When Shannon Ashley, now 43 years old, was in her tweens and teens, her legs were noticeably large.

Shannon Ashley

“Once I hit 12, my calves were unusually large, like tree trunks,” Ashley said. She tried to hide her outsized lower extremities, a contrast to her slender upper body, beneath wide-leg pants, and the size of her legs made clothes shopping difficult.

“Doctors insisted that I was just fat,” Ashley said. “I took a free consultation with a plastic surgeon when I was 14 who said he could perform liposuction on my calves if I lost at least 20 pounds, but since I was already struggling with weight loss and dieting, that felt impossible, and my family wasn’t in a position to pay for such a surgery anyway.”

David Amron, MD

David Amron, MD, is a leading lipedema specialist at The R

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