Dr. Gardner Discusses Areas of Botox

Hi, Dr. Gardner again, talking about Botox, and so when you come into the office and you say “I’m ready for some Botox,” where do you want to put it? Well we always ask you what are the areas that bother you and then we work from there.

Most patients use Botox from the eyes up, and the three areas that are most common there are the forehead, we deal with the wrinkles that come across the forehead, the glabellar area, or the central part which lowers your brow and forms these 11s is another area that we commonly use Botox, and then the crow’s feet these areas that bunch up around our eyes. Those are the three areas we most commonly inject for Botox, but there’s a lot of other places that patients like them, and I’m going to go over those right now.

One of the areas is for patients that feel like their face is a little wide. There’s a very strong muscle called the masseter that we use for chewing, and it makes our – a lot of people have what we call masseter hydro hypertrophy, or an enlarged or thick masseter, and what we can do is sort of thin their face a bit by putting Botox into that masseter muscle. Very popular for patients who feel like their face is square, want a little bit more of an angular face. We see them every three months, we inject this and it really works.

The other area in that area that we inject is for patients who have TMJ or maybe they grind their teeth at night will inject into that same muscle and that gives them – offers them relief for those symptoms.

And then the other area that works really well is for patients like me who have down going corners of their mouth. We’ll put it right here, and it allows them to come up a little bit and have less of a frown look.

The last area on the face that we always have to address are for patients that want to improve the contour of their neck. This muscle here is called the platysma; it often causes these bands to form in the neck and if we inject the Botox into those bands it can help smooth out the neck.

So what are the areas that we most commonly use Botox for? It’s usually the forehead, it’s usually for this central area, to elevate the brow, and to deal with the crow’s feet, but it’s also useful to thin out the face here, to help with grinding and TMJ, help with that smile – turn that frown upside down, and also smooth out the neck. Thanks for your time