Dr. Bae:
Thanks so much, Greg. Good to see you.

Greg:
Did I embarrass you? I hope not.

Dr. Bae:
I’m getting red, getting red.

Greg:
Your hair’s getting longer, by the way, again. Are you doing the COVID thing and not cutting it again, or what’s going on over there?

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, letting it grow out. According to my wife and the person who cuts my hair, Kristin at Monument Salon, shout out to Kristin, they both like my hair a little long, kind of like Oscar Isaac. That was actually the actor that they said they wanted my hair to look like.

Greg:
Hey listen, first of all, the two people you should be listening to in life, your wife, number one, and the person that does your hair, number two. So good choice.

Dr. Bae:
Thanks.

Why Dr. Bae cancelled his trip to Hawaii

Greg:
But the reason I bring it up is, we were kind of full steam, speed ahead, taking our masks off, going out, doing all these things because we kind of thought we had this COVID thing beat, but the Delta variant has thrown a little bit of a curve ball at us, and we’re all kind of coming back. I know me, I washed all my masks, got them in my car, got them in my backpack again. And then I know you just made a major decision about traveling. You were about to take a big trip to Hawaii and you’ve made a decision to not go?

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, if y’all remember, on Big Bay Mornings, I actually invited everybody to come join us in Hawaii and Maui at the end of August, and-

Greg:
I was going to be your nanny. I was going to take care of the baby and then y’all could hang out.

Dr. Bae:
Exactly. Well, yeah, we were excited to have you as our nanny, but we decided to not go because… And I want to make it clear to everybody that we’re making decisions based on specific situation in our life that this doesn’t necessarily mean everybody else has to do the same. But if it was just me and Kelsey, two adults that were vaccinated, I would’ve still gone to Hawaii at the end of the month. No question about it. Even with the Delta variant, even though it’s more infectious and things like that. We would’ve been vaccinated, we would’ve worn N95 masks on the plane. I felt like we would’ve been pretty safe.

Kids under 12 unvaccinated

Dr. Bae:
But because we were going to be traveling with a six and a half month old, or a seven month old by that time, who’s not eligible for the vaccine, who wouldn’t be vaccinated by then, we felt like we needed to cancel the trip. And we reached out to the hotel and just said, “You know what? We’re coming there, we promise. Keep our money, we’re not asking for a refund. Hopefully we’ll be there within the next six months.” And so yeah, we canceled the trip to Hawaii and we’ll just do a little staycation here. But I think the issue was just that, because Emilio isn’t vaccinated yet and being in closed quarters for a five-hour flight, it was just too much anxiety. Because the truth is, he’s a perfectly healthy little boy, and if he got sick, and I know it’s rare that kids get really sick from COVID, but… It’s rare, that doesn’t mean it’s zero. And if he did actually get sick-

Greg:
Yeah. Well, and a baby can’t even wear a mask, right?

Dr. Bae:
That’s the whole thing, yeah, they talk about… Well, the baby’s not required to wear a mask, but I think it’d be pretty tough and maybe a little scary if it-

Greg:
I mean, how would you put a… Yeah, I don’t even know how you would do it.

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, and you’d be afraid that it would smother the baby. Yeah, that’d be a bad scene. So we just didn’t want to take the chance of this perfectly healthy little boy getting potentially sick and getting a rare, serious case of COVID. So yeah, we canceled the trip. We’ll hang out here. We’ll be able to travel there again. We’re just going to stay home, stay healthy. And since we’re requiring all of our patients coming into the office now to be vaccinated, we’re hopefully going to keep the Delta variant at bay, keep our own little herd immunity here in the office and that way I won’t take it-

Greg:
At bay. At Bae.

Dr. Bae:
Oh yeah, at Bae. Yeah, there you go, B-A-E.

Greg:
Hey, even though you did cancel your trip and you did it because of your baby, but you said you would’ve gone had-

Dr. Bae:
I would’ve.

How to travel safely

Greg:
… you weren’t taking the baby. You do still think there are safe ways people can travel, but you would definitely recommend, I mean, maybe the best mask possible. What is that, the N95?

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s… Nothing’s going to be a hundred percent safe. It’s about risk mitigation, risk reduction. And I think that if you’re traveling by car to someplace up in Napa and you’re going to be at a hotel that’s got, basically outdoor, that you don’t have to go into a lobby to go into your room, that you have a direct entrance into your room, if there’s little bungalows and things, I think that’s super safe to do that. I think you’re outdoors, you’re not going into a crowded area. If you’re able to eat outdoors, I think that’s as safe as you can be without completely shutting everything down. And yeah, N95 masks definitely are going to be better than just a regular cloth mask. So I think there’s definitely safer ways to travel and that’s what I would encourage people to do, and that’s what we’re… We’re following my own advice.

Greg:
Awesome. Well, I mean, listen, we’ve got to live life, but we also can make smart decisions and smart choices to keep ourselves safe and everybody else safe.

Dr. Bae:
Right. We want to live life, but we want to be alive to live life.

Greg:
There you go.

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, so make some good choices. There you go.

How to find Dr. Bae

Greg:
That’s great advice. And if you need any other advice from Dr. Bae, whether it’s about COVID, or maybe you want to book a plastic surgery appointment, or maybe you need a consultation for something and just want to ask him a question, he will answer anything that you want to ask at…

Dr. Bae:
Realdrbae, R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E on Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. You can direct message us on any of those. You can watch us operate on social media, and you can also check pricing on our website at realdrbae.com. Always available.

Greg:
Great to see you, Dr. Bae.

Dr. Bae:
Great to see you, Greg.

The post Why I canceled my trip to Hawaii [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Greg:

Hey. This is Greg here with board certified plastic surgeon, Dr. Bae, This time via video. I love this. I love this new look you got going on here, Dr. Bae.

Jonathan Kaplan:

Thanks. Appreciate you joining me. This is going to be our new vlog, Bae Break Example thing that we’re going to roll out and see how it goes. But I appreciate you working with me. We’ll hopefully work out all the kinks in this first pilot episode.

Greg:

Yeah. I’m super excited. And you can also sort of give me a consult to at times via video. You can tell me if I need a touch up here or there, when I do this.

Jonathan Kaplan:

Except that everybody else can see this video. So they’ll see the few imperfections you have, let’s be honest, the very few imperfections.

Greg:

But see? That’s okay. I can have them, because you can fix them.

Jonathan Kaplan:

That’s true. Fair enough. Fair enough. Point taken. Touche.

Three Vaccines

Greg:

All right. Well, I know what you do for a living is do things like this, help me look better, but you also know quite a bit about what everybody’s talking about. It’s the different vaccines for COVID. And we just had our latest one come out. Johnson & Johnson hit the Bay Area recently. But there are some differences and everybody wants to know between Johnson & Johnson, the Moderna, Pfizer. And some people have even suggested, “Ooh, do I want to get the Johnson & Johnson?” So fill us in and tell us what’s your best advices.

Jonathan Kaplan:

Yeah. So go through whatever website you can or whatever, Walgreens, Rite Aid. Do your best to kind of just sign up as soon as you can, as soon as your tier opens up. And don’t worry about which vaccine it is. They’re all life-saving vaccines. Yes, there are three that you hear about in the news, the Pfizer, the Moderna, the Johnson & Johnson. And yes, there is maybe higher effectiveness for Pfizer and Moderna, 94 1/2% versus 95%. Moderna’s 94.5%. Pfizer’s 95%. but don’t let that scare you, that Johnson & Johnson, the published report, [inaudible 00:01:57] from 66 to 71%, because it’s all about what they’re measuring there. The thing to keep in mind is while yes, maybe Pfizer and Moderna will keep you from getting a milder case, whereas that might get past the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the thing that really keep in mind is that all three of them, after about two to three weeks after you’ve gotten any three of those vaccines, that you will not be hospitalized statistically speaking and you will not die if you catch COVID.

Jonathan Kaplan:

So that’s what’s really important, is that these are lifesaving vaccines that will keep you out of the hospital. Doesn’t matter what those percentages are that you may be hearing on the news. So please, whichever opportunity you get, whichever vaccine you get the opportunity to get, like I was saying, sign up, get that vaccine, go take that vaccine, the one that’s available to you tomorrow. Take it. Don’t say, “Oh, I’m going to wait for the Pfizer,” because you just never know when you’re going to get a chance to get that vaccine if you don’t take the chance when you have it.

Greg:

That’s true. And every day without a vaccine is a day that you could possibly encounter COVID. And so you don’t to have to go through that. And something you brought up and I just want to emphasize is I believe it’s 100% of the studies for all three nobody died, nobody went to the hospital under these vaccines. So it’s going to keep you from getting super sick, no matter which one you take.

Where we were just a year ago

Jonathan Kaplan:

Right. I mean, it’s so insane to think that we have three vaccines not even a year after the first shelter in place order was put in place in the United States, which happened to me in San Francisco. So that was March 16th, 2020. We’re not even to March 16th yet and we’ve got three fully-functional vaccines, that like you said and like I’ve said and which you can never reiterate it enough, it will keep you from dying and will keep you from getting hospitalized. Because that’s the thing, is if you say, “Oh, well, you know what? I want to wait for the Pfizer one,” well, let’s say that’s two weeks away and you go and you get a mild case or what you hope is a mild case of coronavirus, but then you get hospitalized and you get put on a ventilator, maybe you survive, great, but if you would have just gone with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is supposedly around 66%, you would have completely avoided the hospital, you would have avoided being on the ventilator. So it seems very obvious to me.

Jonathan Kaplan:

The benefit also of this Johnson & Johnson vaccine is it is one shot. The other two are two shots. But they are looking to see if you get a… They’re doing another study of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, that if you get a second booster shot, kind of like what you’re doing with Pfizer and with Moderna, that that will actually get your levels up to where the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are. So they’re still studying that. But either way, if you can avoid being in the hospital, why take the chance and wait on another vaccine?

mRNA vs other technology

Jonathan Kaplan:

The other thing that’s really I find interesting about the different vaccines is people talk about, “Oh, well, I’m not sure about Pfizer and Moderna because their messenger RNA vaccines,” which nobody knows what that means. I don’t know why you all of a sudden they’re drawing a line in the sand that, “Oh no. No messenger RNA vaccines.” It’s just that that is a newer technology. Or excuse me, I should say it’s a technology that’s been around for 20 years. Just this is the first time it’s been used as a vaccine. And there was some concerns about fertility. All of that is unfounded. There’s no evidence of that.

Jonathan Kaplan:

So whether it’s a message RNA vaccine or whether it’s the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is a vector-based vaccine, you have to become an epidemiologist of virologist to understand any of this, but just believe that smarter people than all of us have done the research and these things are safe. The FDA has viewed these things as safe. And even though they just came out a few months ago, 100s of 1000s of people were included in the studies for all three vaccines and now millions of people have gotten these vaccines in the United States. So they are safe. They really are.

How to get your vaccine!

Greg:

All right. If you haven’t already, get online now, find all the websites, there’s several of them, where you can sign up to get in line to get your vaccine. You can’t just wait around and think you’re going to get a phone call from somebody. You’ve got to go online and be proactive. You can go to your doctor’s website. You can go to a lot of different other websites that you can search and Google, but it’s important to find out where your tier lies, get signed up and get your vaccine.

Jonathan Kaplan:

And what’s kind of cool, and this isn’t technically skipping the line, because obviously I would never encourage that, but if you go Google Dr. B, B as in boy, Dr. B vaccine, it’s a website.

Greg:

[crosstalk 00:06:15].

Jonathan Kaplan:

And maybe you’ve heard… You’re shaking your head. You’ve heard about it? Yeah.

Greg:

Yes.

Jonathan Kaplan:

It’s a website that will let you know if there’s a place where they’re going to have to throw away some vaccines at the end of the day that they don’t have enough people who scheduled or signed up and they’re going to have to throw them out anyway. And so you sign up for that. My boxing instructor, Magic Sean Hall, give him a shout on Instagram, he went last Thursday to the Oakland Coliseum and was able to get a vaccine because of the fact that he signed up on that website and they were going to throw it out. He’s definitely not in the right tier yet, but because they were going to throw it out, it’s totally legit. And he went and got it.

Greg:

Absolutely. The more shots we get in the arms, it doesn’t matter. We would much rather it get into an arm than get thrown away. So you can also show up the Moscone Center on a random Saturday, if they have extras, people don’t show up. That’s another thing. There are no-shows. So you could try it. You could try to show up somewhere. Be polite. And if they have it and it’s going to get thrown away, they will give it to you. Okay. Well, Dr. Bae, this is all great information. And if somebody maybe wants to see you for your real specialty, which is making us all look and feel better, I know you’ve done that for me and 1000s of others in the Bay Area, tell them how they can reach you.

Learn more

Jonathan Kaplan:

Yeah. It’s very easy. On Instagram or on Snapchat, they can message us, direct messages us, at realdrbae, R-E-A-L, D-R, B-A-E, not B-A-Y. And they can also go to our website, which is realdrbae.com. And we have a price estimator on there, a chat bot where you can check pricing, because I know that’s always… Ultimately, everybody’s question is how much does it cost? So we make it very easy for people to check pricing before they come in for the consultation, so nobody experiences any sticker shock.

Greg:

He can definitely help you get rid of that COVID-19 that you’ve gained, if that’s what you’re looking to do or-

Jonathan Kaplan:

[crosstalk 00:08:01] we all gained.

Greg:

Or any wrinkles, because you’ve been worried for a year and a half. Thank you so much, Dr. Bae. It’s been a pleasure.

Jonathan Kaplan:

Always a pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much for joining me.

The post Bae Break: Discussing the Three Vaccines [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Data shows vaccine is safe

To achieve herd immunity, we need 50-60% of Americans to get the vaccine. That translates into 200 million of us. For that to happen, we need to ensure folks it’s safe. Based on the data, the vaccine is safe. In an effort to educate the public regarding the vaccine’s safety profile, we have to highlight some of the concerns out there.

Alcohol and the vaccine

And in the process of highlighting concerns, we may inadvertently bring attention to, and give credence to myths that we want to dispel. For example, alcohol consumption. There’s a concern that a COVID vaccine in Russia may have a bad reaction when the consumer drinks alcohol within weeks of receiving it.

There is no evidence that if you drink alcohol, you will have a bad reaction to the vaccine. The only possible underlying validity to this is the possibility that if you consume a great deal of alcohol in general, this may affect your overall health and lead to a weakened immune system. But other than that, there is no direct correlation between the occasional drink or even a social drinker having a reaction to the vaccine because of their alcohol consumption.

Allergic reactions to the vaccine

Soon after the UK began distributing the Pfizer vaccine, there were reports of allergic reactions. While allergic reactions are possible, three things are critically important to know. First, reactions can occur with all vaccines. Second, the reaction isn’t necessarily due to the active ingredients in the vaccine themselves. They may be from the solution or preservatives in the vaccine. For example, when receiving the typical flu vaccine, the person administering the injection may tell you that a reaction is possible if you already have an allergy to eggs. And third, the people reported to have had allergic reactions were already highly susceptible to allergic reactions in general. How do we know this? Because they were already carrying epi pens! That means, for the large majority of vaccine recipients, a severe allergic reaction is not a major risk.

Bell’s palsy and the vaccine

In a review of Pfizer’s vaccine data, the FDA noted that 4 people got Bell’s palsy during the vaccine trials. While no one in the placebo group during the trial got Bell’s palsy, the FDA noted that this is similar to the number of people that will get Bell’s palsy in the general population, completely unrelated to the vaccine or vaccine trials. In other words, even if those people weren’t in the vaccine trials or received the vaccine, they would have the same probability of getting Bell’s palsy.

As more people receive the vaccine, we may learn of other reactions or side effects. But for now, the vaccine appears safe and the best option we have to return to a life of vacations and human interactions without masks.

Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.

The post The vaccine is near! The vaccine is safe! first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

After the protests in June, and celebrations involving Memorial Day and July 4th weekends, we’re seeing an inevitable surge associated with mass gatherings. This leads to a continuing shelter-in-place, reducing travel plans and working from home for the foreseeable future. These mass gatherings and changes in consumer behavior are leading to a surge in both coronavirus and cosmetic surgery. What’s the connection?

Coronavirus and Cosmetic Surgery are surging

This phenomenon of increasing cosmetic surgery along with an increase in the coronavirus was recently highlighted in this article.

Since March, consumers are home, on ZOOM, seeing their reflection more than ever before. Naturally, some will see things they want to address. Like Botox or fillers for wrinkles.

They’re also realizing this is the best time to get that Mommy Makeover or other procedures they’ve been considering. With trips cancelled, that frees up more disposable income. And with the ability to work from home after a procedure, it’s easy to avoid questions from coworkers about why you were “out” or what you had done. If you just had a Brazilian Butt Lift, you won’t have to explain why you’re sitting on a pillow!

This increase in cosmetic surgery isn’t isolated. Across elective surgery websites, including BuildMyBod.com, where consumers can check pricing on outpatient services, traffic is up 73.4%! So while not everyone is getting cosmetic surgery or other elective procedures, they’re certainly considering it.

Think of a sales funnel. More consumers are entering the top of the funnel and checking pricing. As more folks enter the funnel, more will progress through the funnel, ask questions, schedule consults and then book surgery.

Safeguards with coronavirus and cosmetic surgery are surging

With the increasing surge in both coronavirus and cosmetic surgery, new safeguards are necessary. For plastic surgeons that perform cosmetic surgery at hospitals, their ability to operate is being curbed. As discussed here, cosmetic surgery is slow to start for several reasons at hospitals. Most significantly, the need for hospitals to make up lost revenue with better paying elective cases like orthopedic procedures.

But for outpatient surgery centers or office-based operating rooms, surgeons are performing a great deal of cosmetic surgery. To keep those patients safe, patients are undergoing COVID testing in the community prior to surgery. And in some offices, like ours, we perform an antibody test the morning of surgery.

While the coronavirus is a serious ongoing pandemic, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the end is not in sight. Therefore, we must mitigate the risks and move forward with our lives as safely as possible. That includes accommodating patients that want non-essential procedures such as cosmetic surgery. And based on web traffic and bookings, they’re clearly on board.

Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.

The post Why coronavirus and cosmetic surgery are surging first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.