Get ready to dive into the world of plastic surgery as Dr. Anthony Youn shares his expertise in the latest episode. From discussing ...

are-red-light-face-led-masks-worth-splurging-on-ft-dr-tony-youn

Are Red Light Face LED Masks Worth Splurging On? Ft. Dr. Tony Youn

we surgeons get a bad rep that we only want to do surgery but there's so much more to it and I think the best surgeons are the ones who keep their patients out of the operating room exactly and one of the things I've always thought is you know when we go through our training we look at okay what are the what is the cream of the crop like what do you want to do you want to do like the biggest operations so in general surgery it was the Whipple you want to do a Whipple it's a 10-hour cancer operation if you are so lucky that you can do a Whipple then then you have reached the Pinnacle in plastic surgery it's the facelift and so for years I actually gauge My Success on how many face UPS I had and I got to a point where I was doing so many of them I had people flying in across the country and then I had a patient with a horrible complication from one and it set me in a complete Tail Spin and made me really relook at why I'm doing what I'm doing and should I even be a plastic surgeon and in the end I realized just what you said is the goal that I was always thought taught or I always thought was what we were supposed to do is the goal is to bring people to the operating room should should be the opposite it should be how do we keep people out of the operating room but keep them healthy and happy and in my situation feeling great about themsel yeah for sure and you bring up facelifts I think I did get a question on social media like what's better Botox or facelift like when do you decide that someone should go forward with a facelift and nowadays you're hearing about all these liquid facelifts or nonsurgical facelifts so maybe you can shed some light on that so yeah there are two very different things so Botox is a neurotoxin it's actually one of the most d dangerous toxins in the world and if you get just a tiny amount put into your body you can die from it but if you take the most minuscule tiniest amount and you put it in a very controlled fashion into a muscle let's say a muscle that creates your crows feet wrinkles then you can weaken that muscle for a good 3 to four months and cause those wrinkles to smooth out that's different than a face lift where we're actually cutting out excess skin and we're removing hanging skin like jowls and excess skin from under the neck uh as a way to tighten the lower face and so it is a big difference you know there's a lot though that we can do now with technology has been so kind to us with giving us all these Avenues to tighten skin to even remove fat um to enhance the complexion surgery really is something that we can save just for those specific situations that require it so there's so much technology I mean I can't keep up right I don't I'm like a plastic surgery Noob but there's like lasers and radio frequency and red light masks and all this stuff like what works out of those things like what should we be looking for as consumers if we're looking to tighten up our skin or try to avoid maybe injecting Botox or doing other things so really there's so many things that work I think the question is going to be really for your audience is what do you start with okay and and where's a good bang for your buck because yes there are laser treatments that you can have like a two we downtime that can do wonders on your skin but most people don't want to have a two we downtime so the first thing that I Rec recommend people started you say hey I'd like just to get my skin better I'm on a budget I don't want to spend a ton of money you mentioned earlier they are red light masks that's a good place to start so red light therapy is something that is very popular in more of the holistic alternative medicine realm yet you talk to dermatologists and plastic surgeons and they don't really have much of an opinion on it the idea behind red light therapy is that the red light if you put it onto your skin it's not proven we don't know exactly why it works but the belief is that it can help power your MIT Andria mitochondria are the powerhouses of our cells and they create ATP and the idea is that the energy from that light from that red light it gets absorbed by your cells and it helps to essentially energize them now it's kind of this theoretical you know thing that we think this is how it works but what we do know is that studies have been done on red light therapy and shown that for for example there's one study that looked at it was something like 1,200 patients and they treated them for 90 days with red light therapy and found a significant statistically significant Improvement in wrinkles and skin hydration with it uh they even did split face studies where you'd have literally only half of the face treated with red light therapy and found a significant Improvement in the skin tightness and the firmness of the skin afterwards and that was I think after like two months of therapy uh the good thing with red light therapy is it's completely safe there are a lot of ways to do it there are handheld devices that you can do like a quarter of your face at a time which I find to be kind of annoying cuz I'd rather just get it all done there are tabletop devices that are usually pretty affordable you get them usually for a few hundred there are these creepy looking masks that light up that you may see people on like social media wear those are great too you can usually get that for a couple hundred dollars or there's even actually full body beds that some people do for red light I think red light therapy is a great entrance point for people who are looking to use technology to look younger because it's so safe it definitely helps and you can do it in the comfort of your own home when you're looking at going outside of the home and if you're looking for a good bang for your buck let's say at a med spa then the first thing I would start with is IPL intense pulse light and essentially what this is is using light to Target dark spots it actually will heat up those dark spots on your skin cause those dark spots to Slough off after about 7 to 12 days and the good thing about IPL is that it's relatively inexpensive compared to more expensive laser treatments there's no downtime to it and it definitely works can you use IPL for like under eye dark circles not quite the same for under ey dark circles you have to look at the cause and the and the treatment should be targeted to the cause so some people get under eye circles because they have puffiness under their eyes that's why I that's what I've got you know I've inherited puffiness under my eyes from my mom and the unfortunately that puffiness creates shadowing that can look like a dark circle so that's usually treated unfortunately surgically to remove that fat but you can also get dark circles from pigmentation so people who a lot of people who are like Indian they can get some of that where it's pigmentation that's treated with more brightening creams and you can also get dark circles from thinning of the skin so people have lighter skin that that skin is super thin and it can even become almost transparent so you can see the dark blood vessels underneath that treatment is going to be using let's say a retinol eye cream where you can create some thickening of that skin gradually to make it essentially less transparent I've seen also people doing like um caffeine for like temporary right temporary like brightening yeah so you can get tightness with the caffeine it's kind of hydrating and so somebody like myself or it's a bit it's due to puffiness then caffeine can definitely help I know we talked a little bit about red light the interesting thing about red light is there was this craze uh a little while back about putting red light on your scrotum help with testosterone now unfortunately it doesn't work because it doesn't penetrate deep enough to get to the testicles and so people were setting their par and putting red light on their scrotum which doesn't really help so you know the interesting thing cuz I know the guy that they say you know there's these big muscle guys who go on social media they go a study done by great Ben Greenfield back in like 2007 or something showed that your testosterone increase when you know what he did this is an article that was written in I think it was an online magazine or maybe it was even Rolling Stone where he tried it on himself and he saw an increase in testosterone levels that's it this is not a study this is a lot of that can improve his test he's like yeah he's like a biohacker guy so he's trying all different things but this is like one guy so you can't say that a study was performed by him right this guy tried on himself and somehow his testosterone levels increased but what caused it to increase right right you could have been working out hard the day before or that morning or who knows and that's not a reason to go burn your perineum that's the thing so people do interesting things to their parum speaking of we talked about Botox people do scrotox right do you see a lot of men coming to you for that it's I think it's more of a it's a very Niche thing and I one of the things is a plastic surgeon and you'll probably be happy I say I stay away from that area in general so I don't do a female genital surgery there's genital Cosmic surgery labioplasty that's real popular it's not my thing uh male genital surgery cosmetic surgery is not quite as popular although scos honestly I think it's made news because it's just kind of funny yeah that people think okay you're getting Botox to smooth out your scrotum and some people say because it Smooths out it hangs lower and it I guess is more attractive that way or something but the big thing they say is you got to watch out for those toilets with really high water because you could get wet yeah uh I don't know that women think a lot about scrotums I'll be honest with you but I think if it makes you feel better I mean this is I think how plastic surgeons think if it's going to make you feel better it's relatively safe like there's no harm in it certainly but um I think again you have to think about why you're doing it well it's like that study that was performed um it was in Asia about how attractive men scums are and they had them list on a scale of one to like positive two to like negative2 and positive two being attractive and negative2 being unattractive and every single scrotum was in the negative range and so the idea is that there's no such thing as a beautiful scrotum it's just a levels of how ugly they are yeah I mean I operate on scrotums for a living right and I can't say I've ever saw scrotum and been like wow in terms of General plastic surgery what do you see men coming in for so men come in for a lot of Botox uh and the good thing about Botox is it's a way to reduce lines to just look a few years younger with that if done really well is hard to spot yeah so number one thing is going to be Botox uh the number two thing is going to be lipo suction and typically it's the love handle area and the abdomen that a lot of men come in for uh gynacomastia also man boobs essentially that's also something that people come in for those are difficult operations I recently stopped doing them um I didn't get a lot of patients doing it but I feel I did a really good job but it's hard hard because expectations in that part of the body it's really difficult for men and I had a lot of men where you take them and they'd had real gynecomastia you know real breast tissue and You' make them look quote unquote normal but they were a lot of times dissatisfied

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