Dr. Marilyn Machusick provides a wide range of cosmetic dental services including teeth whitening, porcelain veneers, and dental bonding. But there’s one popular cosmetic procedure you might not think of seeing her for – Botox and dermal fillers.
Today, it is hard to come across someone who has never heard of Botox. Botox injections are one of the least invasive cosmetic procedures that millions of people in the U.S. undergo each year. People do this to maintain their youthful appearance.
Botox treatments and dermal fillers can help adjust your lip shape, sculpt your smile, and smooth wrinkles around your mouth. To complete cosmetic adjustments to your smile, you might consider adding these increasingly popular procedures to your treatment plan.
Botox is the common name for botulinum toxin, a protein that can be injected into the facial muscles. Botox doesn’t affect the muscles themselves—it blocks the transmitters between the nerves that move the muscles so that the muscles can’t contract. This stops the motion that causes wrinkles. Three to ten days after the treatment, the skin that surrounds these muscles smooths itself out. This means frown lines, wrinkles, crow’s feet, and horizontal forehead lines disappear. The effects of Botox are temporary. The exact duration depends on how quickly your body will metabolize the Botox. However, for most people, the effects will last anywhere between three and 6 months.
Besides its wrinkle relaxing effects, Botox has been shown to help patients with gummy smiles, TMJ disorder, bruxism, and migraines. In these cases, it only makes sense to receive Botox injections from a trained dentist who understands both the cosmetic and the dental aspects of the procedure.
Dermal fillers, on the other hand, are injections that can replace the fat and collagen in the skin that naturally diminish as we age, leading to deep wrinkles around the mouth and thinning lips. Dermal fillers can complement cosmetic dentistry procedures to create a truly stunning and youthful smile. Fillers tend to last six to twelve months.
Why would you consider Dr. Machusick for these treatments?
There are a number of reasons to consider going to a dentist for Botox or dermal filler treatment. While one might assume that a plastic surgeon or dermatologist would be the most qualified, the reality is that in most offices, it is the nurses or physicians’ assistants who administer the injections. While these people do have medical training, a dentist spends years studying facial anatomy and spends his or her career injecting anesthetics in many of the same areas treated with Botox and dermal fillers. Many patients who receive cosmetic treatments report that injections performed by dentists are quicker and less painful than injections performed by other healthcare professionals.
