Full Audio Transcript:

This podcast is on Botox, or Botulinum toxin type A, and I think everyone knows about it. I don’t need to really go into how to treat it for the forehead or crows feet. But I do want to talk about some new concepts and understanding what I like to call total Botox, which essentially means that it’s really something where I am able to change the way that the entire facial structure, skin looks from the top of the scalp all the way down to the exposed chest or breast tissue. So let me give you some ideas.

So the area that typically has the worst wrinkles and the worst sun damage is in the forehead area and around the crows feet area obviously because there’s excessive motion and it causes a lot of damage. But if you look at someone, interestingly enough, that has had Botox for let’s say 10 years, their forehead looks so good and their skin looks so good that it starts not to match the areas of the cheek, and the neck area, and the chest area, which has sun damage. Some areas more than others. For people with mild sun damage, you probably never get to that point, but say someone has really, really bad sun damage. The most classic example is someone with what I call a grade three wrinkle, when they smile, they have this deep wrinkle that goes all the way down their face. I sometimes look at Facebook, and I look at these people, I’m like, “Oh, that person’s had 10 years of Botox and nothing else.” Because I see that the midface is starting to cave in, and the wrinkles are starting to be more prominent. Those wrinkles really can’t be treated with lasers, they can’t really be treated with a facelift. A fat transfer won’t stretch it out, fillers cannot get rid of it. So what’s happening is that Botox not only manages the wrinkles, but it does things that you probably don’t think about. It provides long term healing of pores, texture, tone, color, even discolorations, abnormal lesions, everything. It provides profound skin healing. So if you have been doing Botox, let’s say five, 10, 15 years, go look in the mirror. The thing that you’re going to see, if you’re just doing standard Botox, which very few people do the micro Botox for the rest of the face, you’ll see that your forehead not only has fewer wrinkles, but there is a better texture, tone, even the discoloration looks cleaner, brighter, softer. If you have rosacea, that rosacea is probably absent in the areas that you’ve been treating Botox consistently, if you’re getting really quality Botox.

I have a photo that I always show of a lady I saw in the New York Times in the newspaper, 53 years old, where her forehead didn’t even match her lower face because she had been doing Botox so long that that upper face looked so pristine. So the lesson here is that Botox is not only just for dynamic wrinkles. I have a lot of patients that come here and say, “You know what? I just have some wrinkles here. They’re coming back, Doc, I need more treatment.” But it’s actually for more profound elements. It provides profound textural collagen healing in a molecular level. It’s a profound healing.

So what I do for Botox, it’s also known as Meso Botox or Micro Botox. Micro because it’s small, tiny aliquots placed about every centimeter in the dermis, or the superficial skin. Meso Botox, because the term meso is an outdated term for meso dermis or dermis that was used because of mesotherapy, which is a French term from, I think, the 1930s or forties, where treatments were made with different types of vitamins and other therapies to help improve the skin texture and tone. When Botox is placed across the midface, lower face, into the chest area, into the neck area, it not only dismanages dynamic wrinkles and reconstitutes that damaged collagen, but it also starts to change the local circulation of the tissues from the damaged quality, and starts to repair it.

The natural question is, how does it do this? And unfortunately, I don’t have a clear answer of how it works on those. Botox says so many things that you probably don’t know about it. I can work with chronic pain. I had a lady that had a pain level of seven out of 10 that was in her belly from a C-section and it woke her up every night. And I felt this little band, I put a drop of Botox, about one unit, the pain was gone.

I had my cousin who had shingle pain in his forehead that was hurting him every morning. The slightest breeze hurt him. I put a drop of Botox, it was gone except for way up high. It at least was reduced significantly, put a drop back there, and it’s pretty much extinguished now. So Botox does a lot of healing for the body that we just don’t understand and I use it in ways that 99.9% of doctors out there do not know about, don’t even understand how to treat. But what I try to do is treat these areas with Botox. I’ve done my wife three times in her midface because she’s had wrinkles down her face from running in the sun in the past and sun is really the culprit. She’s gotten more compliments, people don’t know what it is, it just looks amazing.

Now, when I do Meso Botox in the face, it does freeze the smile for about four to six weeks, in rare cases up to two months or slightly beyond, but it doesn’t last long term. But the healing is incredible. And those deep wrinkles that go down the face may not go all the way with one treatment, but progressively they get better and better and better.

Of course, radiofrequency microneedle, other therapies are very important to help as well. But the Botox provides things that the radiofrequency microneedle simply cannot do, which is a molecular healing of the entire tissue from abnormal skin color. I had a lady that told me that she was in the sun this summer, and this is the first time that the brown spots didn’t even come back. Now that’s an overstatement for everyone to have this treatment and feel like that’s going to happen to them, but she didn’t have any of the brown spots come during the summertime because the skin has been healed so much.

So people are always worried about looking fake. They don’t want to look overfilled, they want to be over lifted. I don’t blame them. I see this every day coming through my office. But the other thing that makes people look fake is when there is an unbalance. So in other words, the forehead looks like it’s 25 years old, the neck looks 80 years old, things don’t look good. And I will help you when you come in, not only to avoid being over lifted and overfilled, which are cardinal sins, but also to guide you. I had a lady that came in that had a fat transfer with me 10 years ago, she says, “Hey, what should I do? Should I do the fat transfer?” And even though she had aged with some further loss of fat, her neck had progressed so far that I said, “Look, your number one goal is to do a facelift. We need to get you in balance.” And so I’ll guide you. Sometimes I’ll say, “No, you know what you really need, is your midface. You need that Botox, because even if I do a fat transfer, nothing is going to fix it.” So balance is so important. And Botox, if you can remember anything with this, is that there’s progressive skin healing. And that’s what is so powerful. I had a lady that I always showed this photo of, 61 year old Korean woman that never had done Botox. I did about a year and a half with her every three or four months. And then she came back two years later and she said, “Oh, I’m in desperate need for Botox.” I said, “Why? Your skin looks amazing.” I showed her photos. Not only does she have no wrinkles, but the quality of skin, the pores, the texture, the skin, everything looked amazing.And I said, “Did you have any treatments?” She said, “No, I’ve never had skincare products, skincare therapies, nothing in the last two years.” And Botox provided two years of this. The photo I showed in the New York Times of this woman, I would tell you that even years later, her skin probably would still look better. And I think it would be almost impossible for her forehead skin to catch up with the aging of her midface skin because she’s done so much Botox.

So people always think Botox is great for a quick fix, great for three months of some improvement. After that it goes away, because I have my wrinkles come back. But you’re missing the point. There’s a deep profound collagen regeneration with quality Botox done consistently. And that’s what I’m trying to achieve, is long term regeneration of the skin tissues. That’s the powerful thing that people miss with Botox, that people don’t understand, that they completely overlook. And that’s the thing that I can deliver. Now, how many people deliver micro Meso Botox? Very few. I would probably say I’m maybe the only one in Texas, or one of the few that deliver this, because they just don’t understand it, they don’t know how to deliver it, they don’t even know what end points to look for. I’m really trying to create a total balance to the face. And I really am convinced that lasers, other therapies that you think are really going to be powerful, simply won’t deliver what I deliver, in terms of the therapies and the improvements that I get with my micro Botox across a wide expanse of face, neck, and chest tissues.