Pursuit of Wellness - My C02 Laser Experience: Dr. Cameron Chesnut Part 2

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

Dr. Cameron Chesnut is back for Part 2, and we're getting into everything. What we actually did to my face, what the recovery has really looked like, and the honest timeline for results. I came to Dr. Chesnut with acne scarring, hyperpigmentation, and some volume loss. We break down the custom laser cocktail (four lasers total) paired with stem cell-rich fat transfer, why he tailors every treatment differently, and how to shop for a laser provider without getting sold whatever device they happen to own. We also get real about filler and Sculptra, including what filler actually looks like when Dr. Chesnut removes it surgically and why he takes a more cautious approach to biostimulators. Plus, the full recovery protocol I followed: hyperbaric oxygen, microplastic-free IV nutrition, red light, PEMF, and more. If you've been curious about CO2 laser, fat transfer, or whether going the long-play route is worth it, this one answers it honestly. _____ Follow Dr. Chesnut here Follow Clinic5c here Learn more about Dr. Chesnut's practice at clinic5c.com Leave Me a Message -⁠ click here!⁠ For Mari’s Instagram⁠ click here!⁠ For Pursuit of Wellness Podcast’s Instagram⁠ click here!⁠ For Mari’s Newsletter⁠ click here!⁠ For Mari’s TikTok⁠ click here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I came to you with texture from acne scarring, hyperpigmentation, and volume loss in some areas. And then you recommended me the protocol we did. For you, it's like, well, what are the base needs? Let's build something around this. What about this laser? What about this laser? I don't know you. I don't know what your skin needs are.

We're talking about a cocktail here. I empathize with the consumers because it is so driven by marketing. I can tell almost where somebody's going based off of what lasers they ask me about. Are you at a med spa? Are you at a dermatologist office? I can tell by where the marketing is directed. There's still an obsession with filler and sculpture. Why is fat so much better than those two options?

Filler looks like, if I were talking about hyeronic acid gel fillers, when I remove it, it's like wet floating sugar. And a lot of times when I'm just getting on there, it's all over my instruments. And when it's put in the lips, does it travel or does it stay in the lips? Give it along enough. It's not staying anywhere. This is the Pursuit of Wellness Podcast, and I'm your host, Mari La Welland. I think I'm curious what you think. The age of the person who wants a facelift is going to trend down. Oh, big time.

Already is. Right? Very much so. Yeah. Like are people coming to you wanting facelifts and you're like, you don't need one? Yeah. Happened to me yesterday kind of in a way, you know. Even just like sort of a curbside, somebody kind of pulling me over to do it.

But it is trending down. There's pros and cons to that and there's reasons for that. And some of it is social media. say driven, like, let's just lump that all together. People can see things younger. They'll see a celebrity who's younger who you kind of know, but you don't know what they did. That's the ideal result. Like, I know that person did something. I'm not even sure what, but I want it. Yes. Which is the definition to me of a good result that they look better because if you and I have something, well, maybe, basically if you're not a celebrity walking around, nobody has your before

picture in their head. So these poor celebrities get the bad end of it, in my opinion. Because our analytical brains turn on because you have a memory of what that person looked like before or a million images on Google, so you can immediately see them afterwards. But the normal person walking around after a procedure, there is no before image following them around. So if they have that high quality type of quiet luxury work, you have no idea. They just look great, straight up. And so those things will drive younger people to do it too, other than the types of procedures

that I tend to specialize in that are very minimally invasive, kind of like we were just talking about, where it's not this big open, massive procedure that's a little excessive for what you would need at a young age. So the initiation hurdles lower. Less surgery, less recovery, less risk, less all the things. And you don't need to move the needle as far to kind of achieve a satisfactory result. But then you're like kind of taken care of. You've pushed things down the road. It lasts a long time.

You look great. So yeah, definitely trends a little bit younger because of that. So I've obviously been talking about you a lot lately because we just did a procedure together. I did CO2 laser or I did, sorry, a cocktail. You did a cocktail of lasers. Multiple lasers, yep. And I did stem cell rich fat transfer. You did.

Yes. And I've been posting about it and talking about it. And all my girlfriends are like freaking out over your page. They're all saying they want facelifts with you. And I'm like, yeah, like in the future for sure. Right. But it is interesting. Like girls are now planning their future facelifts.

Yeah. And I get to tell people no often, you know, like 80% of the time. I tell people no usually. and that's just those are real numbers that's like about what it is and sometimes it's because you're just not ready yet talk to me later but usually even in that situation if somebody like has legitimate changes that I could correct even if they're small they're small we'll explore like let's talk about this what do you expect what do you want why do you want this is this this this this gets almost into this like physical manifestation spiritual part of things but why are we doing

this are we chasing some sort of an idol is this vanity or is this like a little bit more core to you and your identity and your function as a person. Because great, let's explore those things. And anyway, so as we get into those sometimes, it's like, yeah, let's talk in a few years or let's plan down the road or if you're ready now, if this lines up for you. And taking, again, having a low hurdle makes things a lot easier to even have those discussions now. Yeah.

So for context, for anyone listening, we did a part one on this show. What was that like two years ago? Two years ago, yeah. And for anyone who may not know, can you just explain that? a little bit about yourself because you have a very unique approach to surgery and I just love to explain to everyone. So I do facial plastic surgery. I came to that from a background in dermatology before I did my fellowship and the surgical part of things in facial plastics. And I have a practice that you got to experience a little bit that is very destination based, kind of like a retreat set up,

very like people would call it maybe holistic in its approach, but in its preparation, execution, recovery is very much, honestly, it's just what I would want as a human who's very into, you know, making sure that I'm pulling all the levers I can pull as far as protecting my brain and my body and being physical and all those things. And so it's kind of all those things teed in the type of anesthesia that you get, how you recover, the hyperbarics, the red light, all the things that you got to do, even where you stay. Like that's a very curated spot that's, you know, you have the water views and the mountains and the trees. It's all on purpose. So it was fun to have you and Greg Alis. It was so fine. I wish, I honestly, next time when I come back for something else, I would bring Kai to do a full. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But you, so even you with a small procedure, like we, that was not surgery at all, right? It was very, that's my kind of, my jam for a procedure. It was a, it's not an endless maintenance type of situation. We had an objective. We really pulled the trigger at it. We really went for it. Yeah.

non-surgically, fully sort of like we'd call regenerative or qualitative. We went after it. We did a real procedure. That was no joke, right? There was a little recovery afterwards and things like that. And I say little because, you know, you were still exercising pretty quick afterwards, even though even now you're red still a little bit, right? And so you would not be in my definition out of a, you're still in your recovery period.

Yeah. You're still good. And we have months of improvement ahead of us, but you're functional in life at this point, right? Yep. So that's one of those questions. How long is it take to recover from procedure? Well, you're a prime example of you're still recovering, yet also functioning in normal life. But there would be people in your shoes, and I see this often, who would be still paralyzed

with where you're at in your recovery, because you have a little bit of swelling probably. You have a little bit of redness. Things might feel tight. And for some people, that can be to the point of like, I'm just, I can't go out and do stuff yet. So it's variation from person to person. So is that because of the recovery protocol you think we followed? Well, so, you know, you fall into my, like, relatively steady group of

people who you are literally doing everything you can in your real life to be as great as you can be. You're pulling all the levers, I would say, right? Health, eating, family, like you're driving at your craft. You're great at all those things. And so because of that time, I would say time and attention and those things are really highly valuable to you. So I want you to be better as fast as you can be. And there's only, but there's only so much we can do. We have to respect the process of that a little bit too, because you'll be recovering for a few months ahead and you'll, you're still building any results that you have to now are the very superficial, you know, metaphorically superficial ones. Like they're not, and literally, actually, they're not, you haven't

remodeled all the deep structure yet. That takes months and it takes healing and it takes redness and inflammation and it's all kind of subtly happening under there. But that's the good stuff. We don't want to stop that. Yes. So, you know, like respect and trust the process and enjoy sort of the results that we have along the way, but we're not there yet, you know. So we don't want to stop that. We want to support it. And that's what the whole beginning is, is to like, the first part is real. You've got to go through the initial swelling, right? And you have like a bloody face at the beginning, right?

And that's not pretty, but it's real. That has to happen. You also had a bloody face because you had stem cells on your face and I used PRP. And so there's like some reasons for that that are all good. Everything has a reason. I don't know if you picked that up, but like literally everything has a reason that we do it. And but that's ultimately to get you here right now where we can be just a few weeks out. and if we didn't talk about this, nobody would know.

I know when I'm on camera, everyone's been complimenting my skin and I'm like, just wait, guys. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it gets better and better. And so that's the goal with like, you know, people, that would be a hurdle for me too. I can't dedicate that much downtime. So how do we do the thing we want, get the results and still function in life and minimize downtime without, well, we're still respecting that we need some of it. I will also say, and I want to talk about exactly what we did because a lot of people have had questions for me about. about like the exact protocol we did.

The, my experience with you and your clinic was so unique and interesting. As you said, we stayed in this home in Idaho. Cordillane, Idaho. Everyone was making fun of me because I thought I was in Washington the whole time. That's okay. No, you were for part of things, yeah. I was in Spokane, Washington for the procedure. Did I say that right? Yep, Spokane.

Spokane. And Cordillane, Idaho for where we stayed. And it was gorgeous. Yeah. And then also, I think working with you, I'd already spoken with you for two hours on the podcast. And I love the way you think about things. I love the way you live your life. I love the way you prep for your procedures.

And then being there and being in the office, the way you guys do things is so different. I met the anesthesiologist and she was this larger than life character. She was in the military for what, 20 years or something? She's like, I've jumped out of planes. I've worked in Alaska. I've worked here. I've worked here. And she was explaining to me, you are very particular with the way you do anesthesia,

which I am very sensitive to anesthesia. So I really loved that. And then the recovery protocol, I mean, I went to, what do you call your recovery center? Yeah, yeah. The next day. And it was incredible. Yep. The amount of, I'm glad you liked it.

No, it was awesome. And I imagine I stayed there for a whole week because I cut my stay short so I could be back with the baby. Sure, and that was appropriate for the procedure that you had, too. Totally. And I tried to continue what I was doing with you as much as I could at home. You're very fortunate to be able to do that. I know. Such a cool setup you have.

My husband's crazy. So thank God that came in handy. Yeah, it's funny that he already had the infrastructure for you. I know. Yeah. And I did hyperbaric every day for 10 days. Which is incredible. Yep.

And now I'm trying, it's a big time commitment. It is. It's like two hours. For sure. So I'm trying to squeeze that in. But anyway, it was a very unique experience. And I would a thousand percent do it again and again and again. I loved it.

Yeah, that usually takes some time for people to get to that point, honestly. I mean, I've wanted to do something like this for so long. And I think when I spoke to you, I was telling you, like, the, we'll get into this. But the way med spas do CO2 laser is kind of scary to me. Okay. Because I feel like they send people home quickly. they're prescribing all types of things. And I just, it's your face.

And I was really nervous about doing this the wrong way. Yeah. So I came to you with texture from acne scarring, hyperpigmentation, and a little bit of volume loss in some areas. Yep. And then you recommended me the protocol we did. Probably in that order of importance for you too. Yeah. Yeah.

So let's dive into what you did to my face. So we, I kind of view this in my head a little bit as a Swiss Army knife type of setup where I have all of these, this one tool presents many different opportunities for me, depending on how I open it, like even the fat transfer, right? Generally, fat transfer I'm using as more of a volumetric structural tool. I am taking a fat pad that's deflated and I'm restructuring it because it's not just volume. It's like, I always say it's like a honeycomb structure. So I want the structure and the volume appropriate there. And so we did a, that was like the third thing on your priority list out of three things. So there's barely anything happening.

But I had the tool open. And so like, okay, let's do the 1% or 5% of that that we really need and let's take care of it. Uniquely for you, the textural changes, the scarring on your skin was our main priority. Yeah. And so that could be extrapolated to somebody who's older even with like wrinkles, right? So it could be wrinkles, could be acne scarring, whatever it may be. that's a structural change in the skin surface now. There's some qualitative aspects to it, collagen elastin, things like that,

but more of it is just like the actual structure was changed by the inflammation in your skin with the acne that caused scarring to form in that area. And so we went after what would be as close to a regenerative model as we can get. If I could like magic wand regenerate, I would wave it over and all of the scar tissue would be gone and replaced with perfectly normal skin. That's the like the thing that doesn't exist. So we're leveraging that to the degree that we can to recreate that, which means taking the scar tissue and making the vascularity inside of it normal, more normal, which changes the color to be more appropriate. It rebuilds the collagen structure that's in it because it gets very densely organized and we want it to be more organized like your skin.

It puts some elasticity back into it. The lack of elasticity is, you know, one of the most noticeable changes when you have scarring. And then we use some fat inside the scars to help that remod. process happen and we put it directly underneath. I'm with my hands here. If you're not watching, I'm like doing all this hand movement, but like to support the fat from, or excuse me, the skin from directly below in the subcutaneous layer of fat, that's really important because as that fades, that's usually the first time that people really get bothered by their scars. They knew they had them, but when the structural support below and the subfloor starts going away basically and

they start sinking in, they start to notice them more, even though the scars haven't actually changed, just the volumetric support structure has. So we'd also also did some. It wasn't even volume. It was structural support. It's like, I say this, like putting a new foundation on your house. Yeah. Not sexy, highly functional. We did it under my eyes, I think, right? And here. Did we do any here? Yeah, I went through kind of fat pad by fat pad and literally sort of assessed. And when I say the 1%, that's probably not an exaggeration for some of them. It was like, well, there's a very minuscule amount that we could do to get improvement here. So let's do that.

And then some other areas, we did like more 5% arbitrary number, but like 5% under your eyes. And so, yeah, we kind of went through. That's the beauty of having that tool. We got to do the stem cell portion for your skin. And then I got to do the structural portion for the fat pads. That was all paired with the laser cocktail. Yes, let's talk about. And the laser cocktail sounds very cryptic when I say that.

But I have to be really careful how and what I, not even careful. I can't just say like, this is the recipe I did for you because that will not. I didn't do the same thing on the next patient I saw after you. And I haven't done it since. And I won't do it again. It's all a bit different of ingredients. And so it's sort of like hand mixing a cocktail. It's a little bit of like some people are really good at doing that, you know, different ingredients.

What's your, you know, you may ask somebody, well, what kind of, I don't know, I don't really drink, but what kind of base liquor do you like? And then you go from there for you. It's like, well, what are the base needs? Yeah. Let's build something around this. So we were targeting redness, pigment. And then, of course, the structural change. So that led me to use different lasers, including a couple of different CO2 lasers.

Did I do ablative or fractional? So those are not mutually exclusive. You did ablative and fractional. All CO2s are by definition ablative. And if we want to get into the nerdy science of what happens. People keep asking me this question. Oh, yeah. I don't know.

Yeah. So there are ablative. There's only a couple of ablative lasers that we use. Ablative means that when the laser hits its target in the skin, so our vocabulary word for that is a chromophore. The thing that it's targeting in the skin, there's a very specific. wavelength of light that the chromophore absorbs. All lasers are one wavelength by definition. So your CO2 wavelength, 10,600 nanometers, hits chromophore, water, and it absorbs and it heats up so

fast that it goes to over 100 degrees Celsius and it vaporizes. That is ablative. Two real lasers do that. But CO2 does it every time. Okay. So that's a key element there. The fractional part of it is an idea of like pixelating. So instead of like the grid, wiping out the entire surface, which you could take an ablative laser and just literally take the whole surface off, yours was pixelated in a pattern

sort of like aerating your lawn. That's a terrible slash visible, you know, sort of an analogy. You can see the grid on some people. You can see the grid a little bit sometimes, right? Yeah. I didn't see it on me. Well, so I don't, we say stamp. I would take a little bit more of an advanced technique to it

where I'm not just like stamp, stamp, stamp. I've been doing this a long time. So I don't stamp because I think that there's cons to that personally. This gets very into the nuances of technique. Okay. So. But it's a poor. Well, I mean, it's just a micro nuance of understanding that you're getting different things with different people and you're choosing lasers, right?

Yeah. Because I have certainly colleagues of mine who are very good who would stamp and you would see that grid pattern. Okay. I just don't love that, right? There's reasons. If you don't line it up exactly perfect to the tenth of a millimeter, then you'd, you either didn't treat or you overlapped. Got it.

So I like, I do a different technique. Anyway. But that's the pixelation is that like fractional pattern. And so it gets very confusing because one of the brands of lasers is called fraxil. But fraxil has a bunch of different wavelengths in it. Like some of them are CO2s, but some of them aren't. So it's, again, the nomenclature is so confusing. And so in response to this episode, we will have hundreds of questions of what about this device?

And they'll list like literally one device. BBL, moxie. Yes, right? Those are all the rage right now. I can tell almost where somebody's going based off of what lasers they ask me about, are you at a med spa? Are you at a dermatologist office? Are you at a, you know, fill in the blank? I can tell by where the marketing is directed.

Yes. And so that it's futile to answer like, what about this laser? What about this laser? Because I don't know you. I don't know what your skin needs are. Yeah. We're talking about a cocktail here, right? Yeah.

like what's the right answer for you. But it's, I empathize with the world and the consumers because it is so confusing and driven by marketing, but that's not what it should be. Got it. You know, you shouldn't get one. I think we may have even talked about this before, but the classic scenario is you go to the place on the corner. I'll bet there's places within a walking distance of here that we could go to and miraculously,

both you and I, if we went separately, would be perfect for what device or devices they have. Oh, you're the perfect candidate for Moxie, BBL, Halo, whatever it is. That's like those are, that's the same group. I guarantee that they would tell us that, whether it's proper or not, right? And so I never, like, I never go by

the brand of the device. I'm going by, what's the wavelength? What's the energy? What's the, you know, power? How densely, like, that's the real way to do it. Like, you had two different CO2s for different purposes. One, to go a little bit deeper down into the scars. It's a more narrow. So like around here,

where my scarring was really bad. Yeah, yeah. You even had one cheek that was different than the other. My left was worse. Yep. Yeah. So, yeah, you had the cocktail. You had all the things.

Then we mixed in some redness, which is, again, probably third on your priority list, but an important aspect because that changes the way that, you know, the redness around scars changes the way that they look too. So it's all these little things. If it's raised, let's flatten it out. If it's flattened, let's raise it up. If it's red, let's make it less red. If it has no, you know, no vascularity, let's add some vascularity.

If it's brown, let's make it light, you know. Yeah. There's little things we can try to do it all along the way. So did we just use CO2 lasers or did we do any other lasers? We did, I think you had four different lasers in total that day. Yeah, some redness, some pigment, and then two different CO2s. I think it took, how long did it take total? Two hours?

Yeah, probably. Well, as you saw, so it's a slow day. It's a slow morning, right? You were the only procedure. I did that day. That's just sort of like my value proposition and how I love life. I don't do multiple things. I love that. When I'm in flow for you, I'm flowing. We get it done and then I am like energetically spent. I'm not doing anything else that day. I feel like that's, you are very focused on the task at hand. And I feel like you almost have like a art to it. Like when you

were drawing on my face and the, yeah. I mean, it was a very cool process, honestly, to see it. And I could, I felt like I was in very good hands. Oh, good. And I can, I mean, you're the best. But I can imagine when someone's getting a facelift, they're like, that's a huge deal. Yeah. I mean, the drawing, like you experienced to do like a procedure like that is, I might take me close to an hour to draw. Wow.

You know, it's a long thing because I'm making notes to myself. That's what I was doing on you. I was drawing myself a map. Yeah. Because that's a lot of people when I'm drawing on the face. Like, what are you drawing? Like, I'm making two incisions this big. Why are we drawing for an hour?

Yeah. I'm making a roadmap for myself. I'm revisualizing. I'm, you know, like rehearsing the procedure. I'm, there's a bunch of things. I literally physically write myself notes sometimes, you know, like, it's kind of what you'd want. So I'm in flow, you know, we do your procedure. It's a slow day.

So the morning is like a lot of connection time for the most part because everybody's traveling to see me. And even though we knew each other, it's like you need, I at least need that connection time in the morning. I have colleagues who are right into the OR, their patients asleep. They don't even see them that day. Wow. That's pretty typical. Like most people that have had surgery for anything, I don't know. go to the hospital, get your knee scoped or something like, you might see the surgeon before

for a second. You definitely see the anesthesiologist for a second, but then you're kind of waiting for three hours and you're magically wheeled off type of thing. That's not how this goes. Yeah. A lot of time together before. And so, but then even just like getting the fat and getting a process, that's a slow process and I'm putting it under the red light. And so there's a lot that goes into it. But I'll bet we were working for two hours, but the whole process of, you know, I'll bet it was, what, four hours, five hours maybe? So we got the fat out of the, of my thighs. Yes.

Also, I think a big misconception when I say fat transfer, people think I got like my whole thigh. Oh, yeah, no. I would have to look back at the exact volume, but we took very little fat. Yes. We're not taking a lot of fat. No. Yeah.

And can you repeat, you told me selfishly, I'd love to hear this again, you told me about the quality of the fat. Yeah. Can you explain what that means? Yeah. So this like idea of being a fat connoisseur, I love a fat for the properties that it has. Yeah. a very important tool for me, which is really what that is, you know, kind of saying. So when I

harvest the fat, I'm then taking what's in front of me and saying, okay, part of this I'm going to use, part of it I'm not. And I tell people that I'm controlling the number of stem cells that I get from you. And part of the way I'm controlling it is where I take it from, like different areas of our body have a different density. And then also once I sort of like work with it and process it, then I get, I can increase the density per volume that way. So I can control the, the number, the quantity. The quality is up to you, right? And you come in with that. And so that's why, you know, you're an exception to this because you're exceedingly young and healthy and all those great things. So you're going to have essentially, by definition, the highest quality stem cells

I could get. But with an aging population, there's stem cells are aging too. Yeah. And so I want to get them sort of teed up and have the best quality stem cells that I can get from them. So then if I get some arbitrary number, a thousand stem cells, it's not that. It's millions. But they're the best. thousand stem cells, like they're functioning the greatest they could ever get. So I take the fat from your thighs for you and I have, I don't know, 20 to 40 ccs of fat, which is milliliters, same thing. And I'm processing it and then I can look, immediately see, oh, this is like strong, healthy fat, but this fat's a little bit weak. I see a lot of dietary influence in that, which would argue for how sort of like our cellular membranes function. I think it's probably way too

nuance from a nutritional standpoint to go into those details and a controversial topic when you start talking about what fats are getting implemented into our cell membranes. But I would just say there's a dietary link to it for sure, meaning that some fat cells are just more fragile. And I don't want those ones. I want things that are anti-fragile. I want this. And stem cells are by definition that. And so with you, it was like pure stem cells. So people that are mean to their fat, who are like fit and like testing their fat, Often, like, metabolically putting it through, like, we need fat. We have to have it to live.

Fat's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. And I can tell when somebody sort of has their fats been through some stressful situations, it's survived. And so it does really great in fat transfer, which is big because I don't have to take as much that way. Yes. Yeah, I can get a very high quantity with a very low harvest. And that was you. We spoke about this on the first interview, but I think it's worth mentioning again.

I think there is this, like I talk with my girlfriends and there's still an obsession with filler. and sculpture. Sure. Why is fat so much better than those two options? Well, I mean, so this is opinion driven, right? Because they do different things. It's almost unfair to compare them directly, other than they're all applications to the face

that there's some overlap in the then diagram of what they're trying to do, right? And there's, I think, some behavioral patterns and some cognitive biases that go into this well. We didn't really get into this last time, but there's this avoidance behavioral pattern that happens. Avoidance coping is what it's technically called.

which, and we feel that with every aspect of our life. This is not a cognitive bias. It's just a behavioral pattern that we all have. That's sort of like the big decision, like the thing you did, the big decision is uncomfortable, hard to make. So I'm going to choose the things that are easier decisions, which is like the perpetual maintenance model, right? That's the filler sculpt type of model.

And those have cognitive biases in them that are like the status quo bias. That's kind of what everybody does. The presence bias. You can do it right now. It's easy to do. There's like a loss aversion bias that like, well, if you're not. you do that other thing, it's really risky. It's a lot. Like you're, you're going to lose time. You're going to lose whatever. And so there's a bias there. And so there's a lot that just goes into how people

think about those things in it. And that's what kind of keeps the areas alive. But if we go, filler, filler's not bad. I don't think it's bad. I just think it has a very narrow range of use where it's like good and intended to be. And it's used so broadly outside of that that it's distorting. We talked about that a lot. I think that's a really interesting topic. And then sculpt draw. Okay, so let's do an extreme. So you have filler on this extreme. Then you have fat transfer on the other extreme, which I kind of made akin before to like restructuring the foundation.

That's not sexy, right? That's not this like create. You are not experiencing immediate gratification, right? A lot of people want immediate gratification. And so you're not getting that with fat. Fat takes time. It's great. It's a long play.

If you have that sort of foresight and can commit to what you committed to, it's incredible. Because it has so many facets of things that it can help. And that's, you've made the long play. Yeah. Like, there's no maintenance needed with that, basically. And then the biostimulators have been, sculptras and radiases and things have been meant to fill this like, or at least like, I would say, positioned to fill the middle ground between the two. And I just will openly say from a surgeon's lens, I don't love those products. They're not bad.

There's not, like, you should never get them. That's not it at all. It's just, it depends on what your goals are. what you're trying to accomplish, but I see the changes that they make in the face and they aren't changes that I would want in my face or my patient's face as far as, like, how they're affecting the tissue. Because the way they sell sculpture is that it will build upon what's already there, correct? Yep. Yep. So they inject it in different planes of the face, and the sculptor injectors will get into,

it's injected incorrectly. And I just, you know, there may be some truth to that, but there's also not, It's injected in the soft tissue of the face. And it creates an inflammatory foreign body reaction that lays down collagen, which is like, oh, great, I want more collagen in my face. But do you want collagen in the place between the glide plane of your fat pad and your muscle? Do you want collagen in your muscle? Like, where are we building collagen? You know, and there's collagen in our fat pads in the, like, structural honeycomb.

That's what everybody's going to talk about. But I'll tell you, being in there, it's not where it's at. it's it's everywhere and places we don't want it like the sculpture's going everywhere yeah yeah yeah yeah what does it look like like like what does filler and sculpture look like yeah so fun I have lots of image I actually used to post a lot more images of this but then did they get my little hand slapped by the algorithm and so I was like that that particular platform doesn't love those types of images although my patients did and so maybe I should do a second page that's just these sort of like in intraoperative surgical images.

But I used to post this a lot more. And filler looks like, if I were talking about hyeronic acid gel fillers, when I remove it surgically, which I do 90% of my procedures, which is a regular thing for me. The most common situation, it's like wet floating sugar. I'm just kind of scooping out this wet floating sugar

that's kind of like a few pieces come out. At this point, I can identify what type of filler it is seeing it on my instruments, right? Like a lot of times I'm just getting in there. It's all over my instruments. Wow. Sometimes it's like these tension-laden or these tension-filled pockets. And so I enter the pocket and it's literally gushing out at me.

And those are dramatic but more rare situations, but they're not infrequent. They happen still. That would be very common in like the lower eyelid mid-facial areas, it's begging to be, you know, kind of let out. That's usually when filler was placed more recently. You can get a sense of that. It hasn't diffused around or migrated or moved or whatever you want to call it to the other planes as much.

Then the, I think the most eye opening of them is when the filler, because filler causes an inflammatory reaction, which we can't really argue about it. We know that it does. And sometimes it gets encapsulated like a breast implant would. And so it's like literally got a covering on it. And I'll scoop out this little like BB, slightly larger usually of, you know, it's got that has a clearish capsule around it, kind of whitish clear. and I'll take a scalpel and cut into the capsule and pinch it and filler comes out.

Wow. And in those situations, it's sort of like, well, no wonder you can't dissolve this. Yes. You know, your body walled it off. And so it's because filler is challenging to dissolve. So that's what hyeronic acids look like. And then sculptors and radiesces and things like that. Those are those ones give me more nightmares.

Really. Because it just glues tissue planes together. and sometimes I've seen some of these like literally look like concrete. Like I'm like, do this person inject concrete? Oh, no, they had one of these other types. Yeah. And then sometimes I'll find like little white bebees, like little fibrodic nodules. Yeah.

That was a very classic thing with Sculpto that honestly doesn't happen as much anymore, that you could feel them. And now you can't feel them as much, but I'll still see them kind of like many versions of them under the skin or I'll just see an area. I mean, at this point, could picture every aspect of a face and know exactly what a beautiful young face. or like untouched face looks like, and then I'll see like streaks of like, almost like scar tissue through it or things glued together.

And anyway, that's what filler looks like in the face. It's a deep dive into all the different. It looks different ways and different people. And when it's put in the lips, does it travel or does it stay in the lips? It does travel through the lips. When you're putting it in the lips, the lips are actually interestingly a place where a lot of people get filler first. Yeah.

Because I would say filler in the lips is more augmenting than it is rejuvening. than it is rejuvenating. It would be like filler in the lips is like getting a breast implant, right? Just making your lips bigger. It's not usually like, oh, they shrunk with aging and I want to make them bigger. Like you'll hear that a lot, but that's not exactly how it goes, right? And so you put the volume in there and the volume is not like it's not in an implant, like a breast implant thing, has a border around it.

This does not. And so you're putting it in a muscle. Our lips have some fat in them, they do, but they don't actually have that much fat. there's a lot more muscle and sub-mucosa and some salivary glands in them and things like that. And so you're putting it in a place that isn't meant to receive that much volume. So you're putting it in a muscle and then guess what happens when you, like if you were to put a blob of filler in my bicep and I flex my bicep a thousand times, you don't think that it's not going to be in the same place. Yeah. It's going to move through there.

And so that's the same thing it does in our lips, which is why a lot of people think like, I got it and it was gone in like two weeks. Usually either you were really swollen and you interpreted the swelling as the volume from your filler. Or it is just, the filler is definitely not gone. It's maybe just moved away from the borders of which it was placed. And the injectors will say, that's poor placement, that's poor placement. And there is some truth to that, for sure. But give a long enough, it's not staying anywhere. Okay.

Even with perfect placement, it's not staying there. I feel like it's become a little bit less of a trend. Maybe I'm wrong. But when I lived in L.A. three years ago, it was such a big thing in L.A. The girls were going every three, six months to get more. and I fell into that trap. Yeah. I haven't had it done maybe in three years and it is still.

Yeah, you still have volume from it. Yes. Yeah. And I would call that like this example. When I think of that, you know, it's hard. It's like, dang. But that's like Hanlon's razor, this idea, this like thought paradigm around, nobody was doing that to be malicious in my opinion.

They were doing it because that's what they truly believed to be the right way to do it at the time. Yep. Over time, you start to challenge a revenue model essentially of like coming back every six or 12 months. And that's where then there's some like some bias in there, you know, inherently. And I have bias the other way too because I, you know, I get paid to do surgery. So like, let's acknowledge that right up front. I just, and that's why I try not to be absolutist. Like, I do not think everybody should have surgery. I do not think that by any means. I also don't think everybody should have lip filler. And if my 20-some-year-old daughter came to

me for lip filler, I'd be like, where that would be a conversation. It wouldn't be like, just do what you want. Yeah. I would be like, let's talk about this for real. Are your kids teenagers yet? No, I have a 12-year-old son and then 10-9-year-old daughters. Okay. So not quite there yet.

That'll be interesting. Yeah, for sure. I'm sure you'll educate them in ways that parents usually can't when it comes to the face. It's funny. And they know what I do. Yeah. For a long time, they didn't really know. They, you know, just like daddy fixes owies.

Like, okay, whatever that means, right? Yeah. But now they start to understand a little bit more. And it's interesting because I haven't gotten any really insightful questions yet, which I'm constantly curious about and prepared for because, you know, I want my value system to be fulfilled with my work as well. And that is like helping people be performing in line, feeling good. Looking like themselves, never looking like somebody different. That's like the traditional plastic surgery thought paradigm is like, oh, you change somebody to look different. No, I do the opposite of that. You know, I'd make people look like themselves. And a lot of times the most common thing I hear is like, I just. like see myself in the mirror again. It's like, yes, that's the win. The best. That's the dream.

Yeah. And that can happen at any age, really, you know. You're, if you guys are listening, go check out Dr. Chestnut's page because you just see some beautiful rejuvenations on there. Like, there's one I have in mind, beautiful woman with gray hair. And you just make her look so. Thank you. And you would have no idea.

Right. Like there's a look. And, you know, to people who have had obvious face. and these people do not have a look to them at all. There is a look, and you're exactly right. And you can't put your finger on it, but you know it when you see it. I love that phrase. You know, when I was like really swollen post-laser, I almost was like,

I kind of look like a middle-aged person that got like a crazy facelift. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, well, I mean, because you had that tightness and swelling everywhere. Yeah, that swelling. But like it just never goes away for some people. Well, yeah, that's the tightness. It's the tightness in the wrong places that makes a bad face. left, like spotable.

Okay. And there's a few telltale signs that when you see them, you kind of know forever. Yeah. Like that person, like I talked about that sweeping deformity of the lower face when it's tied to the ear pulling down. And those are kind of linked together. And I thought when I first saw you, I was like, dang, it looks like a teenager. Yeah.

No, I heard that too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. Great. Extreme teenager. Yeah, the other way. But you look like the teenage version of yourself.

Yeah. Which is interesting because it just speaks to like how that, you know, kind of taughtness and things. Yeah, it was kind of amazing. And I always like, I think because I wanted this done for so long, I was fully ready to look crazy. Yeah. And it's, being ready is different for everybody. Yeah. Like, kind of getting over that initiation rule. I love hearing that. Yeah. It didn't phase me. I was like out and about, got on a plane. Yeah. But you probably could empathize and understand how for some people that would be mentally paralyzing. Totally. Right. Because they're not actually ready. Yes. They want the,

this is the human nature, right? You want the benefit without kind of going through the process to get there. Yeah, you have to be willing to feel a little insane for two or three weeks. Totally. And my job, an area that I really work on is trying to decouple as much of that as I can. So, yeah, we got to go through the process. But let's make that less friction to get to the end goal. And I try to be very respectful of that because there's ways that we could like,

I could have had you looking incredible in two days. if I would have given you a bunch of steroids and stuff like that. And that's a really common phenomenon post-surgery, post-procedure, post-laser, like, oh, steroids, because it stops all the inflammation. Just stops it. Like a blanket. Why? At the cost, though, is our long-term results. This is a different mindset that I carry to it.

Like, I worked out hard this morning. I want to be sore. Like, that's a sign of what's building. I could take a steroid and block that inflammatory response and not be sore, but I also wouldn't build new muscle. Interesting. And so it's the same after these procedures. Like we kind of have to have. That's why I say it's all about supporting the healing versus stopping it.

It's a comfort crisis. Like I could get you through the comfort crisis and just knock it out, but not a bad, not a good result on the other end. I had, because I was posting content, I had some people say like, how are you okay with looking this crazy? And my response, I made a video response on TikTok. And I was like, if you have had acne for as long as I had acne. and felt the way I felt with my scarring, this is nothing for me. For me,

this is so worth it because the scarring and the acne stole my confidence for so long that for me, this is beyond worth it. Yeah. You know. And it's so interesting

because, you know, like that's just people who cannot empathize. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And so those are people that are like, okay, well, it's not for you.

Clearly it's not for you. Let's not do this. That would be one of my 80% knows right there. know, I thought it was really interesting that we, because we talked about this before, too, like, what's Kai going to do? Yeah. Right.

He laughed at me. Did I tell you that? Yeah. He laughed in my face. Which I think is like, okay, what's, because if I'm a, I mean, I'm a parent too. Like, and I had a laser right after you, which is ironic, right? Yeah. But that's the same story.

My kids are way older. So I don't have the same thing. But like they're going to, my kids will remember. Kai won't. Yeah. But you get babies. And this is like my love of the nerdy neuroanatomy of how our brains interpret faces. which is a very special process.

Yeah. Kai has this. He sees you. You light up his brain recognition area for faces. And then he gets all these beautiful rewards and bonding and memories. And it's a wonderful process. But he recognizes identity and even beauty. Babies will linger on beautiful faces for longer.

We know that to be true. And so I was a little curious too like, okay, what's going to happen? Because is it going to interrupt his identity response to you? Which it did not. No. And so he went right into his like, who? You know, like, and so I think that's really fascinating. Maybe that's also why I was less mentally affected by it because he still was just in love with me and I was, it just felt normal.

Yeah. He kind of went hit and then that was. That's so funny. I know. Yeah. Like, is that a real laugh to you? Is there a legitimate humor in that for him? Maybe he thinks I look funny.

Yeah. I was like, are you terrified of me? Yeah. What's going on? Like a character or something. Yeah. Like, yeah, like a. Yeah.

Because you were super, I mean, you were in the throes of it when you saw him. It wasn't like, well, let's get through the worst. You were kind of, I would almost say in the worst. Yeah, it got worse day. But, I mean, the first day was actually less swollen. It was the next day that it was really like, like my eyes were swollen shut. Oh, yeah. Like not shut, but you know.

Yeah, like slits. Slits. CO2 laser has become a much more recognizable term. Yeah, for sure. And it's much more popular online and people have questions about it. Yeah. For people listening who are interested in it, who is. Who is a good candidate for CO2?

Yeah. Well, it's a broad application depending on, again, back to the Swiss Army Knife analogy, it's a broad application depending on what your goals are. And it's funny, I got asked this recently, too, a CO2 laser new. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, CO2 laser goes, it has so much history behind it. To say that it has the most of any laser may not be exactly true. But when we come to medical applications, it would be hard to find one that's got more history. It was originally used as a surgical tool, like in the operating, because you can cut skin with it.

Oh, wow. And then it kind of got its first application in aesthetics, and then technology advanced to be fractional. So instead of, like, taking the whole lawn surface off, you were aerating the lawn. And so it's had all these advances. And it's funny to see it in the world of, you know, like I trained out of like a laser mecca at UCLA, where, you know, people are like afraid of, oh, it's a big ablative laser, a big bad wolf type of thing. And so all of these, like, you know, I was in where all the lasers were popping up every day, all the brands. We have like literally hallways full of dead dying and aging lasers. And it just is how it is, you know, new technology all the time.

So it's, I think it just speaks to efficacy now that we're like how effective this laser is, what it does. And now what everybody's talking about CO2 again? So I'm like, this is so far from new. Yeah. And that's when people are like, what brand? It doesn't matter. Yeah. It's the person driving this laser.

Like are you driving a Ferrari or a Lamborghini or like They're highly capable you could get in real trouble with those devices Yes If you put somebody in it who doesn't know how to drive it right And so it's probably more akin to like a Formula One car or a Like a fighter jet like more of that like you get a real trouble And so you know good like And this is with my capacity with it you can give me somebody in their 20s 30s 40s 50s

And I can make it a good treatment for them, you know, depending, and even in my career, the lasers have become so much more adaptable and capable. They're all CO2s, but now it can adjust the densities and the powers and the, we call it the fluences, which is the energy that it's putting out and how big the spot is that's hitting your skin and how deep, I can control these things so directly that, you know, I could, I could give you a CO2 that you have two hours of downtime. It's not going to do anything, you know, but, and that's what a lot of these lasers do is, like,

you go to the place that's like, well, we're going to do a series of three. And you get like the little red slap, like you got slapped in the face. And you're like, I think it did something. And, you know, this is not that. So to do that with the CO2 would not be. CO2, let's just call it in that, like, it's not the definitive maintenance device. It's the one you're going to do every five, seven, 10 years, whatever it is. Like, I would be a great example.

I'm older than you. I have access to anything, right? And I'm on this cadence of personally doing CO2 laser about. every seven or eight years. Is that what you did after me? That's what I did right after you. I was supposed to, after you,

I was supposed to go to L.A. to do some podcasts. I know. It got canceled like at 10 o'clock the night before I was supposed to leave. They got canceled. You didn't tell me that. Yeah,

well, and just rescheduled. Like, some things changed. And so... Can I just tell you that's so L.A.? That has happened to me a million times only in L.A.

It's okay. It's okay. Yeah. And it's funny because it's like, it's one podcast that has done that to me like two or three times. And I was going for multiple. And then so I'm like, well, shoot, do I...

Anyway, long story. See, you're more forgiving than me. I would just cancel. I would just be like I'm never seeing you again. Yeah, I mean, you know, I... It's grace, I understand. I flew to L.A. once for six interviews, every single one of them canceled. Are you serious?

Dead serious. It's an L.A. thing. It's an L.A. thing. I, like, have some identity in L.A., so I didn't... I'm sorry. People there can be really flaky. It's okay. It's okay.

I just... You know what, I'll take any excuse to go to L.A., like some of my favorite people in the world that I was... I get to train with Lairdon and Gabby when I'm there. No, there's great people that you're right. But anyway, sorry. Continue. So you did a CO2 after me. So because I had this like 10 p.m. cancellation, I was like packing bags.

Yeah. Speaks to my procrastination of packing at 10 p.m. I was supposed to leave. I wasn't even finished. And I got this like sort of rearrangement. And, you know, thankfully we just like, so I had some extra time at home. I was supposed to be gone. And I reached out to my associate.

And I was like, hey, you want to, I'm due. I knew I'd been due and I was trying to, I knew I thought I had this trip coming up. Yeah. So I've been trying to like find a time to do it. And so boom, I did it like literally right after you. Well, you're looking really good. Thanks. Yeah.

So I did. So this is, okay, so this is a prime example. I'm older than you and I was doing it for different reasons. I'm doing it for like anti-aging refresh. I like don't do Botox because I choose in that paradigm of weakening the muscle versus strengthening the skin. I choose to strengthen the skin. Okay.

So this is my version of that. They're not the same thing. But like if you don't get Botoxy, yeah, you might want to do lasers more often or something like that. So this is my like skin strengthener for me. And like, you know, that's some pigment and some fine. You know, I'm in my 40s. And so like, great.

That was my treatment. But I did a, because I know your settings exactly, I did something to be like more gentle for you because I don't need the full depth structure remodeling that like the CO2 could bore a hole in your body. Like it could go all the way through. So that being said is I'm controlling like how deep. your scars are. I don't have that. So I didn't need to go as aggressive of that. So I, you know, sort of documented my journey a little bit. And, you know, I was back in the operating room five

days later. Like, and, you know, you could maybe tell, but not really, even five days into it. And by seven days, I would say I was like, kind of probably where you're at right now. Yeah. So you, were you awake? So I did mine awake. Yeah. Is that, like, do people normally do it awake? Um, no. It all depends on the person and what they want. I will do it with people awake. I did it awake because it was like the next morning. Yeah. And I know what to expect. Like I'm part of the reason, part of the anesthesia protocol that you have is just controlling consciousness, which helps eliminate any like sense of time, anxiety, things like that. For your pain control, I was using local anesthesia, the same thing that I had for mine, right? Okay. And so it's, it's, I'm numb. Yeah. I'm not feeling, and I'm obviously very comfortable in my own environment. And so I don't have any of the anxiety around any of those things.

And so, yeah, you can do it awake. But it just like, what are we trying to accomplish? That's why I love my anesthesia protocol is because the penalty of kind of going to sleep. Yeah. Like, you were asleep, right? This is a really common question. It's like, so with that, am I awake? Like, you're not awake.

Like, for your intents and purposes, you went to sleep and you woke up when it was over. Yeah. Right? No recollection. Yeah, no. And that's kind of what happened. You're out. You're not talking.

You're not. People are like, well, did I say anything? No. No. You're not saying anything. You're asleep. Yeah. And then, you know, so I did it with just like local anesthesia.

I didn't know, no topical. Like if you're getting topical anesthesia for a laser, either you're going to be really uncomfortable and miserable or it's not going to do much. And I hear that with like these microneedling, radar frequency of micrneedling treatments all the time. It's probably because the person that is doing your. treatment may not know how to do nerve blocks. Yep. Or should be a yellow flag.

Yeah. You know, because if you're getting a real treatment, you like a robust real treatment, like you probably need to be like fully numb for that, not topical numbing. I did, um, I think I told you this, but I did AVE clear. Did you ever hear about that laser? Yeah. Um, I did this AV clear laser, which claimed to heal acne. And I had to do three sessions.

And it was the most painful thing I've ever done in my life, like screaming pain. With topical numbing and still. Yeah, topical numbing, holding onto the table. By the third session, they ended up getting me a prescription for like some narcotic of some kind. Yeah, yeah, right. And it did absolutely nothing. Yeah, isn't that ironic? Because my, you know, my protocol for anesthesia is completely opioid-free, completely benzodiazepine-free.

Yep. And in the, which people are under anesthesia, so they're like, oh, anesthesia. But if you go do the version of it that's terribly painful, they're going to get it. you a benzodiazepine and narcotic orally. So it's like you're getting the thing that we don't want you to have for this like mini treatment. Yeah. There's just some irony in there to me a little bit.

So when someone's like shopping for lasers, as you mentioned like they're usually throwing out brand names. So confusing. Like what should what should they do? Like what about their skin makes them a laser candidate? Well, I mean, to some degree, if you have any aging changes or structural changes to your skin, you're a candidate for laser. That's not like a one good candidate, right?

Like literally, like, and, you know, this is a little bit of, like, we have to, you know, take this for what it is from the hyperbole, but show me anybody who's over, I don't know, 30. And I could do something to make them better with a laser or something, maybe not really. Show me somebody over 40. I can make big changes, you know. And every, it gets more and more important from there. And so, but it's unique. You know, you are different, like I said, than somebody else, like you were different than me. And we had the same lasers, kind of, at least a couple of them, but for completely different purposes, right?

So it's not even like, this makes it muddier, right? Yeah. Because it's not even what laser are you choosing. It's like, well, lasers are what settings for what purposes. So you end up not, don't ever go for a laser. Don't go for a fill in the blank brand name laser. I'm doing BBL. I'm doing moxie.

Don't do those. Okay. Why? If that happens to be the right one for you, great. But don't go because they have that laser. Like my friend had a moxie and it was incredible. My friend had a brand name Y and it was incredible. Like that doesn't mean it's incredible.

Even if you have relatively similar situations, like that doesn't mean it's incredible for you. You and I have totally different situations. We use the same laser with very good effects for different purposes, right? So choose the person who's driving it. Yeah. And I think I've said this before. We might have talked about this on the last podcast. Choose the person who's driving it very carefully.

Yep. very carefully, and then let them do their thing. Okay. Which might be more than one laser, especially if you're in your 40s. Like trust them. Yeah. And also be like, which lasers do you have that you're not using on me? That's like a, nobody asked that question.

Because if the answer is none, well, either you're getting a bunch of lasers or they just don't have anything. Yeah. Because those machines, I'm assuming, are very expensive. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're very expensive. And, you know, the point of that is it shouldn't. be that you're just getting what they have. Yes.

You know, you should be getting the thing that's for you. I mean, maybe the stars align and you happen to be the actual perfect candidate for the one device they have. But I can imagine it would be really hard to even know that. Yeah, of course. We're not professionals going into these. And then I would question if the person who's doing it even really knows that too. Yeah.

You know, so it might be trained because they get one day, usually one day of training on the device that they buy from the company. Company comes in, spends a day with you, teaches you how to use this thing. And when they're teaching me, it's a different story. I'm often teaching them back, you know, like, and that's not a bad thing at all. It's just like, yeah, like this is, yeah, I've got a lot of experience and know a lot about lasers. I was, you know, deep in a fellowship train that my associate who did my laser, before he did fellowship with me, did the, the laser fellowship at Harvard, which is where every device comes out of. It's like the Wellman Institute for Photomed Medicine.

Like, they, anything that comes out goes through there. It's their brainchild. Is your associate who people can book with as well? Yeah, they could book with me. What was his name? His name is Ryan Kelm. Okay, Ryan Kelm. So either you or if you're busy, Ryan Kelm.

He's going to be at a different price point than I am. Yeah. And obviously he has training with me directly and all the surgical things, but he also has this very cool, like only like one or two people a year in our entire world and industry get to do that fellowship. So he just thinks about it differently, which is why I chose him. I'm like, clearly you're my guy. to do this to me.

So did you bring him to Washington? Yeah, yeah, I did. Because it's such a unique, like, it's just, it's so crazy to me what you've built there. It's amazing. Thank you. And by the time this comes out, actually, because we're like on the preface of this is like, we'll be all in Cordillane. Yeah.

So, yeah, I know we talked about that a little bit. And Coraline in Spokane, Spokane, right next to each other, but it's exciting. Yeah. It's a cool little, you know, it's, again, it's this is what I would want, you know. So the infrastructure is all built around like, this is what I would want if I was going somewhere. And it's a very unique situation. Like I've never seen anything like it before. I think it's amazing.

Thanks. Let's talk about the recovery. Yeah. I want to make sure I hit everything. Okay. Perfect. Let's do it. We did hyperbaric.

Uh-huh. We did IV. Mm-hmm. We did red light. Mm-hmm. We did ion. What was that? The post electromagnetic frequencies.

Oh, my gosh. That was hard for me. Oh, it was? Yeah. Oh. How come? Why? I felt like I was having a seizure.

Your little contractions, right? Yeah, it was crazy. Maybe because I'm not used to it. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, and you should, you can always say something and we can sort of adjust. No, I did.

Okay. I said, can we turn it down? Yeah, yeah, good. Yeah, good. I did. And the ladies there are great. And when I get on, I'm like, shrink this thing up.

I'm going to do everything that I can because you can make it unbearably uncomfortable, which my buddy, Ben Greenfield. It's like getting, oh, Ben Greenfield. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, when I do it with him, he just loves to like, it's a torture chamber. I'm sure. But it has some great physiologic metabolic benefits with the way that our cells communicate

through their cell membranes. Okay. So it helps with swelling and things like that. And we could go into each one of these into what they do. Yeah. But you have, yep, you had the PMF. Keep going. I want to see what you remember.

What was the last one? It was a, not an ion. You had the biometric. The bicharger. Biotcharging. Yeah. Okay, what was that? So the order that you just said these in, I think is really important because I,

I also order things in my head from levels of efficacy or evidence or what they're, like, how sure of a thing they are. Yes. Versus like what could go wrong with them. Is this a, you know, is this all, like hyperbaric is all positive. Like it is unquestionably a huge thing. But there's also some risk to you're getting in a hyperbaric chamber like, you know, we got to clear your ears and all those types of things.

Right. So, but that risk, which is minimal, but it's a risk is worth the benefit, hands down, no question. Yeah. ask, right? And so that's like a high level of efficacy and literature behind it. Boom. No questions asked. The IV nutrition, that gets into the roots of our physiology. Like we can support your healing with nutrition. There's no question about that. And we get around your gut and go right into your veins with it. So boom, microplastic free, right? Like, I don't know if we talked about that last time. Wait. Yes. That's a big

thing. Well, it is for me. I might be the only person that I know who's kind of like gone in that rabbit whole. So do you, how do you make sure it's plastic-free? So the, I mean, in general, the the thallates, the things that help plastic be flexible, like clear plastic be flexible, are some of the things we don't want in our body, basically. And, you know, so getting an IV or being in an operating room, you're just exposed to, I mean, you're getting bags and bags of IV fluid in this plastic. And so there's a lot of microplastic exposure. And of course, You could like, this could get torn apart, you know, like, what's the evidence behind that? And we know that they accumulate to some degree.

They almost unquestionably cause some inflammation in the process. That inflammation is distracting for me from my ultimate goal, which is you're healing the thing that we did. So I don't want a bunch of microplastics in you. Nobody wants microplastics in them. Like, come on. So I was like, as I, of course, you know, like I said, this is what I would want. And so as I'm the homes that you stayed in have all like, you know, PFS free cookware and, you know, like the lighting and the ground of like everything is within this and and I'm thinking like am I pumping people full of

microplastics when they're in the operating room for that period of time like I wouldn't want that yeah and so that was rabbit a whole years ago diving into like and the short answer is like that operating rooms are full of microplastics yeah get rid of them is onerous it's hard it takes effort it's expensive um and it takes you have to like look at everything very, very carefully, right? And so I did that much to, I always kind of like give praise to my team here because they just like roll with me when I do these things. There's no, because it makes a lot more work and friction for them. Like what did you find out now? Yeah. In order, like even in just what they're ordering. So now they like got to research everything we order. Yeah.

Because I mean, even in like the drapes and stuff, like you can have. Wow. So I'm like, I don't want that, right? So I make a huge effort there. Cognitively, you know, monetarily, like, logistically with my team to get microplastic free for your... That's amazing. And you can do it. You can do it. It's like, I wouldn't say it's absolute perfect. Are the bags made of a different material?

Yes, right. The bags, the tubes. If we want to rig it in the, really in the weeds here, things that have a lipid in them, like we'll pull more of these like pallates and stuff out of the tubing. So one of the anesthetic agents we use is in a lipid base. So that was like, I was like instantly on that. And things that are warmed up. So like when you warm IV fluids before we put them in people, of course, that just makes more, you know, energy.

It's just, you know, kinetic energy in the molecules. So they'll pull more out of the plastic that way. And so I'm like, so we're giving people lipids. They're getting heated. Oh, so it's just like, I got to, I got to do this in a way that I'm comfortable. I can't. This is one of the luxuries of my life, honestly, is that I am not in a, I own my everything. Yeah.

The team, like the anesthesiologist that you met who, you know, they're handpicked. Like they're on board. Yeah, yeah, they're on board. And so I get to, I don't have to ask anybody. I'm going to be like, I'm changing everything. I'm changing everything to pink tomorrow. That's going to happen, right? And so, yeah, yeah.

So your IV nutrition, a microplastic free that you got, very dialed in, had amino acids. It had, you know, had obviously vitamins and some specific micronutrients that had a little NAD, had glutathione, which you got immediately after your procedure as well. I did some magnesium first and some glutathione last. The magnesium keeps things. anesthetic dose down. I knew you were sensitive. You had mentioned that. Glutothione helps the metabolism right away. Anyway, and then, yeah, your P-M-F, you know, red light. Red light would have fallen in this, like, category of evidence that was lower, but honestly, it's like skyrocketing and it's evidence now.

Nothing actually changed. It just now has a lot more evidence behind it than it when I first was using it. It was like a charlatan, you know. When we used, when did you implement it? I used this before I was in medicine, right? For myself as an athlete, a lot of these things. I used before I was in medicine. And so then I get into medicine and I'm like, I'm going to use red light for my patient's healing. And it's like, that's pseudoscience. That's bogus. That's not.

And it's like it's one of those. The person blazing the trail takes a lot of arrows in the back sometimes for sure. I've definitely felt that with all kinds of things, from filler to red light, you know. Yeah. Anyway, then you got red light. You got the PEMF that we talked about, which interestingly, I think a lot of even my colleagues don't know. PEMF has FDA indicates. for healing, but it's in bone healing.

Oh. So like very, you know, you can extrapolate that to what we're doing with soft tissue healing. And there is evidence in the plastic surgical literature of improved healing with PMF. So it's, it has evidence behind it, right? But it kind of falls in this like lower evidence category, but also basically no chance of hurting other than it was uncomfortable when you were first on it, right? So that's, okay, that's a downside. Really.

You don't want to be uncomfortable in your recovery more than you have to be. And then you get into kind of that other room that you were in. and I had the biocharger and I have this thing called the nanoVee that blows like structured water. Oh, yes. Protein folding, which has some evidence and has no evidence in surgical healing directly. Okay. Right? I have to say that out loud.

Yeah. Like no evidence in surgical healing directly, but it has evidence in sports, performance, and recovery. A similar process of recovery. Yeah. It is literally breathing something that's blown over your face. So neutral to a likely positive zero downside. other than I have to have the machine, right? That's my downside, not yours, right?

Then the biocharger similar. You know, I have lots of people who are like, actually that might be the one, the biotcharger, that device next to you that's like making noise, which is called harmonics. I got scared. I thought it was going to mix it. There's light coming out of it.

Yeah. And then there's the frequencies. And then there's like literally the way that it moves electrons. You can, that's what you can feel. Yes. And I have a lot of people say, that's probably the one I felt, maybe other than the PEMF.

Yeah. The energy I felt from that the most was this like biocharger, which seems maybe one of the most woo-woo hand wavy of them all. Like it's making noise and flashing lights at me. But did my team show you that halogen lamp that if you move it close and lights it up? So you can have a visual representation of like, oh, this thing is definitely affecting a field around it. No, it's amazing.

I'd never actually heard of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to talk about hyperbaric a little bit more because that has become, I think, more well-known now and people are very interested in it. So how does it work and why is it beneficial? Yeah, it's blossomed in the just like wellness and longevity world for sure. And again, I've seen that happen in my career from like, I remember when I first came out and I was practicing people like, there's no evidence that hyperbarics helps after facelift surgery. And I'm like, all right, you adhere to that world.

I'll do my hyperbarics unless you what happens. And guess what everybody does now, you know, like. Everyone does that now? No, I would say like everybody's a strong hyperbole as well. But you're going to like, it's going to be very, very common. Like, do you think Chris Jenna did it? To find that. Probably.

Yeah. Probably. That's a whole other topic of conversation than Chris Jenner and like what happened there. Yes. But so hyperbarics for like if we get into what it does, it's a chamber that pressurizes. Like, and that's why we call it a dive because this goes back to like dive medicine. If you dive deep underwater like physically scuba diving and you're breathing in oxygen and you ascend too fast, gas will come out of solution in your blood into bubbles and you get this thing called the bends. and it can be life-threatening in your brain.

You have bubbles in your brain, basically. So they'll re-compress somebody down to depth, make the, like, just like a can of soda. When it's compressed, the gas can be in solution, and when the pressure is released, they'll come out of a solution and fizz over, right? So they pressure it back down, push all the gas back in,

and then they slowly raise the person up. The gas doesn't come into bubbles, and they save their life. That's where it goes way back to. That goes to really, really deep depths. But in that process of doing that, because you can put more gas in solution. If you're breathing in pure oxygen and you're at pressure,

you're going to put more oxygen in solution in your blood, in your plasma specifically. Our red blood cells carry oxygen, but they can only carry so much they get saturated. You and I are probably 99% saturated right now. So we can't really do much else other than put it in our plasma. Now has another route to get to healing tissue, right? And so it's been used in medicine to save wounds that are like,

this wound is going to, like, this person is going to lose their leg. This wound won't heal. There's not great blood flow. Put him in a hyper bear chamber. There's direct infusion of oxygen. If they're in a gaseous or if you're just breathing it in, it's going through your, like you are just breathing it in, but it's going through your blood vessels to that area.

If the surgical complications, there's all kinds of indications that are FDA approved for it. And then the wellness world starts ticking in a little bit because, you know, there's things like trouble that it rescues, right? And then you get into the world that I was in, which was like, my patients weren't in trouble, but they had a real metabolic challenge going on, feeling from surgery or from a procedure. And I can support that with hyperbaric oxygen. It makes it better. And there's evidence to show that it makes the fat take better and the fat performs better because it's got the tools it needs to survive better right away.

Yeah. So like not only this is the beautiful thing of hyperbarics that's emerged as not only is it make your recovery faster, but it makes the results better. And if it makes it 0.1% better, I'm doing it. Yeah, like, why not? Why not, right? And it makes your recovery faster. So in you valuing time so heavily, that's one of our biggest tools to decrease your time. Yeah.

And then the wellness world kicks. And this is where we're really getting to, is to we know that, and this is still being elucidated, exactly how what the right doses, how frequently, what depths to do it at. But we do know that it lengthens, there's a direct lengthening. of this cap on our DNA that's called the telomere. This has become kind of a buzzword that you maybe remember from biology or something, but the caps on our DNA,

every time our DNA replicates, which it has to do all the time. Every time you make a new skin cell, it's got to replicate, make a new one, then it closes up, then it opens up, makes a new one. So the more times it does that, it kind of like this little cap on it wears down.

And so the cell gets senescent, gets tired, gets old, wears out. We know that hyperbarics lengthens the telomeres, the caps on our DNA, So kind of like you get more good replications out of it. So it's kind of like a like, you know, metaphorically, it's a long, you can see the longevity formed by what hyperbarics is doing.

So there's benefits to it there. It's great for your skin. I use it as before every surgery that I do. It's part of my flow state because I'm usually recovering from a workout or something or whatever. So I get the workout recovery. It's a sensory deprivation situation for me too. So it's like you said, two hours is a lot to commit for you.

Yeah. But I think it's also sort of a beautiful time if you feel like, okay, this is by definition, me time, maybe. Like, you know, so for me, I kind of have, I have things that I save to read in there or whatever. Yes. I'm not, what else am I carrying on paper? I'm not doing that, but that's my spot for it, you know? Your clinic was the first time I've ever done a full session.

Yes. Because I'm so claustrophobic and anxious. How did that go? I told, I forget her name, but one of your nurses down there, she put me in there and she got on the phone because there's like a phone connecting. in there and she was like, are you good? And I was like, no, I need you to talk to me. Okay. And she, for five minutes, just talked to me. And I, she calmed me down and I just kept my eyes closed for the full hour, hour and a half. And then I was good. And then after that, I did it every single day and didn't even think about it. So you just had to kind of get through it. I had to do that one time to make

sure I was like, to feel safe. That's good. And then moving forward, I was fine. Well, that's hard to do. Good job. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, that's like, I mean, maybe the definition of working through a little fear right there. I almost got out. I was. I almost got out. I was like really scared. Wow. You never got scared going in there? No. No.

I didn't actually. Well, and so I could, I think different chambers have different like levels of that. Yeah. Because you're in a pretty big tube. You could sit up in there. Yeah. You know, you could fit two people. Great could have gone in there with you.

Yeah. Which I think I teased you guys about. I've been in there with my wife before. I've been in there with my kids before. And then there's a giant like full size kind of window right there, which I also think is very helpful. Yes. So it makes it a little bit more user-friendly in that way, but you're still in a space, you know.

Some of the old-school hyperbolic chambers were like a metal tube with maybe like a little window. It looks like on a submarine, which kind of for the same reason because it's like submarines have to withstand depth. So there might be like a little window like this big that you're, you know, the size of your hand you're looking through. That I could see being a little bit claustrophobic. Yeah, I can't do that. But this has that big glass. And once you feel the benefits, like I feel really good afterwards. Yeah.

It's made it really worthwhile and also seeing the recovery. on my face. Yeah, which, I mean, it's hard to quantify that exactly, right? Because you can't blind yourself to doing it or not doing it from individual to individual. But a lot of people notice that. Like, if I were to take a basketball in there, like I do these pool workouts where I take a basketball and I dive to the bottom with the basketball, try to push it down. It's very Lairden-Gabby-style. The basketball compresses because even at like 10 or 12 feet, right, you get in that hyperbaric chamber where you're going like 33 feet, which doesn't sound that deep, but it'll crush it. that thing down or a water bottle crush it down to nothing.

Yeah. So that mechanical like squeezing. Yeah. Is also helping your swelling right afterwards. Yeah. Which is a unique benefit post procedurally that doesn't exist for maybe a chronic wound or for wellness as much. It's like that's extra helpful when you're swollen. So looking at my like what I got done, what does the map of time look like for me?

Because a lot of people are asking me about that. How would you map it out? Yeah, such a good question. So we are sort of letting a rebuilding process. process happen right now. There's these phases of wound healing. These kids are like really nerdy, basic science. But, you know, the first start of any injury is to like stop the bleeding, like literally, stop the bleeding. And then you go into this like inflammatory phase of healing. And then we go into this remodeling and building phases down the road. And there's like sort of these timeframes that

happen with there. We were trying to move through those early times faster. Yeah. Which is what we did very good job at. And now we're in your sort of like remodeling and building phase. Yeah. You, if we like, this is a fun fact. The first type of collagen we lay down is actually not a type of collagen that we're going to keep forever. It's like our, it's literally baby collagen. Like, this is what babies have in the womb. If you, this is a fun fact, if you do surgery on a baby in a womb, like in utero, which they can do. When that baby's born, they'll have no scar. No evidence of the surgery was done. Oh my God. That's crazy. Because there's a bunch of, and this is like one of the studies in plastic surgery is figuring out why that happens, how can we mimic that? Yes. Which

is it's multifactorial and complex, so we don't have like a magic wand for it yet. But when we first lay down new collagen, which is where you're at right now, you lay down this type three collagen, the baby, like get the job done, make a scaffold, basically like, you know, plug the hole. Yes. Save the ship. Okay. And now the ship is saved. You know, you've got the type three collagen laid down and you're starting to like make it more mature and remodel it into type type one collagen, which is like our more adult form, strong kind of what we think of is the rebar of our skin, basically. So that process is happening for you right now as we speak. You're also making a bunch of new Elastin. This is the one that we're really excited about, right? Yeah. Alastin is the

recoil. That's happening. That's slow. Elastin's delicate. It is harder to build, easier to go away. It's fleeting more. You're making new blood vessels in that area. And that's working really hard, which is why you're red and you're pink. And you had the cool thing happen. You want to tell everybody what happened that you texted me about the other day? I went in the sauna for the first time because you told me it was okay. And I finally was like, I'm just going to do it. it and I did it for maybe 20 minutes and I came out and I had little red dots under my eye and I sent Dr. Chestnut a picture and I was like, am I dying? He was like, no, my blood vessels are more delicate right now. So what happened? So those are called the metacord for them is Petitia,

which is like little dots of like red blood cells that got out of your blood vessels, basically. It would be like the idea of a bruise but on a microscopic level, basically, right? Instead of like one big injury that let it out, they kind of like just escaped because your blood vessels are active. They're like the ones that were already there are open and they're like open for business. They're letting all the nutrients flow through them. You're making new ones at the same time. It's feeding the process that's happening and the walls aren't as strong. When you put stress on them, which I think this is a beautiful example of that son is a stress. It's a hormetic stress. It's meant to be that. That's what makes it good for. It's just like exercise is a hermetic stress. And I say exercise

strategically because that's what most people text me about afterwards is I exercise for the first time you know, relatively vigor. Say I got to zone three or zone four. And now I have like dots. Usually it's under your eyes. Or my very fun yogi patients will be like, I did my first inversion since the procedure. Like a full headstand. Yeah, like a headstand standing on their head.

And they get them from that because they're putting extra like gravitational like, you know, hydrostatic pressure on their blood vessels and it pops the little red bloods. I thought that I like rubbed my eyes or something. And that could be it too. And honestly it could be. But that's not, like, what happened is very normal when you have, like, another little stress. And maybe you rubbed them. Maybe you rubbed them well.

They were dilated from being on the sauna. Yeah. It could be one of those. But it happens. Yeah. The other fun thing that's coming down the road for you is this phenomenon called recall redness. Recall redness is, like I said, all those highways are wide open right now. And as things start to slow down, like traffic starts to slow down, the highway will still be wide open.

I don't know if I've never used this analogy. but the highway will still be wide open. And so the first time you go to maybe like exercise vigorously again or it's a hot day or something and you'd normally kind of get flushed in red, you're going to get extra red because you've got it kind of opened the flow through those extra channels again that way. And that's called recall redness. That'll for some people last in small degrees to months a little bit, you know, which just speaks to, that's segue into the rest of your question is you're going to be remodeling from this for months and months and months and months. as soon as the redness really starts fading away, we know we're shifting into maybe our final phase of like solidifying what's happening.

But if you have any degree of visible pink, you are still super active in your remodeling phase. So I'm in it right now. You're in it. Yeah. And as expected, I want you in it. Yeah. The longer you're red, the better the result you're going to get.

Got it. The more remodeling you get. I mean, it doesn't bother me. I don't know. I'm excited about it. Yeah, that's great. And nobody would know. Yeah, no one knows.

what should I be doing to help that rebuilding? Yeah. So this gets back to the boring basics a little bit of, you know, you don't want to be in the sun right now. We talked about that. Yes. And I have to filter that to be like, I got to be careful because some people will take that as like a fear of being outside at all. I want to go. I am a little scared.

Well, no, I've been going outside, but I'm wearing a hat, gloves and like a wrap on my arm. Yeah. And like sunrise, sunset, go for it. Yeah. Like be out. Yeah. I don't do it. Unprotected.

Go for it. You are very light, fair eyes, fair hair, fair skin. You're fair everything. You're not meant to be at this particular latitude. And you're just not. This is not what you're built for. If you look at somebody who is from here, they're not the same skin type as you.

True. So that's like, okay, great. Because I say that to say that we all want sun early and late. There's so many reasons. That's a whole other podcast, right? Yeah. But in the middle of the day, when things are more intense and the rays change,

like when we have more UVB and things involved, that's not when you're built to be here. So you should be pretty anyway, but especially now because you don't have the intrinsic ability to repair that damage. You also don't want to distract. You want your effort to be going to building, not to repairing, right?

And so Sun is a big one. But then it's all the other things. As I was talking about Elaston in my head, talking about it being sort of a delicate, hard one to build. I'm like, that's the one where you're dying, it and your inflammatory profile and your exercise, that's what's really supporting that. The lower, like your blood sugar, the lower you can keep all those things, the better that elastin is going to lay

down. That I can do. Yep. So those are the best things you can do now because most people are not going to be in hyperbarrier chamber for months afterwards. Like, I'm not either. You know, I'm at the point of only getting in it now for surgeries again. I'm not actually, it's not even in my head that, oh, I'm recovering from my laser still, which I am too, you know. And so, yeah, you also went through and I felt this too. You have these, I call it like these like false peaks in this roller coaster of like as you get it and you look crazy and people told you looked crazy. Why'd you do this? And then you have this like, and that sucks.

Like, you know, like whatever. It just sucks. I don't get. And then you have this period where you're like, oh my gosh, I look incredible. Yeah. Like my life's, this is better than I ever expected it would be. Yes. When I was a little swollen.

Yes. Yes. Right. So it's like this false peak. Yes. And what happens. And then you get on the bottom, the nadir, low point, right? Which you're not even quite there yet, but you're coming up on.

What I mean? Well, what I mean is like as your swelling is going away. Yeah. Because your swelling was like false hope. It's like this like here's what and it's like this isn't real. Yeah. It's just like why you look like a teenager right away. You reach this in a deer where the swelling is going away, the bottom now. There's no more swelling left behind. And so it's just sort of like this is what it is right now. Yeah. But you know that if we had two curves going on, the other curve is building up. So as one's coming down, the other one's crossing. up and this is the actual long-term real result of building collagen and elastin, putting volume back in those scars, making all the things we talked about early. But there's a cross point.

Yeah. Until you get to your final results where no inflammation left behind. Yeah. And this has reached its peak too, which is pretty durable. That doesn't have the down, you know, part of it as much. So you're trying to support this one building while you're trying to manage this inflammation going away. And so you're on this, like this little bit of roller coaster and you had it where I was like oh my gosh I look so great but I'm like yeah it's not real I didn't want to I didn't want to burst I didn't want to burst your bubble but you're getting

into the low point right now I would say like right now it's probably about as least effect as we'll ever see wow okay by the next time we see each other it'll rebuild up it's just a that makes me it's less immediate gratification and it's more like yeah it's a long it's the long game thing we talked about the beginning the other avenue of it is like it gets hard when you when you're when you're and not me, because I get to see you in chunks, right? And so I get to see these incremental improvements as like, bang, bang, bang, better, better, better. You're looking in the mirror on average once a day, maybe I have no idea. And so you're not, you have like a much slower shift of this, like, what's happening than I do.

I get to see the beautiful chunks. Yeah. And that makes it hard. Yeah. And then we also, this is where we really test the thing we talked about before, which is what are your pre-expectations? Like, what are we really shooting for? because this is where people get to like, well, for a second, I had no acne scars. And we know that's not going to be the case in the end.

We're going to go. Obviously, when I say you're at the low point, you already have results right now. So great. We're already winning. So now it just turns into like how much of a win is it? Where's our end result going to settle down? And I wouldn't even judge that for probably a year. Yeah.

But in three to six months, you have a really good picture. But like if we really want to get it. get granular with it. And if I were to say like if we were to biopsy your skin every month, which we're not going to do. But if we did that, we would see changes happening in volume of collagen and volume of last. Maybe for more than a year, closer to 18 months. Which is amazing. And not to like tie it back to fitness necessarily, but I think part of the reason I'm mentally like able to handle it and I'm okay with it is because I've done it before in different settings. Right. Like losing 90 pounds took me a year plus. Right. And I was

wasn't easy. And it wasn't easy. And I've done that before, but it was so worth it. So I know this will be so worth it for me. And I'm so excited. Yeah. When I talk to people who have had, I have a friend who's done CO2 many, I think not many times, maybe twice. And I was speaking to her. She was like, just wait. It gets better and better and better. So I am excited for that. Yeah. That's a great testament to what you have to look forward to. But yeah, so long it, people that work out definitely, and most of my patients at this point, selection bias are like very fit. And used to that sort of like what you describe of like yeah work hard it sucks i go through the recovery which also isn't great and then i like what happens at the end yes it makes people like so much more

resilient it's a mindset thing for sure i mean i just also cut my hair very short and i'm like i know that this will be good for it in the long run i'm in that era of my life right now you know yeah i'm i'm down for it the long game era i meant to ask you this just personally when do i start using normal skin care again. I'm not there yet, right? Yeah, so what depends what normal skin care is for you, if there's a lot of active ingredients involved, like I'd say a retinol or something like that. No, I never used retin, just mandelic acid. Okay, yeah. So active ingredient. Yeah. You know, I usually have people kind of tailor in slowly to that. Okay. Because your skin barrier, like the actual, like brick and mortar part of it, which is pretty accurate because it's like

a lipid and a protein together that make the brick and mortar, um, as that heals, uh, it's, you'll be able to tolerate the active ingredient better again. But that brick and mortar healing doesn't really finish until the inflammation starts calming down more. So that's a really roundabout way of saying start slow, try it. Usually it takes people about a month to be able to tolerate those really active ingredients again. I think I'm at week three right now. You're week. Yeah.

So I think I'll wait a little bit. Yeah. So another week and you could like try it and be like, it made me red or it burned or okay, great. You're not ready. But if you did it that day, be like, okay. Okay, great. I mean, I'll take tomorrow off, then try it again. Okay. And then you can kind of tick through it that way.

Amazing. Yeah. We didn't talk about Christianer. Oh, Christianer. I mean, just give us a little, like, what do you think? I just say, this gets back into my feeling a little empathetic over celebrities and having their before and after sort of like in everybody's head already, which is just sort of an unfair comparison. Yeah.

And, you know, the person that did Chris Jenner's facelift is great. He does a very sort of straightforward procedure, gets good results as patients are happy. she was happy and she's older right so this is the other thing we talked about younger patients having surgery which has its challenges and you know nuances to it older patients have nuances too it's it's their tissue quality is not as good their pat pads aren't strong their skin is in strong it's harder to make that's one of the benefits of doing things young is that anybody could have made chris jenner look better if she had done it when she was 40 than if she does it when she's in her 70s like you just it's not going to be i don't believe so okay it's not going to be the same

end result of those. And then you have that. Like, was it her first one? Was it not her first one? Yeah. That adds, you know, complexities into it. But I think she looks amazing. Right. And if you see her in real life versus the released photo, it looks more realistic. Like, yeah, she looks great. Yeah. She legitimately looks great. Yeah. But she also doesn't look like the airbrushed version of the first images you saw. And so in our world, in this little microscopic narrow deep hole that I'm in of like facial plastic surgery, oculoplastic surgery, plastic surgery, my dermatology into, like, there's a lot of heat and critique thrown at like, oh, she's mad about it. And that is by haters, basically jealous people who are more focused on others than them. This isn't me. This is him.

You know, this is Dr. Levine who, you know, did her procedure. And, you know, he did a great job. And then she went on and said, I'm not mad. On Chloe's show. Right. But it just goes to show that, like, you know, I really respect my colleagues. who are focused on themselves and our field and them getting better and sharing that and to be critical of somebody else's and to do so in a false way where you're claiming that she's unhappy,

which is like super unfair to Christian. It makes my heart hurt for her a little bit. Yeah. Because like sucks. Like somebody's putting words in your mouth and leveraging you for their own agenda because they're jealous of the guy who did her procedure. Like it's a little bit of human.

And plastic surgeons are really hard about that, you know, because if you're not the one who did her face, facelift, like you're not getting the attention and like, oh, that hurts your ego or whatever a little bit. So I'm on the other end of that all the time too, you know? Really? Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. That's crazy. That's what I said. The arrows in the back idea. I would be very hesitant to work with someone who builds their career on, you know, hating on other people. Yeah, that would definitely. I mean, everybody knows that's a red flag. In Bradflip. You know, it's a red flag. Like, focus on yourself. If you've got critiques of other people based off of, in our world,

that can even get down to like the nitty gritty of what your training pathway was. Like, oh, you did ear, nose and throat and went into facial, seriously, and went into facial plastic surgery instead of like, well, I did general surgery and plastic surgery. I'm like, okay. Or you did derm or you did ophthalmology or whatever. It really boils down to just like, at some point, like the proofs in the pudding a little bit. Like, look at the results and see what you see. And anyway, so that's my, I guess, odd Chris Jenner rant a little bit of just like,

makes my heart hurt for her. I'm sure she's a very lovely person. I don't know her. She seems amazing. Her surgeons, I'm sure, a very lovely person. I don't know him as well either. Another famous celebrity just had a procedure with one of my best friends in the field. And he was, and it's a great procedure. She was a challenging situation with a lot of previous filler and surgeries. And he was critiqued for her. And then it's like, what is happening here? You know, so anyway, it's a... You know what? If you're doing something well, I think there's always going to be feedback. For sure. Yep. Yeah. I used to get a lot of hate on this show.

but a lot of love at the same time. What are you getting hate about? Just controversial topics. Yeah. You know, things come up and people get mad. Yeah. Anyway. Yes, here we go.

Dr. Chestnut, thank you so much for coming on for part two. Thank you for doing my face. Yes, absolutely. I'm so excited. Thank you for trusting me. Oh. And I say that that is not like a pleasantry. That is like something that's never lost on me when I see a patient.

It's like it's a big, it's a trust both ways, to be honest, especially with surgery a little bit more. Yeah. because I get to, I know what I can create. And it's a trust in both directions that we're like going to be glad that we did that. Yeah. I genuinely felt so at peace. Oh, good.

I don't know if I told you this, but I've had like when I have my egg retriever, whenever I get anesthesia, I freak out. I have panic attacks. And that was the first time I was like, yep, I'm good. That's great. Because I felt so good with you and so good with the team. I love that. Thanks for Shane.

So if people want to book with you in your clinic, where should they go? What should they do? Yeah. So active on Instagram, that's a great place to look first just to kind of get familiar because I generally want people reaching out who like kind of know what they're getting, you know, because I have a unique value proposition. Is that fit with you, right? So I want that. Then you start with just a screening process that I, that's free. You know, it's like send me good photos. Yep. Send me as much relevant information as you think I needed. The more good stuff I get, the more good stuff I can give you back. And that's what I say, this like about 20% of. on the time, I'm like, let's go. You know, like, we're going to work great together. Let's do this.

And for the others, it's sort of like, okay, well, here's like maybe not a great candidate for these things. That's kind of not the right path to what you're seeking or we just got to give us a little time, all kinds of different avenues there. And then we start the like, okay, let's we meet usually virtually first because everybody travels to see me. Nobody lives there. So it's always a virtual meeting.

And then that starts the ball. Beautiful. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks for having me again. Thank you for joining us on the Pursuit of Wellness Podcast. To support this show, please rate and review and share with your loved ones.

If you want to be reminded of new episodes, click the subscribe button on your preferred podcast or video player. You can sign up for my newsletter to receive my favorites at Mari Loewan.com. It will be linked in the show notes. This podcast is a Pursuit Network production. Love you, Power Girls and Power Boys. I will see you next time. The content of this show is for Educate. educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and does not constitute a provider-patient relationship. As always, talk to your doctor or health team.