A Facelift without Surgery - fact or fiction? (Ep. 45)

Welcome to The Trillium Show, where we help you make the changes you want to see in your body, in your mind, and in your life. I'm your host, Dr. Jason Hall.

There are about a zillion non-surgical plastic surgery beautification treatments out there, and the majority of them don't work. There's been one in particular that has really been making waves recently, probably because there are new devices coming out, and the companies and the physicians that buy these devices are trying to make money from them. It's something that I want to talk about in this episode.

That treatment are these electromagnetic muscle-stimulating treatments. They're M-whatever, M-face, M-body, M-breast, M-genitalia, whatever the area that they're trying to treat. Seems like there's a device with an M-something named after it.

I want to talk a little bit about what these are. As I was driving here, I saw a billboard for one of these facial-tightening devices that advertised itself as a facelift without surgery. What these electromagnetic treatments promise to do is they promise to strengthen and tighten muscles without the use of surgery.

They promise to use this electromagnetic radiation plus or minus radiofrequency to reduce fat and improve the appearance of the face, the body, any area that they're looking to treat. I know they've got these things for women's health and all sorts of places. The question is, do they actually work?

If they do, are they worth what it costs to get a treatment? In this video, what I want to focus on mainly is facial surgery and facial rejuvenation, but this can be generalized to the rest of the body. If you go back and listen to episode six of my podcast where I discuss facial aging and how the face ages and why that's important to what we do, we talk about the three layers of facial anatomy.

Each of these layers need to be addressed in a comprehensive rejuvenation plan. Just to review, those three layers are the skin, the underlying volume, and then structure, which we talk about as connective tissue, muscle, bone, things like that. You have to address each one of those layers independently because there's no procedure.

There is no procedure. I'll repeat that a third time. There is no procedure that addresses all three of those components at once.

There's no magic bullet that gets all of them. When we talk about facial rejuvenation surgery, we're talking primarily about the structural part, but if you've ever known somebody who've had surgery or you have had surgery yourself or when you come and see me for a consultation, we talk about other procedures that we can do at the same time to get a nice result. People say, well, my friend had a facelift and all of her wrinkles went away, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and typically when you really drill down on that, what that is is typically a facelift plus volume plus some type of skin treatment, chemical peel, laser that all happens at the same time.

It's not one specific procedure. What these electromagnetic devices are touting is very similar to what a lot of these non-surgical devices talk about is that we can get you a facelift result without really doing a facelift. What these devices claim to do is they claim to strengthen muscle and add volume to those muscles as they strengthen them.

That's how they claim the facial devices work. That's how they claim the body devices, the abdominal devices work. That's how they claim the women's health devices work.

It's important, especially in facial surgery, to understand that it isn't really muscles getting weak that cause facial aging. Now, facial aging is certainly complex. The gravitational descent of the muscles in the face is certainly complicated, but it's not muscles getting weak that cause the aging changes that we see.

Otherwise, when we get to be about 40, all of us would walk around with droopy puppy dog eyelids drooling out of the corners of our mouth because the muscles in our face are weak, and that doesn't happen. Just on its face, the claims are a little bit questionable. When we do a facelift, facelift surgery, what we're doing is repositioning tissue.

We're moving things around, putting it back where it needs to be, and securing it there. If you really look at the difference between the claims of the electromagnetic people and what a facelift does, the two things are apples and oranges. They aren't even close to being the same.

Back about a year ago, a surgeon out of the Midwest, I think it's Kansas somewhere, by the name of Eric Swanson, very bright guy in private practice, does a lot of research, writes a lot of papers, did what's called a meta-analysis. If you're not familiar with scientific literature, a meta-analysis simply takes the results from a number of different papers, compares methods, compares outcomes, and then comes up with a broad statement based on analyzing the data that's already been done from other studies. He looked at a group of 14 different studies on these electromagnetic rejuvenation machines.

Most of them used MRIs to assess the difference in fat and muscle over time after these treatments. He published his results. What he found was really interesting is that across these 14 studies, the average amount of fat reduction, and again, most of these were in the abdomen, was five millimeters, so this tiny, tiny.

The average muscle gain was two millimeters, which is hard to even see on the screen how little that actually is. Most of that, based on the MRI studies, appeared to be muscle swelling from damage that happened immediately after the treatments, and so you don't really get much improvement in strength. His conclusions here were that, yeah, the treatments are safe, but I think the important part of his conclusion was that efficacy is tenuous.

The other caveat there is that all of these studies, all 14 of these studies, were significantly biased because the people who were publishing the studies were paid by the manufacturers of each of these machines, and this happens a lot in science. You don't hear much about it. A lot of times, companies that are manufacturing machines or drugs or other things will pay physicians or pay for studies to demonstrate efficacy or superiority or any of these other things of their device, drug, whatever, and that stuff, while it's kind of disclosed, it's in the fine print, the very bottom of the paper on the front page or at the very end of the paper, but that stuff never ends up making the press.

What makes the press is, oh, this brand new device has clinical studies behind it showing how effective it is at reducing fat. You don't hear that every single one of the people writing these papers is paid by the company that makes the machine. That's something that Dr.

Swanson pointed out is that the improvements that all these machines make is very small, and these are small improvements that are seen just by the people who are actually paid by the manufacturers of the machines. So you have to keep that in mind when you hear about these things having clinical studies behind them that make them fantastic treatment options. Now, from a patient standpoint, what does that look like for you?

The average cost of a treatment series, so typically with these electromagnetic machines, there's four treatment sessions of about 30 minutes, which are typically spaced two to three weeks apart from what I've read, you know, gleaned off the internet. These treatments, a series of these treatments cost around $4,000 to $5,000. So you are paying a lot of money for maybe a little bit of benefit.

If you look at their own studies, you get a five millimeter reduction in fat, a two millimeter improvement in muscle girth for $4,500. Is that worth it? To me, not really.

To you, that's a decision you have to make. The other thing that when you're thinking about one of these treatments is that you have to look at results. I encourage everybody, no matter what plastic surgery procedure you're considering, look at results online of the person that you're having treat you before you have a treatment.

The results online for a lot of these treatment options are the same results. They come from one or two surgeons who are on the advisory board, meaning they're paid by the company that makes the machine, and their results, the best results, are the ones that a lot of these people who own these machines now are using as the before and after pictures. But the point I want to make here is that if you're looking around at one of these non-surgical treatments that is a machine that someone can buy from somewhere else, and you're seeing the same before and after pictures on everybody's different practices websites that you're looking at to get one of these treatments, that should be a red flag to you that you're not seeing the practice's own patients highlighted on their website.

At the end of the day, what's my takeaway on these magical electromagnetic machines? Well, I can tell you that this is one of those decisions that you have to make for yourself. But if you are in your 20s and 30s, and you've got $4,000 or $5,000 that you don't care what happens to, and you want to try and make some subtle improvements in skin tightening, in facial tone, these devices might not be a bad choice for you.

If you're in your 40s and 50s and beyond, and you're looking at these devices as being something that's going to put off having surgery because you aren't ready for that, or you're looking for something to take the place of surgical facial rejuvenation, I think these devices are not something that you should consider, and that really you should sit down, either come and see me, come see one of my non-surgical staff, go to wherever board certified plastic surgeon in your area, and sit and talk with them about your specific concerns, and then about what options are available to help address those. There's lots of non-surgical options that we can use to make improvements that don't take the place of surgery, but can help either push surgery off, or can improve the things that you're concerned

with, but the electromagnetic facelift, abdominoplasty, in a couple of treatments in the office, just isn't a technology that I feel like is worth the money, unless you just have endless amounts of money, and are looking for something to try to avoid a surgical procedure. Thanks for listening to The Trillium Show.

You can keep up with the latest on the podcast at jhallmd.com. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to connect with us on social media, you can find us at jhallmd on Instagram and Twitter, and Dr.

Hall Plastic Surgery on Facebook. Remember, be the change you wish to see in the world.