Photofacials are a great way to just improve the overall texture and appearance of skin and especially those people who have some sun damage. Photofacials are usually done about three weeks apart and most people do a series of three if it is pigmentation they wish to treat or if they have lots of vessels or rosacea. Most people do a series of five treatments. Photofacials are very safe. In over 6000 treatments that we have performed, we have not had any facial scaring from this procedure. We do recommend that you use sunscreen and not be extremely sun tanned when these procedures are performed as power can be increased and results will be better secondary to that.
Spider veins are very small cosmetic vessels on the surface of the legs that people just do not like the appearance of. Often times they are reflection of underlying venous pathology that needs to be addressed first. In other cases, all we need to do is just treat the little spider veins and we treat these with little microinjections with numerous different solutions that we have available now and for refractory vessels we also sometimes incorporate lasers.
Well I have been coming to the Vein Center now for almost four years and I always look forward to coming here because everyone is so pleasant and friendly and they make me feel extremely comfortable and relaxed no matter what procedure I am having and it is just a fun place to be. When I first came here, I had the thermage procedure done and I was nervous to have that done, but they made me feel relaxed and they would stop at any point if I was having a problem with it or did not understand what they were doing and they explained everything to me. The thermage® procedure really did not change my life it just made me feel better about myself and the thing I liked most about the clinic here is they offer nonsurgical procedures to correct problems or enhance your appearance so that you do not have anything drastic done and when you do see someone that you have not seen in a long time it is just a subtle change that they notice, but they do notice it and they say “gee, you look really nice today, have you done anything special?” and depending on who it is you know I confide in them and I give them Dr. Hunt’s name and telephone number and tell them how much they would enjoy coming here.
Our practice for the last few years, have tried to offer the most innovative new techniques to give the best results for very affordable pricing for the patients. Our feeling is that we can achieve beauty through science and we research very carefully all the latest technologies that are out there. It is a very rapidly changing field and we only utilize those that we feel will give us the absolute best response.
Ultrasound-guided sclerotherapy is the placement of very small needles under ultrasound guidance into a vessel in order to place the sclerosant into it and close the vein up. It is a very effective technique for removing incompetent varicose veins. Anyone who has significant varicose disease is a candidate for this procedure.
In order to remain at the forefront of the newest technologies that are out there, we attend numerous scientific conferences, read the journals as articles are presented. We help conduct clinical trials for the latest technologies that are available and we also participate with the laser companies with some of their new innovative products. By doing this, we stay in the forefront of the newest products that are coming through the latest inventions, the best lasers, the best laser treatment protocols. Lasers are only as good as the people that are operating them and unless you totally understand all the physics, the way the laser tissue interactions occur and you develop the best protocols, the lasers themselves do not work well.
The patients have lots of great options when it comes to skin resurfacing lasers. You have lasers with minimal down time as simple as pulsed light IPL to things like erbium skin resurfacing lasers like Fraxel to the type of lasers can give you more down time like Portrait, which is nitrogen plasma skin resurfacing lasers. In the state of Florida, lot of our patients are very photoaged; 85% of all the lines and wrinkles and pigment problems is true sun damage and it is cumulative damage we have done 20 years ago. It is kind of showing up now, so the patients have lots of great options when it comes to skin resurfacing lasers. The simplest type lasers with minimal downtime would `be IPL that is Intense Pulsed Light that is in the family of lasers but it is all light therapy. It feels like a hot rubber band hitting your face. It is treatment of choice for rosacea. Basically, it is perfect for cleaning out facial telangiectasias, skin vascularity, generalized redness, and erythema. It boosts collagen for three months. It shrinks pores. It is also great for pigment like sunspots and age spots and melasma. Minimal to no down time, you look lightly pink, less than an hour. No swelling.
With the new technologies we have available, we can now tighten the skin with products such as RF energy with thermage. We can erase pigmentation spots, brown spots with Pulsed Light. We can also resurface the skin to help with fine lines and wrinkles. We can put fillers in the face to help with sagging and to put normal volume back in the face. We can also use Botox to erase dynamic skin lines for patients. A combination of all these new procedures that are available allow us to tailor fit each procedure for the patient in order to achieve the type of look that they wish to have.
Looking great does not require surgery. There is a big paradigm shift right now in the cosmetic world of lot of patients who are doing facelift, spending $10,000 to $15,000 to pull the skin back tight, they realize you still look your age at sometime that is why procedures like Botox and fillers have become so popular. Particularly with fillers you can put volume back in the face where volume is lost in the aging face. You have got a great filler options like Restylane and Juvederm, those are both hyaluronic acid, they are natural sugars, they are polysaccharides, you cannot be allergic to them, and they are great for filling out tear troughs and filling in cheek, great around the nasolabial folds or smile lines and smoothen out vertical lip lines and putting natural volume back into the lips. The patients today have great options when it comes to facial fillers. You do have you temporary fillers like Juvederm and Restylane. You also have semi-permanent fillers like Sculptra. Sculptra is poly-L-lactic acid, it is similar to absorbable sutures. It is great for filling in cheeks and nasolabial folds. It was actually FDA approved for AIDS patient who would like no atrophy. So you can cosmetically rebuild an entire face with it. One hundred percent people respond to poly-L-lactic acid and it will last you two to three years if not longer. Another great filler would be Radiesse, that is an ideal filler for cheeks and rebuilding the nasolabial fold, that type of filler will last you a little bit longer about a year to a year and a half. The chemical makeup is calcium hydroxylapatite, basically it stimulates your collagen production as well and gives a good foundation to the skin. This year there was an exciting breakthrough and a permanent implant filler with ArteFill, that type of filler is called PMMA – it is polymethylmethacrylate. It is in a purified bovine collagen carrier and it is considered a livable implant filler because it is constantly simulating your own collagen and it is only FDA approved for nasolabial folds, the smile lines, and this type of filler will last you five to seven years. The patients who are interested in longer lasting lip fillers do have the option to do Silikon 1000. With Silikon, it is ophthalmic grade. It is the same thing that the ophthalmologist use for detached retinas and you can use a microdroplet technique to rebuild the lips and basically what happens with Silikon is that they get capsulated by collagen and kind of embeds into the lip matrix and feels like normal natural lips.
We use the Lumenis One™ Intense Pulsed Light System for hair removal as it hurts less than some of the existing lasers and it is a very fast piece of equipment and we have extensive experience with using pulsed light as we helped bring that technology years ago to the US. We also have a device that they have adapted to our equipment called the serenity device that essentially takes 80 percent of the pain out of hair removal. This device has just recently been introduced and we think that it will be widely accepted as it will be adaptable to numerous laser systems, but this innovative technology right now will make hair removal a nonpainful procedure compared to procedures that have been offered in the past.
