Thread Lifts: A Non-Surgical Solution for Saggy Skin

Foreign.

There's some new things coming as far as fillers, Botox, facelifts, and it's called a thread lift. So could you tell us what exactly is a thread lift and how does it differ from traditional facelifts or fillers?

Yeah, great question. We have a thread lift that we've been working on for quite some time. Started doing them in 06. These weren't that robust. Changes occur over time. They got better and better. And really the real breakthrough for us came about two years ago. Combining different modalities. Get the most robust thread lift. What a thread lift is, it's designed to be a non surgical facelift, so to speak. So a facelift, even though it's called a facelift, is really a neck and jowl lift. So as an eyelid lift, we have extra eyelid skin. We take that out. That's eyelid surgery, blepharoplasty. There's a forehead lift, doesn't work that good. But there is a forehead lift that not a facelift. There's a lower eyelid surgery to get rid of eye bags. That's not a great surgery. The upper eyelids are great, the lower eyelids not so much. And then the facelift is everything from the earlobe to the corner of the mouth down does not lift up the mid face. A lot of people believe that, but it does not. So when we're doing our magic lift filler procedure, mostly we're working on the stuff that a facelift just can't handle. And that's the mid face, the upper face, the eyes. We do something called the pretty eyes to restore volume, maybe some Botox for wrinkles. Facelift does not accomplish any of that stuff. But the trouble is with the neck and the jowls, we get some improvement with jowls with the magic lift, which is down here. But the neck, there wasn't really much to do. And we do some Botox to try to atrophy the muscle. It doesn't work that good. It's got, you know, for certain people it does okay, but there's limitations. And the idea of thread lift is you'd have a suture material that has little barbs in it, not like a barbed wire. They're softer than that, but similar in nature. The ones we use actually have cogs on them. And you numb the face up. And then we have the thread is in a little cannula, a little tube as a blunt rounded end. We poke a hole in the skin and run it from a ligament in the face down to the tissue. We Want to grab? Pull the cannula out, and then we push the face up onto the thread. We don't pull the threads up. We push the face onto the thread. And the anchor points we use are the zygomatic ligament, which is just below the zygomatic bone, and the mandibular ligament, the masseter ligament, sorry, masseter ligament, just in front of the masseter muscle. Those are nice dense structures that we can pull the face on. And then in the neck, fascia is very dense. That's another hooking point. So we deploy about 30 threads to the face, 20 to 30, typically. And the procedure would hurt. So we do numb you up entirely for it with something called tumescent anesthetic. In the breakthroughs we've had in the last few years are, number one is the companies made the threads kind of expensive to buy, and they encourage us to use, you know, two to four threads per side. And quite frankly, it's not nearly enough. It's not robust enough, and you don't get that much results. But more threads, more better. We learned that with filler or Botox or anything, if you do it correctly in the right spots, more is better. So now we use way more threads than we did in the past. We know, negotiate with the companies to get the prices down. The second thing is that after you put the threads in, there's some discomfort that's really kind of really notable and irritating for the first few days, because what's happening is that the threads are designed to lift your tissues up and they dissolve over time. And your body stays on these threads, but all the facial movements and sleeping, they start kind of pulling off, and you feel almost like a little miniature ripping where the skin is pulling off the thread. We solve that. So now we use a special skin glue and a special taping device to hold the face in the position for two or three days while it heals. And that's all it's needed. Reduces the pain down to almost nothing, and it causes that face to hold up better so it's not sliding off the thread. So that's really considerably changed it. And the third thing is to shrink the skin, the skin envelope. So there's a couple breakthroughs that happened that allows. Allows us to do what we're doing now. So one is a filler called Radiesse. Got approved in 06. I've been using it since then. Was first brought out as a filler. And it's kind of like a bone paste. You can use it in bones, and it stimulates Growth of tissue and as a filler is considered a biologic filler, where you put it in and your body grows tissue to replace the filler, like in a one to one fashion. It lasts probably for decades. And it came out as a filler. And then the company was seeing that doctors start to thin it out to make it not so stiff. And they were getting way more tissue growth. That led to a bunch of studies, what we call hyper dilute radiesse, where we water it down and get it to spread out. Now it doesn't act like a filler, acts like a bio stimulator and it grows collagen, a lot of collagen. So it really makes skin look younger. So then we start treating the hands of crepey hands, the neck, the face, and it became a really good way to bio stimulate people that were having signs of aging. Then a doctor in Colombia, South America was looking at the dental literature where they were using the same product, the Radiesse product, calcium hydroxyapetate, to fix teeth. And they were using PRF or prp, platelet rich fiber and platelet rich plasma, the fixed teeth. Then they started combining them and found that it's not just synergistic, it's way beyond synergistic, it's like one plus one equals five. So he did a study being a plastic surgeon, even though he had dental affiliates where he would do tummy tucks on people, they know they're getting a tummy tuck. And he'd take the PRF and the calcium hydroxyapatite, mix it together and inject one side of the flap thinned out and the other side of the flap, which is the radiesse, only many other areas that were untreated and then you wait two months and do their tummy tuck and then take this, the tissue and send it to a special pathologist that looked at what happened. And so the people that had Radiesse got more collagen in their skin. The skin got healthier and younger, thicker. But the ones with the PRF and Radiesse together was like 3x amount of collagen deposition. Then you had a study doing this on women's faces, about 100 women. And the people with the PRF, calcium hydroxyapatite, PRF radiesse got more results in about a third to take. So instead of waiting a month or two to see something, saw it in like a week. We were commonly doing that. So this is, you know, learning about this, why I'm doing this more modified vector lift with the Threads. And I postulated that if I shrink the skin envelope by making it thicker, I'll get that to hold better. So then we did and we combine all three things. So we numb you up first, do the thread lift, do the taping and securing and then we put the slurry of the prf, which is from your blood, and the calcium hydroxylaptate, threading it under the skin to make the skin envelope tighten up. And what we've seen was just a generational change in the results of the thread lift. Something from 06 that really didn't last that long or work well to about 2011 when it started working reasonably well on the right patient to now we're getting something almost like a facelift without the surgery, the expense, the downtime. And just to be clear, it's like not cheap to do this type of thread lift because lots of steps to it. It's for the person that does not want the facelift surgery. If you want a facelift surgery, just go do that. So this is a person that wants a non surgical, they want to put the surgery off for some amount of time. So we're getting more facelift like results without doing a facelift. Even the facelifts, those have improved over the last decade or so. So the. So we have the kind of a bigger target to chase and we're seeing that now. And that's been exciting. Way less downtime obviously, less risk. And it really has been on a specialized clinic. You know, this something I invented some time ago, but I've trained our providers how to do this. But it is a more complex procedure. There's some downtime with it. So it's not like getting filler because you're being wearing tape. And so typically you're going to do this. Let's say you do this on a Thursday, lay low over the weekend. On Monday, nobody can see anything done unless you got a bruise or something. So that's been our thread, biolift we call it because we're using biologic stimulations, we're using threads lift the tissues up, holding it in place and causing a biological retraction of the now lifted skin. So that's been really exciting.