No more nips, tucks

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No more nips, tucks or collagen in pursuit of beauty

Ruttan

The Edmonton Journal

http://www.canada.com/edmonton/edmontonjournal/story.asp?id=4E2AC22C-1594-4068-AD04-17AAF6772347

Saturday, May 10, 2003

CREDIT: Journal Stock

Dr. Mitchel Goldman

EDMONTON - Hoping to puff up your lips with collagen injections, like your favourite movie star? Forget it, says a leading California plastic surgeon. Collagen is passe.

Collagen treatments were hot a few years ago, as when Goldie Hawn played an aging actress desperate for puffy collagen lips in the 1996 movie The First Wives' Club.

Today, says Dr. Mitchel Goldman, collagen has been replaced by better substances for filling lips and erasing wrinkles, such as a gel called Restalyne.

Even the traditional surgical facelift is being gradually supplanted with less invasive procedures, said Goldman.

"The wave of the future is no cutting," he said.

"The whole idea is you don't want to cut and sew, because no matter how wonderful the person cutting is, you get a scar."

Goldman was in Edmonton Friday to speak to medical students and professors at the University of Alberta.

Instead of the surgical nip-and-tuck, he increasingly does things like injecting a person's own fat, from their buttocks or abdomen, into their cheeks.

"Usually the reason women wrinkle and the face droops is because they're losing their padding in their cheek area," said Goldman, who runs a dermatology clinic in La Jolla, Calif.

Injecting fat into the cheeks can help with the drooping, he said.

He prefers Restalyne over collagen because its effects last longer and don't cause the allergic reactions that collagen, a liquid made from the connective tissue of cows, sometimes did.

Restalyne is new in the United States, but has been used by Canadian plastic surgeons for eight years, according to Edmonton specialist Dr. Mariusz Sapijaszko. Unlike collagen, it is made from a non-animal substance, although a related cosmetic injection substance, Hylaform, comes from rooster combs.

"I've used one collagen (treatment) in the last three years, compared to 500 of Restalyne," said Sapijaszko.

One double-whammy treatment that Goldman does is removing a varicose vein from a person's leg then using that vein as material to fill the same person's lips or cheeks.

Removing unsightly varicose veins is an important part of Goldman's practice.

As with other forms of plastic surgery, the trend is away from big surgical procedures toward simpler, non-invasive treatments, he said.

A successful new treatment is to inject a foam solution into the varicose veins to get rid of them, he said.

He also uses laser treatments in some cases, but said laser is more costly, more painful, and less effective than injections.

Goldman is not against some common-sense advice as well. The first thing he tells patients who wants their wrinkles dealt with is to reduce sun exposure.

"We take special photographs that show them the sun damage."

And every patient who gets treatment for varicose veins walks out of his clinic wearing compression stockings that help keep the blood circulating rather than pooling in the legs.

Goldman wears compression stockings -- they look like an ordinary man's dress sock -- as a preventive measure, as does his model wife.

"I recommend that every school teacher, every woman who works standing all day, or men who work standing all day, have them on," he said.

In Alberta, compression stockings are available by prescription only, said U of A dermatology chief resident Dr. Jaggi Rao. Rao begins a one-year fellowship with Goldman this summer.

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