Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Skin Report. Today we’re going to talk about the fear behind medical aesthetics.
Hi.
Hi.
So you’re a medical aesthetics doctor.
Mm-hmm.
So what we want to do, and I think it’s really important, is to really explain what is the difference between medical aesthetics and plastic surgery?
Yeah, that’s a great question. Medical aesthetics has actually been a field that I think has really evolved and grown in the last 20 years. Plastic surgery has been around for a long time, and usually when people think about plastic surgery, they think about big changes to how their face looks or corrections. Facelifts, nose jobs, liposuction, breast implants, breast reductions, and so forth.
Now, medical aesthetics is very different. So medical aesthetics sort of addresses the things that most people are looking for without surgery. So that includes acne treatments, acne scar reduction, anti-aging skin treatments. Also, things like Botox and fillers to help volumize the face make you have some options that are outside of surgery that don’t require a facelift. So we do a lot of skin tightening and lifting.
Then we also do body treatments that reduce fat, which again, don’t require anesthesia or surgery.
So in your experience also with those two differences, between medical aesthetics and plastic surgery, do you feel like people have not a resistance, but are they more hesitant to medical aesthetics? Is there sort of a fear of that they want that instant gratification, but they feel like they will get that with medical aesthetics, but maybe it won’t last forever as long as plastic surgery results last. Do you encounter that?
I think that the internet and social media can really help medical aesthetics, but it can also break it. The biggest fear people have is, am I going to end up looking worse? Am I not going to look myself? Am I not going to get results?
I think out of all those fears, the biggest is, am I not going to look like myself and people will notice I had something done. That is not true, especially if you’re using the right logic to find the right practice to work with.
The other important thing is this is one of those fields where you really have a lot of options. There are a lot more medical aesthetic offices than there are plastic surgery offices. For the consumer, it can be very confusing and every medical aesthetic office offers different things, different brands of technologies. So how you make your decision to work with someone is really going to impact your results.
It is interesting that people think that they may not like the results because the results might be too much. Whereas is it easier to reverse those versus the very almost permanent results that they would experience from plastic surgery?
The nice thing about medical aesthetics is you’re not going to end up looking different. I take that back to some extent. Only if you are highly reliant on getting things like fillers and Botox entirely and you’re not addressing skin. A lot of the interest in medical aesthetics has grown in skin. So now we are seeing many people, younger people coming in seeking treatments for acne scars, hyperpigmentation. We’re seeing less people coming in asking for fillers and Botox specifically. People come in asking for a solution and they tend to actually not want to rely on injectables. I think that’s a good trend, honestly, because I think injectables have their space in aesthetics, but they’re becoming a smaller and smaller part of what we do.
Previously, when you see those scary pictures of celebrities or you see a friend who doesn’t look themselves anymore, likely it is a heavy dependence on fillers to correct things. We actually are doing less and less of that.
How can skin resurfacing actually help build collagen or add sculpt to your face that people normally rely on fillers to do? Can skin resurfacing create that same result?
Yes, absolutely. So what happens is, if you look at what our skin is doing through the ages, when you’re in your twenties, you are making new skin and correcting errors like sun damage, pollution damage every 10 days to two weeks. When you’re in your forties, this rate of correction of all that damage goes down to every six to eight weeks. Then in your fifties, it’s eight to 12 weeks.
So that’s why, let’s take a woman in her twenties and a woman in her forties. They’re getting exposed to exactly the same amount of sunlight, the exactly same amount of pollution. Why does their skin look different? So skin resurfacing essentially gives a controlled injury to your skin so that it can make your skin behave like it did when it was younger. It’ll make it repair faster and erase scars, fine lines, hyperpigmentation and so forth. The beauty of all of this is it’s your skin. You get to keep it and if you have a healthy lifestyle, your results are going to be even better.
What are the most common things when you’re about to bring your new patient into a treatment plan? Let’s say for laser resurfacing or microneedling, which is also skin resurfacing. What are their top FAQs or top concerns or their most frequently asked questions to really take away their fear?
I think their biggest concern is is it going to work for me? I think this is where the conversation around skin tone comes in. A lot of people don’t even go to medical aesthetic offices if they have a darker skin tone because they immediately assume that whatever we do is not going to work for them or harm their skin. It’s just not for them.
Then the second one is, are the results going to go away? That’s a really interesting question. No can take away good skin from you. It’s yours to keep. You just need to be disciplined about good skincare. I mean, yes, when you first start a medical aesthetic treatment, you’re probably getting three to four procedures done once a month. Okay, there’s that initial investment, but after that, it’s actually easy. A little bit of maintenance here and there just a few times a year. Good skincare daily, good lifestyle. That’s all it is.
So are my results going to go away is another common question. No, we cannot age you fast. We just resurface. You have great skin, it’s up to you after that. You’re not going to lose that.
How long now after they’ve done their initial, let’s say three to five treatments, what does that take? About three to four months?
Mm-hmm.
Then what is their maintenance plan? So they’ll be on skincare to kind of feed their skin to maintain those really, really nice results. When do they have to kind of come back over time?
Right. So let’s talk about acne scarring, right? So you are in your thirties, you are getting skin resurfacing for acne scar reduction. You go through a treatment of microneedling four sessions once a month. So four months, you’re done. After that, let’s say if you’re in your thirties, come back twice a year, get one microneedling session.
If you are getting skin resurfacing to address sagging skin or fine line, well, if you are in your forties or fifties, your natural rate of collagen production is reduced. So instead of coming twice a year, consider three times a year, four times a year. Again, the other thing is a lot of the treatments we do now don’t have any downtime. So you can easily incorporate them. You don’t have to take time off to do them.
I think that’s a great summary just to take away those fears and that hesitation because it actually seems really easy and smooth.
It’s very doable and I think that’s what surprises everyone when they start doing treatments in a medical aesthetic office. They realize that, you know what? I could come in my lunch hour. I did not have any… Is it cheap? No, but it as expensive as plastic surgery? Absolutely not. It’s a fraction of the cost.
I love that.
All right, that wraps up our discussion about the fear of medical aesthetic. If you like our videos and want to learn more about medical aesthetics, beauty, please subscribe, like, share. If you have any questions, ask us in the comments.
