channel, male plastic surgery or on my um, Instagram, uh, male plastic surgery. You see when the fat comes out, it's beautiful liquid gold. So we call that gold. So you're just throwing that gold away and you're, you're depriving the patient of having the best result they can have and the best result they can have for the rest of their life. Cuz this is a key thing. This is another important metabolic thing that people don't think about it all. They think about mechanical, suck out the fat. 

Dr. Steinbrech (15:01):
That's it. It's, there's a whole lot of biochemistry and physiology involved and mother nature, what she does, she's a little bit cruel, but she's doing it to do your favor. When you turn 56 years old, a man, she turns down the testosterone, she turns up the estrogen because she wants to turn on those hormonal receptors that have more fat survived. That's for caveman. We are not caveman anymore. But that was for grandpa. Grandpa was a caveman and caveman terms, Grandpa was 35 years old. That was grandpa, right? Grandpa's supposed to stick around the cave, right? As when the guy goes out and he gets a deer or a bear and drags it back and cooks the food, caveman first is going to eat that, right? He's gonna give it to his wife then the kids so they can breastfeed the kids. The last people to get fed are the two old people over the corner. 

Dr. Steinbrech (15:47):
They're 35, 40 years old, grandma and grandpa. But mother nature turned up the estrogen. So both of them can have a lot more fat so that they can survive the winter and babysit while the caveman runs out and catches another deer. That's all the way we're built. But we don't live in caves anymore. So we don't do that. But that's the way it's engineered. So whether you like it or not, mother nature's gonna for the men is gonna turn down the testosterone up in the estrogen. You're gonna lose muscle mass. But because I've banked the fat into these desired areas as she turns up to estrogen, well I always tell my patients, when you're 60, 70 years old, your shoulders are gonna get a little bit bigger and they're gonna replace a muscle loss that you suffer because of the lack of testosterone. It's also gonna be the same for the traps for the chest. And you're gonna write me a thank you note that this stuff really, really worked. We get immediate benefit, but it continues to be the gift that continues to give and follows you accordingly with the changes that you have in your metabolism and your hormonal levels. It really works. 

Eva Sheie (16:49):
I recently heard, um, from another plastic surgeon that he could tell by someone the quality of someone's fat, what their health was like. Have you seen this? 

Dr. Steinbrech (17:00):
Yeah, you can if if people just have a really oily, sort of greasy fat that may be an indication that their tissues just aren't as robust or nutritionally. This is another thing that I harp on is people have to be really well carb loaded as they go into surgery. And that's when we get really beautiful plump cells that make a higher percentage of survival. Like you always hear these stories of the woman, oh I went and got my BBL I got my Brazilian butt lift and all the fat went away. Well yeah, the fat went away because either the doctor didn't know how to process it properly or he or she didn't know how to inject it properly. But a lot of times it's because you went home and you starved yourself because you thought, okay, I'm gonna go cold Turkey, I'm just gonna stop eating cuz I just had plastic surgery. 

Dr. Steinbrech (17:47):
Absolutely a 100%,180% the wrong thing to do after you had surgery. You need to carb up as much as you can to prevent problems with the, with the wounds falling apart, with infections, with fluid collections. That's one thing. But the other thing is all those good cells that got put in your, your backside or for the men that I do and the chest shoulders and the traps that gets eaten awake, it gets cannibalized cuz your body is trying to use that energy to just to survive and heal to other places. So I make everyone carb up for a full 28 days afterwards and I tell 'em, look, you can go on a low carb, modified, low carb keto diet, paleo diet, a hunger strike. But it's gotta be after 28 days after everything's all healed up. 

Eva Sheie (18:30):
You're not telling them to overeat, you're just telling them to eat, in a specific way.

Dr. Steinbrech (18:33):
Yeah, I'm telling them to eat a little bit over with the carbs because they're gonna need some, your body needs so much. I tell my patients, you are running a New York marathon every single day just sitting still because that's how much energy that you need to be able to repair your tissues.  You had liposuction, they don't realize that, they think when they had a tor, I do a torso tuck, you know the recipe of people do a, a tummy tuck. I do a torso tuck, which is goes all the way around. That's 360 torso tuck or or two-thirds around. That's a 270 torso tuck. So when we do that, we're, we're tucking the shirt into the pants cuz guys usually have a really nice butt, good legs. But the problem is they have this muffin top, we have to tuck it in. 

Dr. Steinbrech (19:15):
For women, it's a lot of times it's, they need to pull things up for us, it's more tucking it down. But when we do this, they think that they, they see and all they see is an incision. Well guess what, underneath the full body we did 360, which means 360 all the way around your body. We did liposuction, which creates inflammation and, and even healing tissue all the way around, but you don't see it so you don't think it's there. That takes so much energy for that to repair. So that takes a lot of nutrition. So I really get on people about being good with the carbs and it makes a huge difference. 

Eva Sheie (19:50):
Can you help people who are overweight with what you're doing? 

Dr. Steinbrech (19:55):
Absolutely. I mean we have a lot of, when people come in and, and they are overweight a lot of times what we can do is we can shift around the fat that we have. If they're moderately, if they're morbidly overweight, then we talk to them about for the safety of the surgery and with, for the safety of anesthesia. We talk about them losing weight and that could be 50, a hundred pounds, but we do it with them. We have a, we have a weight loss specialist that can help 'em and we don't lose track of 'em. We, a lot of times you go in plastic surgeon's office and like, oh sorry, you're, you're too big and you're just not a candidate. So go home and lose the weight and then try coming back in a couple years. We don't do that. We develop a plan and because that also gives them hope. 

Dr. Steinbrech (20:37):
So we do, we treat you just like you'd be ready for surgery. We give you a plan as a goal and we give you what's called our body banking roadmap. We have a color chart of all the places we're out and all the places you wanna put it in. So you get to design with our people your unique tailored result. And we, you may be a hundred pounds overweight, but we're gonna do that with you because you had a consultation with us and that's what we're here to deliver with you. And also when we give that piece of paper to you, we're gonna give it to you and we're gonna have you put it on your refrigerator and you use that as a goal. I know we tell people, we tell people we'll give 'em some of our before and after photos of people that have lost the weight and then we've done body banking. 

Dr. Steinbrech (21:16):
I don't want 'em lose it all cause I like to use that fat and put it in good places so don't lose it all. But when they get down to once the point of safety, and I've had some people that look, I had one guy that never went to the gym and he, I took out all the fat and he was a little, he's probably like, you know, 30 pounds overweight, but he was, it was still within the range of being safe to do surgery. I took out all that fat, I put it all in his shoulders, his chest and we had a lot. So I loved it. It was so great and it made such a huge difference for him. We put it in his chest, shoulders, traps. That's a triple play. But then I had more, I had leftover cuz he had such an ample supply that we got some in his glutes, we got some in his calves, we got some in his biceps and he had a total torso transformation. 

Dr. Steinbrech (22:04):
And he went from looking like a guy, never worked out like a chubby kind of hefty guy to looking, not necessarily like a ripped bodybuilder, but he looked like a weightlifter. You know, he looked like he was very strong. And the great thing about it, I love, number one, he started going to the gym because it inspired him. Cuz he is like, wow, this is what I could look like now I'm gonna start doing it. So he is building muscle underneath it. The other thing that when I see my patients after I've done the body banking and after they come in in big shoulders that they never had in their life and probably never would be able to get to at the gym anyway, cuz we're just creating something completely different. They come in and you say, Hey, how you, how you doing? And I'll say, you know, John, you look awesome. 

Dr. Steinbrech (22:46):
You look just really fantastic. And they'll look at me and they'll kind of smile and kind of sniff and they'll say, Gee, gee wiz. Thanks a lot, doc. You know, and the the way they say it is as if that they earned it themselves by going to the gym. And it's, it's never like, thanks Doc, I really appreciate what you've done. But it's the best compliment for me because it makes me realize that they've, they don't feel like this is foreign. They feel like this is part of them and they're so convinced that it's part of them is that they kind of a lot of times feel like they did it on themselves, did it for themselves. And then we have some guys that, uh, they get inspired with it and then they get really into fitness and it changes their lives. They stop smoking and they say, you know what? I want to thank you for not just changing my appearance but changing my life. And once you do that, then I, then the tears starts to go down my eye because that's, that's what we're, we're in this to feed my family, feed my son. But it's more than that. You, you don't, it's just not a transactional thing. You wanna change people's lives. And when I get that, that's what gets me really excited. 

Eva Sheie (23:56):
It's been tremendous hearing about your different approach and I, I find it very interesting and exciting and I thank you for sharing it with us today. If someone is interested in, uh, reaching out to you or learning more about what you're doing, where should they go? 

Dr. Steinbrech (24:11):
They should go to our Instagram, uh, which is male plastic surgery. And then they can just DM us and we'll get right back to you. Or you can go to male plastic surgery.com or if you're in Chicago, New York or LA, it's Male Plastic Surgery new york.com. Male plastic surgery chicago.com. And guess what? Male plastic surgery la.com. 

Eva Sheie (24:31):
Thank you Dr. Steinbrech.

Dr. Steinbrech (24:32):
Absolutely. Thanks Eva. So nice. 

Eva Sheie (24:38):
If you are considering making an appointment or are on your way to meet this doctor, be sure to let them know you heard them on the Meet the Doctor podcast. Check the show notes for links including the doctor's website and Instagram to learn more. Are you a doctor or do you know a doctor who'd like to be on the Meet the Doctor podcast? Book your free recording session at Meet the Doctor podcast.com. Meet the Doctor is Made with Love in Austin, Texas and is a production of The Axis, t h e a x i s.io.