Dr. Gardner Talks About Botox

One of the more sought-after procedures at Naples Plastic Surgery is Botox injections, and so I’d like to talk about what Botox actually is. Botox is a trade name for botulinum injectable botulinum toxin that’s offered by the Allergan Corporation.

There are other forms of botulinum toxin that’s injected, including juve, dysport, xeomin, but the one that most people are familiar with and that’s thrown around quite a bit is Botox. So I’m going to refer to it as Botox. Botox is actually injected for one purpose: to weaken muscles.

So how does it work? It actually works on the muscles in our face, usually that’s where we inject it to weaken the muscles that, for example, form wrinkles. I’m going to form some wrinkles on my forehead. Those wrinkles, if treated properly with the right amount of Botox, can smooth out.

When you get Botox injections, it’s not an eraser; it’s not going to erase all the lines in the face. What it’s going to do is weaken the muscles that form those lines. What we recommend is every three months you come back you get re-injected because that’s how long Botox generally lasts, three months. If you capture those muscles before they start working those wrinkles again, you can actually, over a year’s time, get those wrinkles to almost disappear. It’s miraculous, but what I wanted to say about Botox that’s very important to understand, it’s one of the best anti-aging tools we have in our armamentarium against aging.

I have patients that have had Botox for many years; they come back every three months. I’m not kidding, they almost are stuck in time. It’s not to say they don’t age physiologically, but if you look at the areas that we inject the Botox, they almost stay where they were when we started injecting them, so it’s really good for that purpose.

Remember when you’re ready to do Botox, it’s not an eraser, it’s not just going to make all your wrinkles go away, but if you keep up with it every three months, over time the wrinkles are going to go away and you’re going to stop the aging process as well as you could with any other modality.