My jowls are dropping along with my other facial features. ARRGH! Can you suggest some skin tightening procedures that don't require going under the knife?
Hello,
Jowls have fat in them as well as skin over them. Skin tightening procedures will not provide long lasting results.
As long as you are OK with this, skin resurfacing may blunt their appearance. Decision making here really depends upon what exactly you consider "surgery."
As my grandfather used to tell me, there are no free lunches.
Although there are other ways to tighten the skin without surgery, they can't compete with taking out skin. Sure there is some contraction of the dermal elements with radiofrequency (like Aluma, Thermage, or Titan) and with resurfacing of the skin (chemical peel, or laser such as Active FX), but I tell my patients that these other treatments will only tighten the skin about 5-15% depending on the treatment, and the specifics of each patient (how much collagen one has in their skin, and or how much impedence their skin has when using radiofrequency). I liken it to the shine of your car paint. A wash and a wax to your paint job can only do so much, and can't compete with a new paint job.
Of course your downtime is less also with the smaller alternatives. All you have to do is look at the survey on the right hand side of RealSelf to see how patients think if it is worthwhile or not to see the differences of the alternatives or the surgery itself.
As with all surgeries, and their alternatives, who better to give you all your choices than a Board Certified Plastic Surgeon, because he has all the choices to offer you - not just one thing, but the whole spectrum of services.
J.O.
You are experiencing the natural process of facial aging. This happens to all of us at different rates depending on our genetics, sun exposure, age and health history. There is an entire specialty (cosmetic medicine) which deals with the treatment of facial aging without surgery. However, the field of cosmetic medicine is filled practitioners who have less than adequate formal training, practitioners who promote to products with the only interest of making a profit (at the expense of the specialties reputation) and treatments that give only marginal results. This is why I would suggest looking for a Board Certified Plastic Surgeon for advice in this area. Not only do they have excellent training in the Art and Science of Cosmetic Medicine, but they also are trained in the ethics of dealing with a specialty in which their financial interests must be subordinated to the efficacy and safety of the treatments.
My experience with non-surgical treatment of facial aging is to use combination therapy involving Fillers, Micro-Fat Grafting/Suctioning, Botox, Intense Pulsed Light and Fractionated Laser Skin Resurfacing. The newer Radiofrequency treatments work on tightening the subcutaneous layer and have some promising results. However there still appears to be a higher dissatisfaction rate with these treatments, with some patients telling me that they did not see much difference or that the effects are temporary.
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