The Big Beauty Podcast Part 2: Botox & Healthy Botox Alternatives, Liposuction, Hollywood’s “Devil Drug”, Popsicles, Vibrators, Non-Invasive Anti-Aging Protocols & Much More With Dr. Cameron Chesnut.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

You know, a lot of things topically can have effects and it may be like a 5% improvement. And that's real, that's a thing. But is that enough for what most people are after when it's getting injected in these like really realistically very small doses for cosmetic uses that it was getting into our central nervous system. Whole different process in the conversion to brown fat, which tends to be more like chronic low grade cold exposure. And this is like a very acute focal application of cold to fat cells.

Health.

Nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield.

Welcome to the show. Oh my goodness, folks. Wow. I just got something done to my face. I don't know what it was, but we're about to find out. Because if you heard my podcast about hair growth and really like beauty and anti aging and skin repair in general with Dr. Cameron Chestnut that I released, I guess at the time that you're listening to this a couple of months ago, then you're already familiar probably with where I'm at and what I've been up to because I ventured back down to Cam's place. Say hello Cameron.

Hello. How's everybody doing today?

They can't talk back, just so you know. And I ventured back down here because Cameron had some other cool stuff he wanted to show me to continue my path to a lion's mane. So first of all, I'm not going to reintroduce everything about Cameron to you, nor am I going to reintroduce everything we talked about in the fabulous last episode, which I think you can access@bengreenfieldfitness.com Hairgrowth this episode is accessible at bengreenfieldfitness.com hairgrowth2 that's hair growth, the number two. So anyways, we're back at Cameron's clinic. We just finished another crazy procedure for me and my wife. Still on Cameron. I'm in a perfect place to podcast right now because I've been podcasting since about 3:30 this morning nonstop. And I'm at my last one of the day where I'm like kind of loopy but lucid and hopefully able to creatively engage in meaningless chatter.

Little mental exhaustion.

Yeah. So that's good though because I'm with a really smart doctor, so he gets to do the talking. I get to sit back and drink my Kirkland signature Italian sparkling mineral water with carbonation added and chew on a piece of nicotine gum. Just keep me awake here.

We'll get you dialed In.

All right, so anyways, you put some numbing cream on my face and I thought I was gonna get micro needled like we did last time, but then you put me back and you put some sunglasses on me, or in this case, tanning goggles. You know, my style. And then you used a laser on me, right? And Cameron, you know I'm a red light guy, right? I use the juv lights and the infrared sauna. I have what I thought was a laser device, like this little handheld laser. But when you started like zapping me with that thing, it literally, it felt more like a Star wars laser gun. Like one might assume would a laser would actually feel like. So, so tell me about this whole first protocol that we did. Just, just fill me on this, this whole. I think you called it a laser cocktail.

Yeah, I do like to call it a laser cocktail. It's a little bit different for everybody who comes in and sort of what they need. But we did microneedling last time, which is very straightforward and simple. It's a physical modality to cause a little micro injury that we have to heal from. And we use your PRP to heal that. What we did today is a bit different though, in that we're using lasers specifically to target different parts of skin. Aging, whatever we want to call it, different things we have different targets for. And so you actually got a couple of different lasers. We targeted some pigment and some blood vessels in you separately. And then we went after a little bit more of what we'd call like a resurfacing laser to get after your collagen elastin that targets water molecules, I.

Want to ask you how that actually works. Just out of sheer scientific curiosity. When you're talking about how these photons of light actually affect things like pigmentation. But before I do, you know, it felt, I mean, like, it felt like a shock, you know, literally like, like an electric shock. You had me change glasses halfway through because you're using, I guess, a different wavelength, is that correct? Yeah. Okay, and so what's the difference between this type of laser that you use and what's it called compared to just say me shining infrared light on my face?

Yeah, exactly. So lasers, the lasers that we're using are exponentially more sort of powerful. They put out more wattage or have more energy, which we measure in joules to, you know, kind of have the effect that they're after. So just think of like a laser pointer, right? That's a laser too. It's just a really, really low power laser that Can't. Doesn't. Can't quite do as much as something that, you know, is a little bit more amplified. And so laser itself is actually an acronym, which I think some people know, some people don't. It stands for light amplification by stimulated emission radiation. Right.

I do that sometimes.

Fill up podcast space, but it's a nice amplification. More power goes through that particular tube and, like, a bigger laser like that, so you just can get a lot more effect. And, you know, with, you know, the one that you felt, like, pretty warm with at the end there, we were, you know, maybe a third of the way towards its total energy that it can give.

Okay. So in terms of the amount of energy delivered to my face, it's almost like it's concentrated in such a tight ball that I'm getting what I'd have to stand for a red light for hours to get the equivalent of.

And it's not doing the same thing either. This is one of the other unique things you talked. You talked about the wavelength. So laser has, by definition, a fixed wavelength. Just one wavelength of light is coming out of that, and that's determined by whatever the medium of the laser is, whether it's like a carbon dioxide gas laser, whether it's a dye laser, or whether it's a solid state laser. There's all kinds of different things you can make to get different wavelengths. And the reason we want different wavelengths is what you hinted at is that each wavelength has a specific. We call it a chromophore or a target in the skin that it has a really high affinity for. So if that's a pigment or a blood vessel or collagen, each of these lasers is very specific for one of those particular types of targets. So you can mix and match.

So each chromophore responds to a specific wavelength. And by using lasers with different wavelengths, you're able to target the. The areas of the skin that express different chromophores.

Exactly right. Yep. So some of them can target, you know, collagen, are completely blind to pigment, or vice versa. So you can be really, really specific with what lasers do. Wow. Which is why you can make a nice little cocktail out of them, just like you can with anything else. When you can mix and match things that sort of work well together.

I thought you called it a cocktail because you're also mixing my blood.

Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. Which we did at the end. We used your prp, a different type of PRP than we used in your hair today, but we used a type of PRP on your face afterwards. Because the last laser that we did creates these little. We call them micro thermal zones. These little, like, pixelated zones of.

You mean the one we finished up with tonight, right?

Yeah.

Which felt more like a. Felt more like a small sting where the other one felt like. More like a flash of light.

Yeah. Like a rubber band snap versus like little hot needles, maybe, type of thing. And that one creates these little micropores that we can get your PRP to sort of penetrate down into.

And then what about the hair? Is it pretty much doing the same thing on a hair follicular level? Because you were doing some other stuff up on my hair in the same.

Right. So we switched to a different type of PRP for your hair that has a little bit of higher concentration of growth factors in it and put that right around the hair follicles directly in this little fibrin matrix. So that's sort of like a more slow release delivery of those growth factors to your hair follicle over time versus what we put on top of your skin. We just, like, delivered right to the areas that we sort of injured today, if you will. And that went right away. There's no sort of slow release. Release.

It's just.

It's all there right now, doing its thing.

Was that what the injuries that the vibrators that you're using?

No, the vibrators were to literally just distract you from the little needle entry points for the. Oh, really? You can't even feel the injections with the vibrators going.

No kidding.

Yeah. Well, that's literally.

Okay, so the vibrators were just distracted. I thought these were like, super fancy scientific vibrators with micro needles that you were.

I hate to break it to you, these are the type of vibrator you think of when you hear the word vibrator.

Okay.

And we coat them, and that's good.

You probably wouldn't want to have vibrators with needles.

No. You don't want to get a very.

Small subset of the population. I would appreciate that and buy it.

Right? Yeah. And those work via this thing called the gate theory of pain, which is certain nerves that carry pain carry vibration, proprioception or positioning and pain and so. And temperature. So if you can have something that's really cold and vibrating, it's harder to feel pain through that. Okay. Yeah.

That's amazing. That's better than dipping my feet in cold water.

Also works.

Although it's funny, actually, last night somebody sent me not to totally derail our conversation. They sent Me, a cryo helmet. I was actually gonna try it earlier today. I did get a chance. But it's literally like a helmet that you keep in your freezer and you pull on. And it does cold therapy for your entire head and is supposedly amazing for things like migraines or before you go to sleep. And so that I may pop in here next time. That's probably the least effective form of cold therapy I could wear to a hair growth clinic. That would be the cold therapy helmet.

Yeah. Interesting ice cream headache there.

Okay, so the other thing you mentioned was a type of acid that you use with the growth factor, transamic acid or something acid.

I don't necessarily use it with the growth factors here, but that is something that we use for after lasers and things like that to reduce redness. It can do a few things to inhibit angiogenesis. It enhances our blood's ability to go through its clotting cascade. It's a drug that's been used orally for women with heavy periods for a long time. And it's just kind of finding its place interestingly in like cosmetics and surgery, where we mix it with local anesthesia to increase what we call hemostasis or like the ability for us to control bleeding. And then, you know, for things like melasma, which is a very frustrating pigment and blood vessel issue that happens in the skin when people get pregnant, when they're on hormones, when they have sun exposure. It's been quite change in the way that that gets treated. And it's very effective for it.

Okay, got it. So we did the laser with the world's most expensive skin cream created from my own blood. And then did the vibrating with the microneedling on the head, followed by more of the PRP applied to the scalp to allow for more follicular growth. Did another set of photographs beforehand because we're photographing this whole thing just to make sure that actually works so that you have proof. And then the thing is that this is all very interesting, but a lot of people had some follow up questions from the last podcast that we did. So before I asked you, like Botox, for example, is a big one. So I definitely get into Botox. But before that, if someone were to call their local clinic or whatever and want to get something like this done, what do they tell the doctor that they want? What's this called? Anti aging.

Yeah, so we did a bunch of things today. So you had your hair restoration, which wasn't necessarily micro needles. It was actual like needles and syringes injecting that. So that'd be like PRP for hair. And then, you know, as far as the laser goes, this is like a whole topic of a discussion that is, you know, if you call and ask for a laser, it's, well, okay, what are we, what are we targeting? You know, is it blood vessels, is it pigment, is it wrinkles, is it laxity, is it a, you know, just sort of basic gauging changes. And so that's a tough one because there's a million brands of lasers and those focus around a few key wavelengths usually. But you're, you know, basing that off of what your goals are, what your needs are, what your age is, all kinds of how much downtime you have, things like that.

So call your local anti aging clinic and then tell them to call Cameron. Because what I'm going to do at the end of this podcast after Cameron snuck out is I'll give you his cell phone number and you can just connect your doctor with Cameron. He'll, he'll tell him what to do.

Sounds good.

But seriously, by the way, you guys, if you go to show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Hair Growth 2, I'll put a link to Cameron's clinic and stuff because he does do some, some telemedicine consults and stuff like that. If you, if you want to chat with him about what you need. Okay, let's talk. Talk Botox, like fillers. Are fillers different than Botox?

Yeah, that's such a good question. They are different. And I think it's a really common area of confusion as to what those things are because people may have heard of them. Some people haven't heard of fillers at all maybe. But Botox, everybody, I think, is pretty household at this point. And Botox is, it's kind of funny because in our comments and in my people reaching out to me after the last one, I got a lot of questions about what are Botox alternatives? I don't want to do Botox. And it's really funny to me because, yeah, I totally see that and I get it. But if you really go back to the history of Botox, it's probably like one of the first real great biohacks. It is a really true cosmetic biohack. Yeah. So Botox, you know, is discovered like a poison. Well, yeah, it's a neuro, It's a neurotoxin kind of like the cyanide and.

Almonds or yeah, maybe natural built in plant defense mechanisms in every plant out there.

Right. And this Is coming from, you know, botulinum of bacteria. And it's very famous for, you know, living in honey. And if, you know, like little kids can't eat honey because if it gets in their stomach, they can't kill it in their stomach acid. Adults can, which is why babies can't have honey, because they'll get flaccid from this, you know, the botulinum toxin, releasing the toxin in them.

Baby's on Botox.

Baby's on systemic full body Botox, not a good thing. But in low levels, like anything else that maybe has some hormetic dosing is like, it's really helpful for your muscles to kind of like calm their strengthening. That tends to. They tend to get a little bit stronger than our skin can stand in our facial musculature over time. And so it started getting therapeutic use in the 20s, and then by the 70s, it had some indications for a lot of eye spasms or aberrant movements of our eye musculature. And in that it was kind of discovered like, oh man, these people's eyes look really good. And we're injecting this around there. And that was the first sort of like, wow, this is an interesting sort of anti aging option that's in some sense natural coming from a bacteria, but then it's kind of taken off from there. Botox has multiple indications for lots of different things throughout medicine, from spastic bladders to, you know, contracted muscles in the neck and then a bunch of cosmetic uses. And it's interesting in that it, you know, affects the muscle, that the neuromuscular junction kind of relaxes muscles from getting a signal that the nerve can't communicate to make the muscle fire. There's a bunch of effects it has on these cells.

It's almost a little paradoxical. You think like a loose face would be like saggy and wrinkled and a tight face would be more firm and youthful looking. But Botox is loosening.

Well, Botox is taking your face and making it look like you're in repose, like at rest, instead of where people may be frowning all the time or lifting up their eyebrows to, you know, kind of elevate things and get those lines in their forehead. The idea is just to relax that function, not to take it away, but just to relax it so you don't break down your skin quite so much.

Maybe a dumb question about how long does it last when you get that injected?

Yeah, so it lasts about three or four months. Usually when it done, it's very temporary. There's A new product coming out that's gonna last a little bit longer, but. But for the most part.

What's that one called?

3 or 4? That's a revance product that's coming out, and it's just in the pipeline coming, but it's going to be a neuromodulator, botulinum toxin as well.

Now, aren't there concerns about the side effects of Botox? Isn't that one of the reasons that you'll find in the alternative medicine sector, for example, people are doing things like emailing you and saying, can I smear honey on my face? Right.

And a lot of the concern over Botox is whether it entered the central nervous system, which was a big concern when it's getting injected in these, like, really realistically very small doses for cosmetic uses, that it was getting into our central nervous system. And, you know, that is kind of based off of its distant cousin, tetanus toxin, which, you know, does get in the central nervous system. And it's, you know, that it's been proven that Botox neuromodulators like botulinum toxin are not crossing into our central nervous system, which I think was sort of the biggest concern with him. So, again, I am not saying, like, Botox is great. Everybody's got to go do it. I just think it's really kind of a humorous little aside that people in the maybe biohacking world are so very, very against it. But it's kind of funny to me that's like, well, so, like, if you're. Let's.

Let's say, Aubrey, your wife said, I mean, I'll get Botox. You just be like, yeah, whatever. Yes, that's fine.

No concerns. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

It's just gotta be done, like, well, in small doses. And it does a really great job for what it's for. It changes the way our fibroblasts react, and it upregulates, like collagen synthesis. It has effects on wound healing. It's, you know, it's got a lot of good benefits. Okay. Yeah.

All right, cool. Good to know. Another question that this one won't surprise you that came up. Was liposuction, you know, kind of a similar thing? Like, I want a natural alternative or, you know, is liposuction safe and healthy? So what's the deal right now with liposuction or liposuction alternatives?

Yeah, so liposuction just is. For those that don't know. It's just sort of manually applying suction to remove fat from wherever you want it. Abdomens, thighs, flanks, whatever it may be. And, you know, that's falls under this category of different types of body work. And it's a very direct way to get rid of fat that's there. It, like, physically reduces the amount, the volume, the number of fat cells that are there. There's other ways to get around it or to do the same types of things. So it just sort of depends on, you know, somebody's baseline, like, what where you're standing, what you need, what your goals are. There's this really cool story of using freezing to reduce fat, and that's called.

Cryofreeze, or cool sculpt.

Yeah, yeah. And so that was discovered by one of our dermatology colleagues, who's the father of a lot of these devices and lasers. And there's this thing that little kids get called popsicle panniculitis, where if they hold a popsicle in their cheek for too long, it causes the fat in the side of their cheek to sort of necrose and go away. And little kids fat is a little bit more saturated than adults, so it's easier for it to turn into a solid state.

This is fascinating. Kids were sucking on popsicles and melting away fat in their face, freezing their cheek fat.

Popsicle panniculitis. Panniculitis means inflammation of fat. And so that was like, hey, that's a really interesting thing. And no damage to surrounding skin, nerves, muscles, anything like that. Just the fat's very sensitive to cold. And so at certain temperatures, which is what coolsculpting is designed to do, it gets that fat to the temperature where the fat cells lice or die, the surrounding skin, muscle, and everything is just fine. And you get a reduction of fat that way. So it sounds like a miracle, and it's not quite.

You know how many popsicles and vibrators you're gonna sell from this podcast episode. Yeah, so. So this. This coolsculpting, it's totally non invasive. Like, it's literally just like a cold wand.

It's an external applicator that has like a suction in it, and so kind of pulls in the fat that you want to freeze, if you will, and it applies sort of cool to that area to a very specific temperature for a very specific amount of time. Then it comes off and the fat gets inflamed. That's the paniculitis part. And then it gets sort of, you know, auto digests and those.

Because when you do cryotherapy, it's a conversion. Right. Like, a lot of it gets converted into more metabolically active brown adipose tissue.

Right.

Which generates heat.

Yes, but.

But in this case, it's literally just atrophying and dying.

This is a different process than that, like a full body cryotherapy is going to do, because the. In your full body cryotherapy, your fat cells aren't getting to that same temperature that they are when they're sort of like focally. When it's focally applied, you wouldn't be able to sort of withstand that temperature. But you're right, you know, the whole different process than the conversion to brown fat, which tends to be more like chronic low grade cold exposure, as many people know. And this is like a very acute focal application of cold to fat cells.

Now, in terms of liposuction, I've actually had it done because I needed to get stem cells from my adipose tissue. And as a very lean guy, that was not fun for me. I mean, all over my back tissue. I was sore for a couple of months afterwards, but that's where they could get the fat. Obviously not what I would classify as a minimally invasive protocol. But are there minimally invasive forms of liposuction, aside from something like coolsculpting?

It would depend on your goal. For if your goal is body contouring, liposuction is relatively just more aggressive, you know, just because you've got to get under the areas that you want to sort of reduce to get rid of that fat. Most of the liposuction I do is very similar to what you mentioned, which is to harvest it for facial fat transfer or, you know, harvesting stem cells out of it. That is quite minimally invasive. That's like, can be done with just a little bit of local anesthesia and a really, really small cannula to get it. And like you're saying with you even someone who's really lean, you can often find enough fat to get what you need. But you're again, not doing it for a body contouring version of a procedure. If you're doing that, you tend to probably have just a little bit more baseline to go after, which just makes it a bigger procedure overall.

Okay, got it. I was just writing a note to myself to say something about popsicles and vibrators in the title for today's podcast episode. Now you guys know why we were talking about it. Okay. Another one was that there's prp, but then somebody asked about prf. Yeah, what's prf?

So PRP is platelet rich plasma. PRF is Platelet rich fibrin. And that fibrin makes this little matrix that I was talking about. It's part of our blood clotting cascade. And it's one of the structural components that starts physically holding things together as a wound's healing or as we're trying to seal off a bleeding vessel or a clot or something like that. So this fibrin makes this little, like I said, matrix that sort of holds some of the prp. PRP in, which is that the PRP is coming from platelets themselves. So PRF is more of like a gelatinous gel, almost a semi solid. I can actually. I have a. I can link this maybe in the site, one of my Instagram posts. I kind of show what it looks like.

Yeah. Email to me.

And you can see what, like, something like PRF looks like. So they're different, and I don't know that one's better or worse than the other. They're not. They're not kind of doing the same things, if you ask me. Like, PRP is injectable, simple, straightforward. When I'm using prf, I'm using it, like in surgeries under areas where I've operated to give a growth factor balm, I call it. And at the same time, kind of start off that healing, that the fibrin itself is kind of like a glue that kind of heals things back together.

Okay, so this is not something you'd make like a cream with and apply after microneedling or lasers. This is something you would inject into a joint for a regenerative surgery. Sure.

Something along those lines. Yeah. Or use under an area that we call a flap, or use under a facelift or an eyelid surgery or something. Just kind of start the healing. Reduce some swelling, reduce some bruising just by kicking off the healing cascade. Really.

Okay, tell me about the devil's drug. This one's interesting. I hadn't heard of this before, but there's some chatter about it. Apparently it's getting a lot of, like, online buzz right now. So the devil's drug is apparently something in, like, the beauty sector, but I don't know anything about it at all. I figured you probably would.

Yeah. So that's a funny name for it. The devil's drug is isotretinoin, which people know probably better as accutane.

Isotretin. Oh, accutane.

Okay. Accutane. Yeah.

Yeah.

And so that's a drug that's been used for acne, and it's a really powerful medication for that. It's a vitamin A derivative. We call that a retinoid. Lots of people have heard of retinoids, retinols and things like that. First topical skin creams. But this is an oral version of it. And it's really powerful on our sebaceous glands, which are sort of, you know, what's controlling acne a lot of times. So it's been around a long time for acne and it can put people into remission. Like it can kind of, if you will, cure their acne, they can take a course of it and then they don't have it anymore after that.

And less smelly than rubbing raw liver on your face.

Yes, right. Yes.

It's from a polar bear. You get a lot of vitamin A.

That's right.

People actually get vitamin A toxicity from bear livers. That's exactly.

Polar bear specifically.

Right, exactly.

They eat some pretty fatty animals, those polar bears.

Okay, but, but this is so. So this devil's drug is actually Accutane. That's a high vitamin A compound used for acne.

Right. And so it's a. It's evolved in its life to be from, you know, a severe, severe acne medication to becoming a little bit more of like a designer drug for anti aging and skin care and things like that, where people are like almost microdosing it, taking small amounts of it more frequently.

Topically.

No, orally.

Really?

Yep. Taking it orally in small doses.

But was that. Is that how Accutane was originally used? Oh, I thought Accutane was a topical.

Nope, it's a medication. Yep. So they're taking it orally in small doses over time to, you know, prevent aging, help their skin sort of just look better. And it's interesting in that some of the European soccer teams are using it as well for. To protect some joint cartilage because there's some evidence that it like protects the degradation of type 2 collagen and the type 2 collagen extracellular matrix, which is like the collagen that we have in cartilage. And so maybe this little bit of a double benefit for someone who's an active, young, fit, healthy person that, oh, your skin looks great.

When you say microdosing with Accutane, what would a normal dose be? And what are we saying for microdosing?

Micro is not as. That just makes it sound sexy. It's not really probably microdosing, but people may be taking like 10 milligrams a day regularly or 10 milligrams every other day or three times a week versus a regular dose of Accutane might be 40 milligrams a day.

Okay. So this would be like somebody taking Valium and cutting their tablet in quarters.

Smaller doses.

Okay. All right, got it. Interesting. So do you think that there are any downsides to, let's say, microdosing with Accutane?

Yep. There's a whole lecture that you could give on just the downsides of taking isotretinoin. It has effects on really drying out your skin, which is actually probably one of the benefits that it has for people that have oily skin. And then there's a lot of, you know, issues with, you know, it's big, big, big risk is it's a. It's a teratogen. You can't take it when you're pregnant or conceiving a kid. Bad, bad effects there. And so pregnancy category X, it's the bad one. Okay. And so that's probably one of the biggest concerns with the sort of, like, more recreational use of it a little bit. But then it has effects on bones and all kinds of things like that. So not, you know, again, hence the devil's drug part of it.

Especially if you're a pregnant soccer player.

You do not want to be a pregnant European soccer player taking isotretin.

Well, what would you do, knowing what, you know, if you had, let's say, somebody come in with horrific acne.

Right. And so this is a really great question. This goes into sort of, what are those sort of alternatives? And we talked a little bit earlier about lasers and lasers being a really great option for different chromophores in the skin. Skin. Right. And chromophores just being those specific targets. And it's not uncommon that people are just like, you know, I maybe need Accutane. I don't want to take it. I'm not. It's not something I'm going to do. What can we. How can we kind of go after this? And that's where I really get into pretty aggressive laser protocols where I'll use sometimes like a photosensitizing drug called a porphyrin that I'll put on top. And that tends to penetrate down into oil glands because they're high, they have a high energy metabolism. So they take those up. And now you kind of have, you know, smart bombed your target, putting a photosensitizer in there. Then you can use different lasers to specifically target those oil glands to start shutting them down. You can even use red and blue light for that sometimes to shut them down. We know that blue light has an effect on acne by affecting this bacteria called Proprionibacterium acnes. P. Acnes, we call it. And so it can kind of calm that down. And blue light alone can have some effect to improve acne. And so when you're pairing that with something that's a little bit more aggressive, like a laser protocol, laser cocktail, as I like to call it, you're going to get a much, much better effect and targeted.

Are there different forms of acne? And the reason I ask is I'll often give someone nutritional advice to avoid insulinogenic foods. Omega 6 fatty acids, almost like Loren Cordain, one of the godfathers of the Paleo diet, wrote a book way back in the day you could probably still find called the Dietary Cure to Acne. My wife had bad acne and that cured it. Within a couple of weeks, her face cleared up. Do adults come to you who perhaps, you know, let's say they're eating a good diet, but they actually have acne? Like, is that a thing? Oh, for sure.

And acne has so many different. Yes. If there's different types of acne, the answer is yes. And you can even see patterns of somebody's like where. Where it's located on their face, for example. Traditional, like hormonal acne tends to be like we call along the chin strap, the lower part of the face. Whether it's, you know, in young people who like have elevated hormone levels, you know, like I said, a lot of it. It's this cycle of our hair follicles, which we pores, for lack of a better term, right where our oil glands and our hair follicles are coming out of. Just the amount of production coming out of those is so aggressive that they just can't clear themselves. And so that causes, we call a comedone. People might call it zit or something like that underneath. And the level of what you're doing to stimulate that growth versus clean out your pores versus calm down the bacteria that lives in there. All those are going to play into what's happening. And so if you're really pro inflammatory, you're going to have worse acne. If you're taking something like isotretinoin, that's going to calm down your oil production, that's going to help your acne. So there's a bunch of different dietary, nutritional, systemic things that you could do to improve it. Or like I was talking about going directly to the skin surface itself with different types of lasers to help that.

If you did that with lasers, is it permanent?

Yeah. So the. You're Talking about what it does to the acne.

For acne. Yeah, yeah.

You can have like durable, long lasting effects on it. No kidding. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah, it's amazing. It's really nice. What about eczema? Would lasers work for something like that also?

Yeah. So there's again looking at chromophores and different things, there's different lasers for more specifically probably psoriasis than eczema. That can have effects there. And it all boils down to sort of what the underlying cause is and what that laser is going to do to target those chromophores, those things underneath, whether it's blood vessels or things like that.

Okay, awesome.

Not as commonly used for that certainly. Yeah, yeah. And one of the issues there becomes that, you know, lasers are generally not insurance reimbursed. They tend to be like, you know, out of pocket procedures.

Yeah.

And so, you know, when you get into more medical types of treatments for lasers, they're certainly there, but, but much more of the laser things are going to come in. You know, when we're talking about like one of the big questions, we got like Botox alternatives. What are Botox alternatives? Like that's where I'm going to direct people more towards lasers. Where, you know, we're going to restrengthen, restructure your skin, things like that. Where, you know, Botox is trying to take some of the tension off the skin. If we can just make the skin stronger at baseline using lasers, we can kind of. There's your Botox hack, there's your alternative to Botox or something like that. Kind of.

Speaking of the acne and nutrition piece, how, how often do you find yourself talking with a client who's struggling with say hair loss or gray hair, about inflammatory components in their diet or their adequate amounts of amino acid consumption or anything like that. Do you find yourself having those conversations?

Yeah, generally we kind of take a little bit more of a comprehensive approach. It's usually multi provider for us here where we'll have somebody who's a little bit more focusing on a lot of that systemic part of it. I tend to be more of the like end of the road, like, okay, now we need to like be doing something physical about this or something to regenerative about it, to target it. So at that point, usually we've kind of like exercised all those other options.

So you're assuming they've already been through the funnel by the time they've walked in here. Unless they're holding a bag of McDonald's dripping with grease.

Exactly. Then There's a better place to point them to go.

Right. Okay, got it. So I sent you over a study, I think last evening, because it just came across my desk. I knew it was coming in here. We kind of sort of addressed the idea that most of these topicals are somewhat ineffective as far as like the popular, like food for your face type of compounds and formulas that are sold out there. But then this was. And I don't even know if you had a chance to read the full paper. I couldn't find the full paper in time, but it's the abstract and it was a six month randomized control trial with, with 62 men who had AGA. So that's AndroGelic alopecia, the hair loss due to the hormone issues that we talked about in part one of this podcast and said they applied a topical foam that had nicotinic acid polyphenols. It looks like a couple of the ones from green tea, like eg, cg, and a quercetin based polyphenol. So basically like green tea and quercetin, zinc, glycine and caffeine. And they did that twice a day. And then there was also a control group and they were looking at the telogen rate, the proportion of hair in the telogen phase, which was the resting phase that comes before the hair loss phase. We also talked a lot about that on the last podcast and so they saw that, that telogen rate, I guess it would have decreased. Decreased. Right. If that comes before the hair loss phase.

And they don't explicitly say, but that would imply that more of the hairs are into the growth phase.

And then they said a secondary outcome was hair density. What do you think about that? Like, like you think that there's something too that's kind of like smearing stuff in your, in your hair.

Yeah. And this is like, I think, or could.

It could have been what we talked about in the last podcast. Scalp massage occurs twice a day. When you're, when you're using anything like.

This, you look at the active ingredients here. So there. It's worth mentioning that the placebo, the foam itself did have some rate of telogen reduction itself. So there's that. So that could argue, you know, for what you're talking about was just manual massage. But if you look at everything in here, you've got, you know, niacin, you've got caffeine and so things that are vasoactive basically. Right.

Like vasodilatory, they're assist with blood flow. Possibly.

Exactly. You got polyphenols that are anti inflammatory. So you have all the, all the ingredients we talked about last time that, you know, could have sort of effects that are going to, you know, positively grow your hair, if you will, take it out of resting phase, take it into growing phase. The thing that this paper doesn't really talk about is, okay, to what degree of change did we really get? You know, that's where I think I.

At least in the abstract it doesn't say.

Right, yeah, that's what I mentioned maybe before, which is, you know, a lot of things topically can have effects and it may be like a 5% improvement. And that's real, that's a thing. But is that enough for what most people are after is the question a lot of times. And so you can start mixing and matching your topicals and seeing if you can get some synergy between them. And we talked about that a little bit last time as well, ways to do that. But I'm never surprised to see these because it's like, yeah, it makes sense that, you know, this is going to cause some change, but what is that going to equate to clinically for people who are seeking hair loss, you know?

Right, right.

Because by the time we're usually, you know, going after something that has to do with increasing our hair density, we're well past 5% reduced. We're usually like 50 plus percent reduced. And we're just starting to notice it. And then we got a little bit of an uphill battle to go.

Okay, got it, got it. I wanted to ask you, just while I have you as a captive audience here, in terms of protocols that a lot of people may not know about or like the sexy stuff that folks are up to in Hollywood right now that people might be hearing about a few months from now, is there anything kind of coming down the pipeline in the beauty or the anti aging industry that you think is, is super interesting?

Yeah, this is my jam, this is my world. That's where I trained down in the Hollywood area in LA at ucla. And this is, I think hits a lot of the questions probably that we got from listeners last time, which were, I would say the main parts of the question were filler and Botox alternatives. Right, we talked about Botox a little bit. And alternatives for that being like, okay, if we don't want to weaken those muscles, let's strengthen our skin. So really great options with lasers. Lasers can physically reduce or erase wrinkles that are already there. Right. So in the Hollywood world, lasers are very, very, very popular because they are very High yield and very natural. You're not going to ever make somebody look different. Right. And then you get into fillers. And we talked about this but didn't really touch on it. This is a deep subject of fillers are volume replacers. These are, we lose volume in our face as we age and our volume sinks and descends and kind of of all creeps downwards vertically. And, you know, we know that if we think of somebody who looks a little bit older, like, okay, all their, you know, volume's depleted and so fillers have been sort of an option to go replace some of that volume. And they're very powerful and they work very well. They're hyaluronic acid gel, which is, you know, something that's a normal part of our skin, that the structure of hyaluronic acid is the same across all species. And so you can make these like gels by cross linking them. They have different properties and those can mimic bone or fat or whatever we want them to mimic. And we can use them to replace volume. They work well, they're temporary. Eventually we break them down. We have an enzyme in our body called hyaluronidase that breaks it down and they're a temporary solution for volume restoration.

And how are they delivered? Is this like an injection, similar to Botox?

Yep, injection. But they're usually targeting, like I said, deeper things like fat pads, bone, things like that.

So if you see like HLA injection, hyaluronic acid injection, that's what that is. And that actually works? Correct.

Okay, so they work well, they're temporary and they have a little bit of an inflammatory part of them because they get dissolved. So we know that they have, they stimulate some inflammation. And so, you know, they work great. But a lot of people are trying to avoid them because, you know, it's like this thing that comes out of a syringe that's not from them. And so, you know, another option there is like, okay, well what's a volume restoration option that is not, you know, sort of coming out of a box. And that's where things like using your own fat or fat transfer come in as a really great volume restoration fat transfer.

And that's where we're, I'm guessing what that is.

Yep, we're borrowing fat from somewhere else. Generally, we like the peri, like around your belly button, we call the peri umbilical area. Or your flanks or your thighs.

Use the liposuction wand for this.

Use a teeny, teeny little white liposuction wand and we harvest it. Sort of very, very gently because we want those cells to be intact. And then we process them through centrifugation and we can get different types of fat. We can get smaller, larger, more stem cell dense, kind of whatever we're after there. And we use that to same thing, replace like for like, basically where we've lost fat. We can use your own fat to replace like.

Plus you get liposuction at the same time.

Yeah.

Do people actually do that? They do it two for two.

Sure. But in general, we're not doing it for body contouring. We're doing it just to harvest a little bit. Yeah. That is a really great volume restoration alternative because once those adipocytes, those fat cells set up shop, they establish a blood supply in your face. They're now there long term. They become part of your native facial structure. And via this paracrine effect and the way that they communicate with one another by releasing these growth factors and growth hormones, growth signaling molecules, is that you also get this nice benefit to your skin surrounding fat pads. We're sort of constantly being bathed in this. So I'll see people like two years after their fat transfer. We don't do anything else. So they're kind of like, man, your skin just looks amazing because they're getting this kind of skin looks like a baby's butt. Right. There's a reason why. And so people now have sort of hacked that a little bit to like, okay, well I want that, that part of it without maybe the volume. And so this is getting back around to your question of like coming down the pipeline. We call that more like nano fat, where we really, really process for that dense stem cell portion. We're not doing a bunch of volume restoration, but we're using your own fat to give a little bit of restructuring to the underside of your skin and bathe your skin in those sort of like long term growth factors that, you know, have a really great kind of glowing effect. It's very much a Hollywood type of treatment, huh? Yeah.

Wow. Those folks in Hollywood, a lot of stuff. Any technologies like biohacks or even like home use equipment that you think is going to really take off stuff.

Oh, you know, or stuff you'd see.

In a medical clinic like this.

Yeah. And so this is where you get into these ideas. One of the really popular things. So lasers have been around for a while and you know, they're expensive and they're onerous to operate and they, you know, have risk to your eyes and things like that. So you got to have somebody who Kind of knows what they're doing, running them, you know, so there's constantly been a hunt for, okay, well what else can we do that's like simpler, if you will, like that we can put in a Medispa or something like that, you know. You know, we've seen evolution of these devices that do like radio frequency or radio frequency microneedling. So instead of using light based energy, they're using radio frequency energy to basically, with the radio frequency micro needling, that's a really popular one. Needles go under your skin in sort of some sort of a pattern. And then radio frequency energy comes out the tip of those needles and causes heat. So because at a baseline level, lasers also just use heat, right? They just use heat in very, very focal, targeted locations. And radio frequency is a little bit more of like a blanket type of heat. But you can put needles under the skin, create heat, and with that at various densities, we can change the way that collagen and elastin, those key elements of our skin structure, we can change the way that they react and cause them to grow a little bit with those like radio frequency microneedling devices.

It reminds me of like the type of acupuncture where I believe they actually electrocute the needle right when it's in there.

Yep, same idea. It's really interesting because you can get a little bit a deeper delivery of that and that's usually more targeting like muscular structure and things like that. But same idea.

Yeah.

And then the other really popular and kind of sexy sounding ones are these like plasma devices. Plasma pens, like using helium plasma. And as I like to, you know, joke around with my four year old son, plasma being the fourth state of matter, you know, as they're learning about solids, liquids and gases, I kind of, you know, tease these reps or whoever are working with these plasma devices, like it doesn't matter which state of matter is creating heat. They're all just, like I said, using heat in some capacity. So these plasma pens are.

That's the joke you tell your kid.

Well, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Sorry.

Teaching my kid.

Interesting father. Jeez, My dad told me these jokes never got him.

Yeah, teaching my kid the fourth state of matter being plasma, which his first grade teacher then argued with him about, which is kind of funny, that there was no force state of matter. And then. But with these reps, you know, there's like this plasma sounds so sexy. Oh, it's a plasma pen. It doesn't matter. But it is, it's delivering heat energy.

Okay.

And so It's a topical way of delivering heat, basically.

So this would have a vasodilatory effect. Almost similar concept to smear in like caffeine and kerasotinur, like a frank heat.

Destruction type of thing.

Oh, really?

These plasma pens? Yeah, they can be ablative to the.

Surface of the skin like the cool one does to fat. This is also doing that to skin. Right.

And like I said, everything is using heat really on the skin surface or underneath the skin, whatever we're targeting to cause whatever effect we're at. And so some of the radio frequency devices that I use for like tightening skin, like the holy grail, if we had like a device that was could just tighten up all our loose skin, it'd be a miracle. And we have things that are decent at it, but nothing's perfect. And with those, I'm using a radio frequency tip under the skin, say, and I'm using a thermal camera on the surface of the skin. And I'm looking at the gradient of temperatures between those things. And it's like, you know, big math equation of figuring out what temperature are we hitting with our targets. Collagen and elastin to cause them to contract, to remodel, to get stronger, more resilient, more elastic, tighter skin. And again, heat, heat, heat. It's all heat. Doesn't matter what source it's coming from. It's what degree you're heating it to and what targets you're hitting.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right, so those are plasma pens.

So plasma pens are of surface treatment. Like I said, they've evolved into this like very sort of user friendly, anybody can operate them type of option. That sound really sexy. So it's good marketing.

Yeah.

You know, but like I'm saying, it doesn't, doesn't matter. It's just heat.

Okay. And you guys have a better way of delivering heat in a more thorough fashion? I would say in a medical clinic or would you use a plasma fed?

I'd say more specific way.

Okay.

We can like whatever we're after, we can hit it directly.

Okay. But we need someone to develop some device, full body device, that will both cause tightening and increased elasticity. And that's what doesn't exist yet.

That's. That would be the dream.

Okay. So I don't know if that's going to happen, but what you could do is you could get like Elon Musk to tweet out that tight elastic skin is not a thing anymore. And we have new definitions of beauty and you want loose skin and that's how I get rid of issues.

Yeah, I think that's worked. Yeah.

Just tweet and change society.

Elon's a thought leader in the beauty world now. Yeah.

Well, let's see. Anything else you want to. You want to mention before we tell people about your clinic and where to find you?

Yeah. You know, I think those are the biggest questions we had were really those, like, filler botox alternatives, you know, kind.

Of smear honey on your face.

Yeah, honey on your face. There's a lot of questions. I think the last. Last kind of topic was about the difference between, like, non invasive, non surgical, minimally invasive options, you know, and jumping a cold pool, defining those things, what those mean. And, you know, I kind of would assume something like non invasive means you're not getting poked, you're not bleeding, nothing's happening like that versus no sharp objects. Yeah, Something non surgical, which would be like fat transfer. Very, very non surgical. No cutting, no sewing, no stitches, no anything like that. But you're getting a little cannula put under your skin to harvest fat out. So probably a really good example of something non surgically. Non surgical, then minimally invasive. This is sort of my surgical world that I live in. Everything I do surgically is very, very sort of targeted in the sense of, like, you know, multiple small procedures put together to have sort of a global effect. But each one of those procedures itself are very stealth, very minimally invasive. So maybe a little bit of cutting and sewing, but on a much smaller scale than we might traditionally think of for, like, a surgical procedure.

Okay. Okay. Yeah, got it. And just like the dentist's office where you get the stickers and the toothbrushes, popsicles and vibrators when you walk out.

That'S what you get it.

All right. Easy peasy. I like it. All right, so camera's clinic here in Spokane is called Optum. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Clinic 5C. Optum Clinic 5C. What's the 5C stand for?

Ooh, that's like a little inside thing. Oh, not the real story.

Yeah.

Okay. So I was trying to just think of a random name. Honestly, I was, like, thinking, like, clinic 34 clinic. Looking around at random things. And I realized that when my dad was a kid, he had five brothers, and they owned a little car dealership down in Moscow. And their car dealership was called the seven Cs S E or C E E S. And there's seven of the chestnut kids. And I was like, oh, interesting. So I was like, well, we have five in our family, three little ones and us. And so that's the backstory. If you know, you know, clinic 5C.

You just can't have any more kids now.

Yeah, right.

We're stuck.

Yeah.

Six, seven, you get clinic 10C, you start up a job as a fertility doc. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Clinic 5C is Cameron's clinic here in Spokane. He also does some telemedicine. You can visit his website and get into that with him. And then the show notes for our first podcast was Ben Grief, I believe. And for this one, it is BenGreenfieldFitness.com Hairgrowth2 that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com hairgrowth the number two. And you guys can of course go there and leave your comments, your questions, your feedback, because if I, if my suspicions come true, this isn't the last time I'm going to be in camera's clinic. And now we're establishing a tradition of strapping on the mics afterwards. And so, so it could happen again. So if you leave some good questions, you just might get them answered by the expert himself. Cameron, thanks again for an amazing show.

Yeah, thanks for coming. Hope your face feels better.

It will. We're gonna go out to eat again with weird looking faces to Baba's. Baba's Restaurant, Spokane. Baba's Mediterranean restaurant. Shout out. Good spot if you're ever in the area. I'm Ben along with Cameron Chestnut signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, progress, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.