Dr. Andrew Hsu, MD

Dr. Andrew Hsu completed his surgical training in Chicago, has practised on both US coasts, and joined Goals in 2021. His work there is body contouring: liposuction across the torso and limbs, plus the fat transfer procedures that use what the liposuction removes. Below is the practical detail patients want before booking. What the procedures actually do, what safety looks like inside an accredited facility, and how to check any surgeon before you commit to one.

Dr. Andrew Hsu trained in surgery in Chicago and has spent more than two decades practising since, on both the east and west coasts. He joined Goals in 2021 and now sees patients at the Los Angeles clinic in Northridge.

The Goals list is built around body contouring. Liposuction across the abdomen, flanks, back, arms and thighs, and the fat transfer procedures, chiefly the Brazilian Butt Lift, that place what the liposuction takes out. Those are one operation seen from either end, which is why they usually happen in a single session. Splitting them across two dates would mean harvesting the fat twice, which is worse for the graft and worse for you.

Being based at one clinics means the surgeon who operates on you is the one you see afterwards, which matters more than it sounds. Still worth asking at the consultation who staffs the follow-up appointments. Contouring recovery runs over months rather than weeks, and that answer counts for more than it appears to on the day you book.

Behind the cosmetic work sits a general surgery background. Surgeons who arrive at elective work by that route tend to be direct about candidacy, because the habit of judging whether somebody is fit for an operation does not switch off once the operation is optional.

In practice that should mean a consultation which spends real time on your health history before it spends any on the result you want. If the order runs the other way round, notice it.

Do this one yourself before you book anybody. Every licence is issued by a single state, every one of them is public, and a board lookup costs you two minutes. Dr. Hsu holds a licence in California, where much of his career has been spent and where he operates for Goals.

The lookup is free and open to anybody. It returns the status of a licence, the state that issued it, and whether any public action has been recorded against it. Search the surgeon's full name in every state they claim to work in, not only the one nearest you. Any surgeon worth booking will tell you exactly which states to look in, and will not be offended that you asked.

Goals credentialing runs over the top of that: operative history, complication rates and facility privileges reviewed before a surgeon sees network patients, then monitored afterward. Nobody keeps those credentials without continuing to study for them. He is listed among the surgical team.

Raise revisions before you have any reason to. They are uncommon in contouring without being rare, and what you want back is the timeline, the approach, and how cost is handled. Add one more question that usually goes unasked: who actually performs the revision. It is not always the surgeon who did the first operation, and afterwards is the wrong moment to discover that.

Decode the titles before you compare surgeons against each other. A licence, a credential and a length of career are three separate claims that people read as one. None of them forecasts how your particular operation goes.

FlexSculpt is the contouring procedure he performs most, usually taking the abdomen, flanks and back as one continuous treatment rather than as separate areas. Circling the whole torso is what prevents a finished outline with visible seams where treatment stopped. He also works the arms and thighs, and arm contouring is there where the arms are the specific concern.

Much of it is done awake, under local. The benefits are concrete. You avoid a class of anesthetic risk outright, healing runs faster, and somebody who is conscious can be repositioned partway through so the two sides get compared against gravity rather than guessed at lying flat.

The thing to be clear on before booking is what liposuction is actually for. It changes shape. It does not change weight. It removes fat from places that have not responded to diet or exercise, and it is neither a treatment for obesity nor a substitute for losing weight. Patients who understand that in advance are the ones still pleased a year on, because they are measuring against the right thing.

Skin is the other variable, and the one people forget. Fat can always be taken out. Skin either retracts afterwards or it does not, depending on age, genetics and how much stretching it has already done. Where laxity is pronounced, J-Plasma or an excisional procedure is likely the better answer.

Ask to be marked up on your own body, in front of a mirror, so you can see which areas are being treated and roughly what changes. A surgeon drawing on an abdomen tells you far more than any figure in litres.

The Brazilian Butt Lift layers fat grafts for fuller, longer-lasting projection than a standard BBL. The fat comes from the contouring half of the same operation, which is why both run together: a single anesthetic, a single recovery, a single stretch away from work.

Not all of the transferred fat lives. Some is reabsorbed over the first few months, and whatever survives is where your result settles. That proportion belongs in the conversation beforehand, quoted as a range, with the caveat that it lands differently on different people.

Candidacy comes down to having enough donor fat and a weight that has been stable. A graft keeps the habits of the tissue it was taken from, which means it rises and falls with the rest of you. Without both of those in place you should be hearing about a different plan, or about waiting.

There is a second abdominal route as well. FlexTuck reaches definition on a far smaller incision than a full tummy tuck. The full operation takes over once laxity or muscle separation gets pronounced. A mommy makeover brings abdominal and breast work together where the total operating time permits.

Safe total operating time is a hard limit rather than a scheduling preference. Where a plan runs past it, the work gets split across two dates, and that conversation belongs at the consultation instead of on the morning of surgery.

Start by matching the operation to the surgeon's busiest work. Liposuction, torso contouring, a Brazilian Butt Lift: that is where his Goals list sits. Anything else and a straight consultation should say so, and the network has colleagues whose volume lies elsewhere, including breast procedures and facial work.

Then check independently, for any surgeon and any clinic, this one included. Verify the licence with the state board yourself. Ask how many of your specific procedure they performed in the past year and expect a number back, not an adjective. Read reviews on sites the practice has no control over, and search the surgeon's name next to words like reviews and complaints rather than reading only the profile page.

None of that is impolite. It is the same diligence you would apply to a contractor working on your house, for a decision with considerably higher stakes. A surgeon who takes offence at being checked has told you something worth knowing. Most good ones have been checked before and expect to be again.

Second opinions repay the time. Another consultation, inside the network or outside it, costs you an afternoon and buys a much clearer sense of what is achievable and what a sensible plan looks like. Two independent assessments that agree are worth more than one delivered confidently.

Take photographs of results you like, and expect a candid reading. Pictures online show a different frame, different skin and often a different quantity of donor fat from yours.

Ask which accreditation a facility holds and when it was last inspected. Expect a straight answer to both. Every procedure at Goals runs in an accredited U.S. facility. The accreditation itself is a list of specifics, all of them signed off by an inspector rather than announced by the clinic: instrument sterilisation, the emergency kit, the ratio of staff to patients, the monitoring of anesthesia.

That external verification is the real gap between having surgery here and buying a cheaper package overseas, where you generally cannot establish what standard applies or who checked it.

Goals facilities work fat transfer to a fixed protocol: subcutaneous placement only, ultrasound tracking the cannula from start to finish. No other single measure in modern BBL surgery matters as much.

Screening comes before any date. Bloods, cardiac risk, a look at your medications and at how you live. Where anything lands outside safe parameters the case should be postponed until it has been addressed rather than routed around. Ask what the screening covers and what specifically would move your date.

Facility standards earn out on the day something goes wrong. Accredited centres hold emergency airway equipment, run monitored recovery areas and drill their staff on advanced response. Ask about that too. A facility that cannot tell you when it was last inspected has answered anyway.

Take the written plan home before you commit to a date. Anything agreed under time pressure, or with a discount attached to booking today, deserves a second look tomorrow, and a practice worth using will not mind you taking one.

The appointment itself should be work rather than sales. Expect an examination of the area, a judgement on your donor fat and your skin, and a plain statement of what your build permits. Normally the before & after gallery gets opened as well, so the outcome is shown on somebody built like you. You should walk out holding a written plan, under no obligation.

The fortnight after surgery decides more than the months that follow. Garments, positioning, lymphatic drainage. Each has a physiological reason behind it, and doing them properly is what protects the result. With a BBL in the mix, nothing you do matters as much as how you sit and lie.

Follow-up runs across the first year, because contouring goes on refining for months. Swelling leaves unevenly, so an outline that looks crooked at week six is frequently level again by month six. Before you book, establish who you will see at those appointments and how to reach a clinician between them if something worries you.

Ask as well what happens if you need more time off than you budgeted for. Recovery estimates are averages, and somebody has to cover the gap when you land on the slow side of one. Better to know that in advance than to find out in week three.

There is one number most quotes leave out. Ask what a revision would cost and who carries it. That figure is the one most likely to be missing from a breakdown, and the only one that matters if a revision is ever needed.

Beyond that, everything should be on the table before you commit. Fee for the surgeon, fee for the facility, the anesthesia, the garments, every follow-up appointment. Nothing should surface later that was not on that list. Theatre time and complexity differ between patients, so the quote gets built for your case rather than lifted from a price list.

Financing partners offer monthly payment plans across a range of terms, and most applications are decided the same day. Read what you are actually signing rather than the summary of it. Whatever is currently on offer is listed on the financing page, and going through it beforehand is worth the time.

Budget the whole timeline, not just the operating date. Time away from work, garments, follow-up appointments, sometimes help at home in that first week. Accounting for that in advance is what makes the recovery months bearable. Everything above is background. The plan comes out of the examination.