Find a Board Certified Plastic Surgeon in Salt Lake City
An Interview with Dr. John McCann on Botox
Dr. John McCann is a plastic surgeon certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery. Here the Doctor has answered some of the common questions Bizymoms visitors have about Botox.
Q. What is Botox?
A. It is a protein that relaxes muscles.
Q. Who is the ideal candidate for BOTOX?
A. 30-55 year old men and women who have concerns with dynamic rhytids. Dynamic rhytids are wrinkles formed by contraction of facial muscles and these include the vertical lines between the eyebrows the horizontal lines on the forehead and the crows feet area.
Q. What is the recovery period for BOTOX?
A. 3-4 months for a patient new to Botox. As long as 6 months for those who have had prior injections.
Q. How long do the results of BOTOX last?
A. 3-6 months.
Q. How much does BOTOX cost?
A. Botox is sold by the unit. The typical per unit charge is 10-13$ and the number of units used for a treatment varies between 20-75 units depending on how many portions of the face are treated and depending on how large the facial muscles are.
Q. How safe is Botox?
A. The therapeutic index is a common way to measure systemic toxicity of a medication. This is the ratio of how much medicine it takes to harm a person versus how much is used to treat a person. The higher the ratio the safer the medication. The therapeutic ratio for many over the counter medications is around 10. So if you take 20 Tylenol it could seriously harm you where 2 Tylenol are used to treat headaches. 20/2=10. It takes about 28 units of Botox to treat wrinkles and 2800 units to seriously harm a person so the ration is 2800/28=100. Using this analysis Botox is about 10 times safer than many over the counter medications. Given that one would have to open 28 bottles of medication to cause harm to a person it seems very unlikely that this would ever happen by accident.
On the other hand Botox can cause temporary problems such as a droopy eyelid or double vision if injected in the wrong location or at the wrong dose. This is well known to many patients and this is why many of patients seek out experienced injectors. As the largest volume injectors of Botox in this area for most of the last decade the senior surgeons in the practice have great experience. All patients injected at The Center For Facial Appearances are injected by one of the experienced senior surgeons and this task is not delegated to nurses or other assistants.
Q. How many treatments will be needed for botox?
A. Most patients get 3 treatments in the first year and 2 treatments per year in subsequent years.
Q. How to contact Dr. McCann if we have further questions?
