Another new episode of Dr. Athré’s podcast, “Plastic Surgery Unplugged” is here! In this series Dr. Athré shares industry secrets, details on plastic surgery procedures, and personal anecdotes from professionals and patients.
In episode 7, Dr. Athré gives you the scoop on the top five plastic surgery procedures that won’t break the bank.
Listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or Google Podcasts—and don’t forget to check out our archive of episodes 1 through 6.
Don’t forget to subscribe and share with friends and family. Here’s episode 7: “Top 5 Non-Invasive Treatments [That Won’t Break the Bank].” Thanks for listening!
[Audio transcription via Rev.com]
Dr. Raghu Athré:
Hi. I’m Dr. Raghu Athré with Athré Plastic Surgery and Med Spa. Welcome to another episode of our podcast.
One of the prompts I was given, which I think is very interesting, is 5 non-invasive treatments that I would recommend that give you bang for buck. So I decided to sit down and think about this and I’ve put together a list of 5 treatments which I think really work well and give you a bang for buck that is probably not as proportional to the price. So let’s get started with that.
The first thing that I put on my list is skin care.
I think skin care is probably the single most important thing in anything we do with respect to plastic surgery. I definitely talk to all my patients after a facelift, after chemical peels, all of these types of procedures, about skin care. so most of us don’t even think about skin care until we get to the point where we start seeing a few wrinkles then go “Whoa! I need to do something about it!”
So at that point in time, realistically, we’re in the repair phase rather than the prevention phase. If we actually target that a little earlier we’re going to actually have a way better overall result. So kind of I like to think about this kind of like going to the dentist.
So if you decide that hey I’m going to go to the dentist every six months and i’m going to use the appropriate toothpaste and brush my teeth and floss… that type of maintenance early on pays you dividends for the most part down the road, okay. You’re not going to need more expensive procedures, no root canals, no implants, things like that, okay. I know I’m over simplifying but you kind of get the gist of it.
Now if you say “Hey listen, I have a little bit of discoloration in my teeth and I just want to go get zoom whitening and not worry about anything with respect to the preventative aspect”, yeah you may get a little bit of white teeth in the short term, but long term you haven’t really done anything to impact your teeth.
So similarly with skin care a good regimen involves preventative, as well as some degree of reparative, and then maintenance. Okay, so all three of those things are targeted in a good medical grade skin care regimen and I know I keep harping on skin care and you’re like “Ah there’s 10 million products out there!” I’m going to make this real simple for you: Medical grade is different from what you can buy at Walgreens or even at the more expensive department stores.
Come in. Have one of us, myself or the esthetician, evaluate your skin. We have objective ways of looking at your skin. I call it “the egg”, it’s being able to shoot your skin in different types of polarized light to see what kind of damage exists, what the moisture level is, and all those kinds of stuff to really get a skin care regimen that’s targeted to the issues that you’re facing.
Number two is a good facial regimen. Okay, inclusive of facials, dermaplaning, some chemical peels, all of those boxes. And I’ll be really honest, I’m not really good at maintaining myself. I talk a big game and, you know, I get tied up with work, but realistically this is a big category that gives you a hell of a lot of dividends with not as much investment.
So if you are very um, how do i say this, if you keep up the small stuff you don’t have to sweat the big stuff down the road. Facials are really good to get rid of some of the dead skin cells and kind of get that skin collagen system re-reboosted. Chemical peels to amp that up even more and things like dermaplaning, kind of sloughing off some of those dead skin cells. So a lot of this, I’m putting all that in a big box, and by speaking to a very good quality medical esthetician like Blaise in our office, she can put a regimen together for you so that you kind of have a blueprint or a game plan of what needs to be done when.
Number three. Microneedling. Microneedling is all the rage. It’s not snake oil. It’s not useful for everything but it is a procedure that can repair a lot of damage and prevent a lot of damage. What microneedling is really doing is basically putting little micro perforations in the skin and each one of those little micro perforations serves two purposes.
One, it actually creates a controlled injury into the skin which triggers the skin to kind of pump up its reparative mechanisms to increase collagen and such.
The second thing it does is temporarily create a little channel in that micro perforation so you can put stuff on the skin which sinks into the skin. So it is useful from both of those perspectives.
Again, another procedure where dividends received are way more than the investment put in.
Places where microneedling is awesome… under eye area, works great for that area, really can trigger and help with a little bit of the crepe like skin, crow’s feet region, generalized acne scarring over the face, fine lines across the forehead, all areas where microneedling works great. Also it can really help thicken up skin, sorry, thicken up hair in this area. So that was number three.
Number four, IPL. IPL is one of the best treatments to impact the color quality of the skin. So as we all age, we tend to develop some hypochromia or little dark spots, age spots, freckles, all these kinds of various things and IPL is a great treatment in order to give you more of that even complexion. It goes hand in hand with skin care. So the skin care is treating the skin more long-term. IPL gives you that instantaneous reparative mechanism for maintaining that skin coloration. Also it is really good for some small tele-injectations or little capillary veins type of thing. So that was number four.
Last but not least, exilis, number five. So exilis is a combination of radio frequency and ultrasound. You’ve heard me say this before. It’s basically two different types of energy. It’s kind of like trying to put some heat into the deeper skin layers and thereby causing remodeling of the underlying tissue layers creating collagen, tightening it up, as well as burning a little bit of fat.
Most of the work that we’re doing in the face is more on the remodeling, trying to increase collagen, increase thickness. So it’s good for dealing with the texture quality of the skin whereas the IPL is more on the color purpose of the skin.
So if we break this down… chemical peels, facials, those kinds of things, are good for overall superficial texture. Deep, underlying texture and support is an exilis issue. And color is an IPL, skin care issue. So this is kind of how all this fits together.
I know this is a lot of stuff being crammed down in a few minutes but in a nutshell there are lots of treatments that are available that are not very expensive, that fall in this stitch-in-time-saves-nine category. If you invest in these now, you’re getting high dividends to prevent bigger procedures down the road to repair things.
If you have questions please don’t hesitate to give us a call. Blaise, who is our esthetician, is an excellent resource. So come in, create a small aesthetics consult. It’s complementary and she can go in and create a blueprint for you guys with respect to what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to give us a shout. Till next time.