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  • Repairing the Damage of Illegal Fillers: Dr. John Martin Reveals the Complicated Treatment
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What do you do to help these people? And you think, "Okay, is it just one portion of society?" It isn't. We have nurses. We have schoolteachers. I have a man who runs a construction company. So it's all walks of life movement sort of sucked into quick fill, and it's permanent.

I've done surgery on a couple people when I initially tried to take them out thinking, "All right. Here's a nodule. Let me go in, and I'll take it out, and that'll be the end of it." Once I got in there, went in for a face lift incision for this large nodule, first of all, it's like a rock. You cannot rock through it, so you can't just take it out. It's in all the different tissue layers. So it's very hard to dissect around it and get it out. So I basically kind of chipped away at it to reduce the size and do a biopsy.

The other thing that a lot of people use are steroid injections for a 5-FU because there's a large inflammatory component to this, which is why it waxes and wanes, so it'll get better and it'll get worse. But we have found that Althera actually seems to work pretty well. And I think that what happens is that the deep heating is going down far enough is breaking up some of the fibrosis that's in these nodules and shrinking them down so that in some of my patients, they actually have gone away. Other times, at least, they're small enough that they're not cosmetically as deforming as they were before. So Althera is really our treatment of choice along with steroid injections and even some 5-FU to try to decrease some of the scarring that's going on under the skin.

Repairing the Damage of Illegal Fillers: Dr. John Martin Reveals the Complicated Treatment

Dr. John Martin describes the damage done by some illegal fillers and the treatment he's found that's actually working to break them up and make them easier to remove.