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This podcast is to talk about cyclical, swelling, specifically around the lower eyelid area. I have some patients that come to me wanting eye bags removed or fillers under their eyes. And the number one question I asked them is, do they have allergies? And do they have cyclical swelling where it swells in the morning when they wake up? I always say I can’t hit a moving target. So, you know, if I fill it, the problem is it may look better, you know, in the morning when it’s swollen and then it maybe look overfilled in the afternoon. And the other problem is that the swelling oftentimes will be worsened with hydronic acid or filler because they’re hydrophilic or they love water. So they absorb water and causes more swelling. So that’s really problem and so how do you fix this kind of cyclical swelling?

Well, the answer is not to let me do this because, you know, if it’s mild and it’s like maybe five or 10% of some swelling that I could probably put some fillers and maybe fat grafting, eye bag removal, et cetera. But if there is a large component where it’s mainly swelling that occurs on a cyclical nature, especially when you wake up in the morning, then what I recommend I have a lady upstairs in my building QC stone that does lymphatic massage. She does cupping and he said, well, what the heck cupping, what the heck would you do that for? The reason is a lot of times our body is holding toxins back either through too much alcohol, through poor diet, through stress, through whatever, things like that. And so, yes, it’s sort of an Eastern philosophy, but I really believe that that toxicity that’s around your eyes is, is a reflection of systemic or body toxicity.

And the answer is not fillers, not fat grafting, not an eye bag removal. It’s someone to help with that therapy. Now, clearly, if you don’t believe in all of these methods, you can go the Western route through functional medicine to try to manage it through a doctor, to see if there’s other underlying reasons. But the real problem is Western doctors, such as myself, have been trained to look at like, you know, your liver function tests your cholesterol. And if everything looks sort of normal, they don’t know what to do with it. And they just give you some steroids and send you on your way, whether longterm steroids is not the solution, you need some kind of therapy to help reduce this. So I hope this idea of understanding cyclical swelling. The goal is not surgery is not necessarily fillers, but it’s looking at the underlying cause of what’s causing it to treat that.