The surgical skills you bring back from GAC 2025 will change how you work. Not in some vague, inspirational way. In concrete, measurable ways that show up in your operating room in the weeks and months after you return home.
The Surgical Strategies track runs all four days of GAC 2025, bringing together some of the most accomplished surgeons in aesthetic medicine to demonstrate the techniques that define modern practice. Here’s what you’ll actually learn.
Watch the Masters Work With Live Surgical Videos
Saturday morning starts early with a facelift video course led by the masters: Dr. Nabil Fanous, Dr. Edwin Williams, and Dr. Stephen Perkins, to name a few. These aren’t highlight reels from Instagram, but full surgical videos straight from the OR that walk you through each technique.
What makes these sessions invaluable? You see the moments that don’t make it into journal articles. The small adjustments when anatomy surprises you. The decision points where surgical judgment matters more than technical skill. The way a surgeon with 30 years of experience handles something unexpected.
Reading about a technique tells you what to do, while watching someone perform it shows you how. That gap closes fastest when you get to see the surgeons with no ulterior motive at work, like Dr. Perkins, who retired in 2024. He’s here because he’s committed to teaching, not because he needs the exposure.
By noon on Saturday, you’ll have seen three completely different approaches to the same problem. All successful. All teachable. All applicable to your practice, depending on your patient’s anatomy and your surgical style.
Beyond Blepharoplasty Basics
Upper and lower blepharoplasty sessions run throughout the conference, but these aren’t introductory courses.
On Thursday morning, Dr. Morris Hartstein delivers three separate presentations: key analytics for blepharoplasty success, his guide to avoiding and managing complications and his approach to the negative vector eyelid. That’s the depth you’re getting here.
Dr. John Holds discusses the tricky trifecta on both Thursday and Saturday: blepharoptosis, dermatochalasis and brow ptosis. When all three exist simultaneously, which do you address first? How do you sequence the corrections?
The blepharoplasty sessions at GAC focus on the nuances that improve your results and reduce your revision rates. This level of education is only possible when you’re learning from surgeons who have performed thousands of cases and can distill their experience into actionable guidance.
Advanced Body Contouring
Thursday afternoon dedicates significant time to body contouring, with particular emphasis on safety and new techniques.
Dr. Johnny Franco presents twice, first on advanced body-frame contouring techniques, then on the modern BBL with ultrasound-guided fat transfer for ultimate safety. BBLs get a bad rap due to a high rate of complications (primarily caused by fat embolism), so safety in this procedure isn’t optional. It’s the baseline expectation, and Franco shows you how to achieve it.
Dr. Charles Riccio addresses the impact of GLP-1 medications on surgical cases. Your practice is already seeing patients on semaglutide, so understanding how these medications affect surgical planning, healing and long-term outcomes has become essential.
Dr. Roberto Ramirez Gavidia demonstrates abdominal etching with skin tightening, Dr. Tunc Tiryaki covers inverse abdominoplasty, and Dr. Barbara Machado discusses whether age is the main limiting factor in liposuction. These and other sessions address the questions you’re actually asking in your consultations.
Practice-Changing Sessions on Managing Complications
Complications happen because every surgery involves variables you can’t completely control, like varied anatomy, individual wound healing and patient compliance with aftercare instructions. The surgeons presenting at GAC understand this reality.
They also understand that how you manage unexpected complications is a large part of what defines a great surgeon. Thursday’s schedule dedicates significant time to complication management across multiple procedures. You’ll hear candid discussions about what goes wrong, why it happens, and how to fix it.
You’ll also get experienced insights on how to anticipate complications and systematic solutions for managing or preventing them that protect both you and your patients.
The Sessions You Didn’t Know You Needed
Some of the most transformative sessions address topics you might not prioritize when building your schedule.
Dr. Manoj Abraham discusses the safe use of tranexamic acid with facelifts on Friday morning, a seemingly small topic that could reduce your complication rates significantly. Dr. Fred Fedok presents on the pretrichial forehead lift on Thursday afternoon. Not the most common technique, but for the right patient, it’s transformative. Having this option in your skill set expands what you can offer.
These “niche” topics often solve specific problems you might encounter regularly but haven’t found good solutions for. The surgeon who only attends the headline sessions misses the refinements that can make a real difference. Sometimes the session you almost skipped becomes the one that changes your practice.
Sharpen Your Surgical Edge at GAC 2025
The Surgical Strategies track at GAC 2025 offers something rare: concentrated access to surgeons who have mastered their craft and just want you to see them succeed.
You can’t learn everything in four days, but you can learn enough to transform how you approach your next case. One refined technique, one better understanding of anatomy, or even one improved approach to patient selection — these improvements compound over time and translate into significantly better outcomes.
The Surgical Strategies track runs October 30 through November 2 at GAC 2025. Register now and bring new techniques back to your OR.
