What is a "No-Cut" Facelift? | Dr. Rob Whitfield x Dave Asprey

And then there's fat atrophy, which you were suffering from.

I just don't have a lot of fat left.

You lost a lot of weight. And I have a ton of people of very high end clients who, who are biohacking their way through life and lowering their body fat pretty aggressively at times. And that leads to kind of a deflated effect and excess skin. And then there's muscular components, typically hypertrophy around the eyes, mouth. And then obviously the last, which is what we see is the skin. So how can we affect the skin? The gold standard has been a facelift because you have so much flexibility when you do that. But once again, like you described, how can we not do that and leave visible scar? So the combination of basically elevating tissue like you would do a facelift, but all through 2 to 3 millimeter openings that won't be visible once they're healed or in the line of sight once they're healed, allows me to basically separate the layers, the skin and fat layers, and then tighten them with the radio frequency treatments we use. And then we can do neck lifting or like you mentioned, softwave. But the final thing that's helped is using hollowed out micro needling or microcoring devices more accurately to remove skin without a scar.

So that was the most long medical meandering answer I've ever heard of. Do you need some smart drugs? Well, you can tell we're buddies.

It only took seven years to get there, and that was less than three minutes.

Can I translate? Here's what he's saying. For the no cut facelift. What you're doing is you're using tiny hollow needles to suck out little cores of skin and you do it all over the face. So it's very much the same effect as microneedling, but instead of just poking the skin to make it grow, you're poking the skin and sucking out a tiny, almost like a blackhead's worth of skin, a tiny little sliver. But if you do it all over the face. Yeah, you're gonna not look so great for the first week or two, which is common in a lot of the facial re sculpting things. But what it does then is instead of the skin just healing like it would from microneedling, it's tighter when it heals.

Right. It's just doing math. So unless you think the world's flat, it'll work. So if we take out 26,000 cores at 7 to 8%, typically we're gonna remove between one and one and a half Inches square inches of skin.

And you can do this all the way down into the neck.

Yeah. I mean, what we did for you on your back really highlighted how it's flexible. You can do it on the body and especially all over surfaces that are more flat. The neck is probably the most complex due to its three dimensional character. So the Adam's apple's in the way and I have to turn your head if you remember a certain direction to help get it taken care of. But it was exciting when this finally got through and FDA approved in Q1 of 22 because now you can take skin out with no scarring and less.

Downtime than a normal facelift as well.

Right? Yeah. So that's a good point. So with you who detox really well and take care of yourself in a manner that makes it easy for me to then provide the care. If you don't detox well and or haven't followed a pretty strict diet to eliminate things that can affect your skin health. Maybe lowering sulfur, lowering histamine based on how you eat, you'll get more redness afterwards. So now we prep, unlike what you had, we prep with Aeonia to really reduce the production of melanin.

What's aeonia?

So it's from Bacillus lysate, the space bacteria. So basically that will downregulate the melanin production, which is part of what we see, if you remember from your treatments. And we can't use it right after the treatment until the skin's healed a little bit more because it's a little bit irritating. But once you can, that's really a game changer in terms of reducing inflammation that you see visibly.

Aeonia is a really interesting topical serum kind of thing. And it comes from a bacteria that they found on the space station or something. And it has really nice clinical effects, except they put a whole bunch of really strongly scented herbs in there or flowers or something. And it's. It's so strong that I put on, I start sneezing like I. You react to it. The plant extracts in it don't need to be there for it to work. I wish they would take those out and make like an unscented version. But it is really powerful. I gave away my bottle of it because every time I put it on I would just start coughing. This is no good. But it is really powerful for pigment.

I found it to be the most important thing for us right now for this particular procedure because it's so aggressive in treatment as you've experienced.

So that's one of the things you see prep with that stuff and then you come in.

And then.

You come in. They wasn't knocked out. So I'll rephrase that. So we come in. Then you gave me some kind of anesthesia. I don't remember what. Probably ketamine or. Right.

So what we like to use, we do this under local. Like I do all facial treatments, including facelifting. We use a little bit of pronox, mixture of oxygen and nitrogen or nitrous. And it's not the concentration you get the dentist, it's 50, 50. Most people get comfortable. And then I numb the whole face. I can do numbing of the whole face. You can't feel anything.

I didn't feel anything at all for it. It was pretty. Pretty non. We'll say it was pretty trivial. I felt it afterwards. Just because you're also inflating the face with some saline so that you don't. The needles don't go through into the nerves and stuff. So you don't look great that day. I mean it's.

Yeah, we make a little soft pillow of anesthesia for it and then we do the treatment process like we said. And then ultimately once we get everything removed, including the quartz of skin and cleanse it, then we're gonna put you in our hyperbaric chamber. If you brought your own stem cells like you have, we would do your treatment with those. We'd add exosomes, whatever we could do to enhance the delivery that day and treatment that day, and then put you in our hyperbaric chamber in my office.

Nice. And I didn't have to do that because I have oxy health hard chamber at home. I might drive a 10 year old Jeep, but I have a hard hyperbaric chamber. So you know where my priorities are right now. Okay. So this is a possibility. And in terms of cost, this is a little bit more expensive than a normal face cut or facelift.

Well, there are facelifts that range from a quarter of a million probably down to like 10,000.

Wow.

And so ours really is in that respect, very economical. So.

Okay, lower end of the range, but not $10,000 and not a quarter.

Of a million either.

Yeah. And so you do have. And it's going to depend on which all treatments a certain person needs. So this is not like a budget thing, but it's not out of range at all.

No, I think this is very realistic. And the more important thing is getting yourself prepared because we don't want to react to anything after a treatment that we provide for a Patient, whether it's in our office or in the operating room, we want to be proactive and get you on track before you ever see this.

Yep. And I wanted to test it on my low back, and I wanted to do it on my face and just see how it worked and then talk about it on the show. Which is why our last interview was about breast implant illness, because I think that's just so critically important, and you have more knowledge about that than I've seen. So this is kind of almost an unrelated episode about my idea that I like to be the guinea pig, and I'll talk about anything, and I'll do any of the things that I'm capable of doing. So I don't need breast implants. Work done. Thank you very much. But other than that, I'm down for whatever. So I noticed meaningful results because maybe in the video, we'll cut in what I used to look like and how big my face was. And I still. I'm not entirely happy right here. I used to have a lot of fat out here.

Right.

So, yeah.

And that's.

Seems like I should do another one.

You lost so much weight at such an interval. Like, the more rapidly you lose weight, the more you deflate in your face. And it can take as little as five pounds to change someone's facial appearance. Yep. It's a hundred.

Yeah. And people are asking, Dave, how did. How did you lose the next round of weight? Because I. I went through a time in life, I go from 300 to 250 to 300 to 250, over and over. And that's why the keto diet doesn't work. That's why I wrote the bulletproof diet. You need to do cyclical keto with clean fats without the inflammatory stuff, and then you can get past that. And then I've probably lost another 20 pounds of fat while maintaining muscle mass. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.