Do fillers have to hurt

The best way to minimize pain with fillers is a dental block. Similar to what a dentist does during a procedure, your doctor can inject lidocaine or xylocaine to the inside of the mouth to reduce sensation in the areas you would normally receive fillers.

The numbness makes your eyes, nose and lips feel weird and you may even talk funny for an hour. But for those 5-10 minutes of treatment, you’re less likely to feel a thing! Topical cream won’t do the trick. They might help minimize the pain associated with the needle stick but the real pain with fillers is the actual gel going into the tissues. A topical cream won’t help with that pain but a dental block will.

Do fillers have to cause bruising

The best way to reduce bruising with fillers is to reduce the number of needle sticks! When using a needle, you must make many sticks to treat the area in question. With a blunt cannula – a long needle without the sharp tip – you can treat more far reaching areas with fewer access points (needle sticks). For example, most doctors will stick the upper and lower lip many times for lip fillers. With a blunt cannula, the doctor (as seen in the video), can treat the upper and lower lip through only two needle stick sites. One from the left corner of the mouth and one from the right corner of the mouth.

If the descriptions above make it hard to visualize, check out the video below.

Video: Minimizing pain and bruising associated with fillers

To check pricing on fillers from Dr. Kaplan, click here.

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

The post Do fillers make you look like you got punched in the face?! [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

When it comes to fillers, there are a couple drawbacks (but they don’t outweigh the benefits!). Pain and bruising. For those not aware, injecting fillers can be more painful because of the thickness of the material. Compare that to XEOMIN®, which has the consistency of water, and therefore doesn’t hurt “going in.”

But fillers don’t have to hurt with the help of a dental block as I’ve written about here. Aside from pain, there’s also a way to minimize bruising when injecting fillers like Radiesse or Belotero (or Restylane or Juvederm for that matter).

How to minimize bruising when injecting fillers

The single most effective way to minimize bruising is avoiding what causes bruising. And that’s need sticks. The more needle sticks into the face, the greater the chance of hitting a blood vessel and therefore the greater chance of creating a bruise. Reduce needle sticks, reduce bruising. Makes perfect sense, right?

However, it may not be obvious how to go about providing a full correction to someone’s hollow eyes, under-projecting cheek bones or deep parentheses lines without creating a lot of punctures into the skin. The answer? Good planning and blunt cannulas.

As you can see in the diagram above, you can either treat all three of the aforementioned areas with many needle sticks (image on the left). Or you can use the blunt cannula and inject all of those areas with only two needle sticks (image to the right)! The choice is obvious. The video below shows how a dental block and blunt cannula can also be used for lip fillers, making the experience much better for the patient.

Video using the blunt cannula to plump up the lips

Seek out a practitioner that is competent in using a dental block and blunt cannula. Less bruising and less painful. Unless that doesn’t sound appealing to you!

To check pricing on filler injections from Dr. Kaplan, click here.

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

The post Injecting fillers with a dental block and blunt cannula to minimize pain and bruising [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Do patients actually want duck lips?!

I don’t believe patients want duck lips. They end up with the overly filled augmented “lip look” because they lose perspective. Perspective of their baseline. Here’s what I mean.

A patient goes in to see their doctor because they’re unhappy with the appearance of their lips. Maybe they want a fuller upper or lower, or more typically, fuller upper and lower lips. They get a syringe injection and look great. But then they get used to that appearance over the next 6 to 12 months. As the filler dissolves, they notice their lip volume is decreasing.

However, the situation begs the question: Are their lips really smaller or maybe they’ve become used to their appearance and don’t recognize how the lips are larger than what they started with. So they go back to their doctor and ask for more. The problem is they’re no longer volumizing their lips in step-wise fashion from their original state. They now have a newly “recalibrated” baseline and their perspective is altered.

In other words, if the patient’s original baseline is assigned the value of zero, their first injection took them to a 1. As they become accustomed to this new appearance, that 1 recedes back to a zero in their mind. When they go back and get more filler they think they’re again going from a zero to a 1 when in fact they’re going from a 1 to a 2. After treatment, the ‘2’ becomes their new zero, so when they go back in to get additional filler, the injection brings them up to a 3 and now they have duck lips! Hopefully this numeric analogy makes sense.

Lip Augmentation with Filler Video

The best way to avoid this problem is by documenting your baseline with a photo before the first treatment. When you return for your second treatment, review that baseline photo with your doctor before getting a 2nd treatment. Maybe you only need a small touchup, but not the whole syringe. Regardless, you now have the correct perspective, thereby walking out of the office without those enigmatic duck lips!

To check pricing on lip augmentation and other fillers from Dr. Kaplan, click here.

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

The post How to avoid duck lips with lip filler [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.