What About Getting Botox at the Shopping Mall?

The quality of your Botox results depends on three things:

1. The number of units of Botox that you receive.

2. Exactly where those units are placed.

3. The concentration of the solution used.

The Botox injection community has shifted toward using both

· more units per volume of salt water injected into the face for fewer complications

· more units total for effectiveness and probably longevity

There are many, many subtleties to the placement of Botox. The most important thing for most women is for the medicine to relax the muscles that depress or bring down the eyebrows, which are the muscles between the eyebrows and the muscles out to the side of the eyebrows. In the hands of the best Botox administrators, very little Botox is placed in the forehead because this tends to drop the eyebrows. When proper Botox placement is achieved there is a beautiful eyebrow arch, and when the proper amount of Botox is used it will last longer.

I think any good registered nurse can be trained to administer Botox, and I have no doubt that there are a few Botox administrators who are operating in malls and at parties and other informal settings who do a great job. However, your chances of getting consistently excellent results are better if you stick with an established surgeon and understand that what he is doing did take training, practice and experience and is not easily duplicated without a similar background. It is not the M.D. after the name that counts, but rather the technique when using Botox.

Scared of Needles But Want the Benefits of a Cosmetic Specialist?

Seattle Harbor at Night

We are specialists in “scaredy-cat” patients. Are you afraid of needles? Dr. Yoho has special techniques to make your experience in surgery or even a minimally invasive procedure as painless as possible. For example, he has a method where he starts an I.V. using a very tiny needle and a tiny amount of local anesthetic and almost no pain is perceived by the patient. Before the local anesthetic is put into the skin, he scratches the area in order to fool the nerves and most people feel nothing at all.

Also, many “non-invasive” procedures are performed with just numbing cream placed on the face. Dr. Yoho believes that all of his patients should have a chance to go to sleep briefly if they wish, and accordingly, offers his “non-invasive” patients no-charge sedation for their procedure. Of course, they need to be accompanied by a person who can drive them home, but they generally feel fine within 15 minutes of waking up, because the sedation medicine is so short acting.

Additionally, we use a special Botox needle that most people can’t feel. It’s a 32-gauge needle, which is smaller than was ever available a few years ago. By pressing the fingernail into the area to be injected, the nerves again are fooled and often the patients feel no injection for the Botox.

About Breast Implant Warranties

For all patients that have had Mentor implants within the last ten years: you can switch to saline whether you have a deflation or not, and all you have to do is pay $300 for each implant to go from saline to silicone, which are over the muscle and much better. They’ve come out with a new silicone implant that’s made of gel and FDA-approved and people have had a great success with it.

Allergan implants are a little different, and you can call our office and give us your information. If you are ten years out, you still get $1,200 or $2,400 if you upgraded. And they will replace one side, possibly two.

But you’re more than welcome to call our office at 626-585-0800 and ask us about the warranties on the implants, because many people are coming up on the ten-year cutoff.

Botox and the New Botox Medications

One of Dr. Yoho's daughters at the Louvre

Botox is one of the most popular cosmetic procedure options ever, and certainly there are more Botox treatments than any other kind of cosmetic surgery performed in America. Unfortunately, the material only has an affect for three to four months or a bit longer and has to be repeated, but the good side is that if you repeat it regularly for a year at three-month intervals to four-month intervals, less Botox is probably needed.

The other good news is that a cheaper Botox is available now and this is called Dysport. Despite claims of the manufacturers that one is superior to the other, we find these products in practice to be virtually identical, with the advantage of Dysport being a bit less expensive. Whether or not the surgeon passes this savings on to the patient is up to the individual surgeon.

Also, surgeons are ordering these products from outside of the country. This is actually against the law, but in practice, the material seems to be identical, although the bottles can be identified by someone who knows what they’re looking for. Dr. Yoho does not use out-of-the-country Botox or Dysport. 

The second piece of good news is that a new neuromuscular blocker or muscle relaxer is on the horizon and slated to be marketed this year, hopefully for a lower price even than Dysport. We would love to have a product that lasted longer, but we’ve heard no reports to the effect that this new Botox lasts any longer. Hopefully, though, we will be able to pass the price savings on if the new product turns out to be virtually the same as Botox or Dysport.

So don’t believe any claims that one of these things is better than the other. The skill of the injector, the amount used, and just where the material is placed are the critical variables in how long it lasts and what kind of a result you have. Remember to check with your administering surgeon or medical aesthetician two weeks later if you have any question or problem with your Botox or Dysport result. Often there will be a little irregularity in the response or a problem that can be fixed with a few units of additional material, and we do this for free.