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  • How to Spot Illegal Injectables
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What a lot of people are looking for is they want a quick fix at a good price and so what they will do is they'll look around and people will say to one another, "I had a great filler. It's long lasting. It's supposed to be permanent. Look how great my cheeks and it was only $400, but it was done in someone's apartment." So if you're not going to a board certified doctor's office, you have to be very weary. If you go to an apartment, to someone's garage or to a hotel room, really you should be weary. If someone is coming from out of the country which is what frequently happens and they say to you, "We have a product that we used in South America and we use it all the time there. No complications and so we're going to use this on you." You should walk right out and if you're getting breasts for $500 with an injectable solution, you should run out of the room because it cannot be a legal substance that they're injecting into your face or into your breast.

Well, they tell you that it's a natural substance but the most common one is some sort of silicone frequently called biopolymer but there are no restrictions on what they are injecting and so it's frequently probably an industrial grade silicone.

So you would have two wishes here. One is that it's something that's a foreign body, so it creates a foreign body reaction. It's also loaded with impurities so you get the impurities creating another type of foreign body reaction. There's no sterility so you can get infections and sepsis and die from that and it's also a low viscosity product so that you'll put it into someone's butt, it can travel down the leg into the ankle. It creates such restriction of blood flow but then they have to have an amputation. So I mean the worst case scenario is death at least, either from a pulmonary embolus into a silicone embolus that are getting injected directly into a blood vessel or from sepsis. They get an infection. It becomes overwhelming and then they die from the infection.

How to Spot Illegal Injectables

Dr. John Martin gives some pointers on how to determine if the injectables you're considering might be illegal substances that could do more harm than good.