Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (56 page)

The result of daily use is quite remarkable: natural, fresh-looking skin. The first time you use the FaceMaster, try doing only one side of your face. Then look in the mirror, and you will see that the Face-Mastered side is higher and more lifted. Your eyebrows are higher, your cheekbones more pronounced, and your jawline stronger.

Women have been using this technology for decades in Europe, where I first encountered it. A friend of mine flew from Saint-Tropez to Geneva for her treatment. It was that important to her, to leave her vacation to be sure she didn’t miss her appointment. When she returned, I was stunned at the difference in her face. This treatment—called a “microcurrent nonsurgical face-lift”—is also given in fancy salons from Los Angeles to New York City. The Tracie Martyn Salon in Manhattan gives these facials, for example. Go there and try it out; you’ll see the difference it can make, and then you can buy a machine of your own for under $100. (By the way, the salon price for one treatment runs from $200 to $300.) I interviewed Dr. Hanson so you can learn for yourself the efficacy and safety of these treatments.

CHAPTER 32
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R
. P
ETER
H
ANSON:
N
ONSURGICAL
F
ACE-LIFT
WITH THE
F
ACEMASTER

Dr. Peter Hanson is a Western-trained medical doctor, acupuncturist, and author. He runs the Hanson Peak Performance Clinic for pain management, and he is the author of The
Joy of Stress,
which has sold over 1 million copies. I first met Dr. Hanson several years ago when we got together working on the FaceMaster. The FaceMaster is an ingenious little machine that gives a nonsurgical face-lift. In his clinic, Dr. Hanson was using a similar device for pain management. It works on the theory that electricity is your friend in small doses and has great healing properties. Dr. Hanson and my team worked together using the same technology for the face to bring this device to the public. It gives the appearance of a face-lift without surgery, and the results are fantastic. This interview is going to sound like an infomercial, but I am always asked about my beauty regimen, and this truly is my primary beauty secret, and I use it almost every day. It is small enough to fit in my purse, and on the rare day I don’t use it, people ask me if I am tired. Let me put it this way: If my house were on fire, I would grab my FaceMaster
.

SS:
Good morning, Dr. Hanson. Let me first ask you to describe what kind of doctor you are.

PH:
I am first a medical doctor specializing in family practice and
emergency medicine. But I also specialize in alternative medicine, and my expertise is in medical acupuncture and alternative treatments for pain and for stress.

SS:
How does medicine interact with something like the Face-Master?

PH:
I first started working with medical acupuncture for Bell’s palsy in 1980 and started to see the effects that electrical stimulation deep into the tissues had on the face. The effects were dramatic. We were able to see that we could stimulate all twenty-two muscles of the face with electrical stimulation using an acupuncture needle placed correctly at the beginning and end of the muscles and that it had an immediate impact. And then, of course, everyone who had this done said, “Gee, what about for me, who has no Bell’s palsy? What about just using it for cosmetic purposes?” We weren’t changing the outer structure of the skin—you need a skin product to do that—but we could see that the tone of the skin had improved dramatically and that it had a tremendous effect on changing the appearance of the skin.

SS:
Is it the skin that ages, or is it the muscular structure under the skin that ages?

PH:
Obviously, we know that skin ages on the surface, and for treating that, you can use moisturizers or a host of other treatments to smooth the outer layer of the skin. But in terms of the deep layers of the skin, there is an underlying sagging of the muscles that occurs with aging. Rubbing a product on your skin will do nothing to help the sagging muscles. Those muscles have to be tightened in the same way that you might go to the gym to tighten your biceps and other muscles.

SS:
Yes, but can’t we just do facial exercises to get the same results?

PH:
Ah, that would be so easy. You can do facial exercises day and night, and all you are going to get is increased wrinkling. There is no way to exercise the muscles in the face. That is why the FaceMaster is so awesome. The FaceMaster affords us a chance to get right up close to the muscles. We don’t need to place deep electrodes because the facial muscles are very close to the surface. In fact, there is hardly any distance between the skin and the bone, so the muscles are in between. With the FaceMaster, we can reach these muscles with probes
dipped in conductive solution rather than using needles. For home use, this became a logical vehicle for transporting the electrical microcurrent. You can’t really use probes to affect the biceps because they are too deeply seated. On the face, however, everything is handy, very easy to get to, and it works really well.

SS:
But isn’t electricity dangerous?

PH:
Well, sticking your finger into a light socket is probably not a good idea. But the electrical current used for medical purposes is very, very, small and much less powerful. In fact, the current we use is called microcurrent, which is millionths of an amp. This current is actually a very healing current.

SS:
Do you think if a woman used a FaceMater regularly, she wouldn’t need to have a face-lift?

PH:
So much depends upon the individual. It is important to remember that there are cases in which we will see people with severe drooping eyelids, like your one eye, Suzanne, which has been corrected with the FaceMaster. If you are considering a face-lift because your facial muscle tone is poor, you can be assured that using the FaceMaster should at least put off the need for a face-lift.

SS:
I have been using my FaceMaster for fourteen years now, and I truly believe it has helped tremendously in arresting the sagging process. When I have a facial, the aesthetician always remarks that I have such good facial tone. I know that that tightness is from using the FaceMaster so religiously. I love the results of using this machine. It makes my eyes appear clearer, whiter, more alive, and less tired. Over the years, I have been able to sculpt my cheekbones in much the same way using free weights in a gym would tone and sculpt the biceps or any of the other muscles.

PH:
It is nice to be able to use the full menu of possibilities and realize that before you leap into surgery, or even after you have surgery, you can still do something about your muscle tone. Keep in mind that muscle tone is never addressed by surgery. There is no operation to pump up muscles.

SS:
If you had surgery, would this speed up the healing process and help with the scarring?

PH:
We use it routinely on people who have had surgery, and they
are thrilled with the results. It tones the muscles as it runs a current through the scar tissue. The technology is known to speed healing. Postoperatively, surgeons routinely implant electrodes above and below a scar level, and the scars heal better as a result. Moreover, the patients usually don’t need pain pills.

SS:
Do muscles have a memory?

PH:
Absolutely. Let’s say a bodybuilder like Arnold Schwarzenegger took one year off and then went back to the gym. It would take no time at all for his muscles to bounce back because he has had a whole lifetime of using them.

SS:
How often should a man or a woman use this device?

PH:
It works if you use it once or twice a week, but for a full face, you could use it every other day and touch up areas as needed.

SS:
Well, that’s good because I do use mine almost every day.

PH:
And that’s okay. We just want to make sure that it is used as instructed. We don’t want people using it for eleven hours at a time and ending up with their muscles in spasm.

SS:
Is this a machine that works on a man’s face as well?

PH:
Oh yes, because muscles know no bounds. A man’s face responds beautifully. Look at Alan’s face when we only did half of it as a demonstration. The half that had been FaceMastered was visibly higher, firmer, and the eye was more open. In general, the one side of the face that had been done looked much better than the one that hadn’t had a treatment.

We are specialists in the muscle area. Ninety percent of the appearance problems that people have as they age are directly related to muscle tone, and the other 10 percent concerns inherited bad bone structure or sun damage, which clearly does need to have some dermatology treatments.

SS:
Do you think microcurrent is the future?

PH:
Absolutely. Microcurrent has several other applications. We use it in our office as an alternative to drugs. It seems odd for a physician to be in the business of taking people off drugs, since most medical doctors believe that every symptom in the human body has to be caused by the lack of a brand-name drug. Clearly, there is more to pain than just a Vicodin deficiency. If you find a new, nondrug way of
treating pain, such as using a microcurrent, the patients are very grateful.

SS:
Then why is the medical community behind relative to understanding the healing properties of microcurrent and electricity?

PH:
Rather than use the word
brainwashing
, I’ll explain this using the word
paradigm
, meaning pattern or model. In the history of medicine, the paradigm is interesting. First of all, doctors think in terms of traditional Western medicine. Right off the bat, that phrase is an oxymoron. In 1941, there was a doctor in England who worked in a venereal disease clinic. He spent all day, every day, injecting arsenic into the veins of anybody who had venereal disease, because they did not have antibiotics then. So Western medicine only goes back to 1941. Prior to that time, we were very, very dangerous. We were a bunch of loose cannons. So we have some nerve applying the term
traditional
for Western medicine because it is really not that old at all.

Doctors have been using electrical stimulation since 1856, dating back to Italy, where they had the first acupuncture needles left over from Marco Polo and the galvanic batteries. So, basically, we know that electric current has been tried for more than a century, and it has been tried safely in the post–World War II years in China, where medical practitioners routinely used electricity to stimulate their acupuncture needles.

We have also found that with the electrical stimulation of acupuncture needles, we increased the patient’s levels of endorphins and ACTH [adrenocorticotropic hormone], which are the precursors of cortisone. And acupuncture restores the body to normal balance.

Electricity can even be tested by blood samples to make sure that it does work. We have found that it restores normal hormone and chemical levels, namely endorphins and cortisone, in chronic pain patients, for example, and thus improves their inflammation. Even so, doctors still think you need a drug every time you have a symptom.

SS:
Why is it that I fly all night and when I arrive my eyes are red, scratchy, and tired? Then I use my FaceMaster, and they go clear and fresh.

PH:
It has to do with restoring the balance of the normal blood supply to the area.

SS:
So it’s about circulation?

PH:
Yes, it restores proper circulation and eases inflammation. The eyes go red because of inflammation, often caused by dry eye or dust in the area. Stimulating with electricity gets the body back to normal, restoring its levels of cortisone, and that is probably the mechanism by which the red goes out of the eyes.

SS:
Well, this is my little beauty secret. And to think it’s good for me, too! Thanks, Dr. Hanson.

DR. HANSON’S TOP FIVE ANTIAGING RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Ninety percent of the appearance problems that people have as they age are directly related to muscle tone, and the other 10 percent concerns inherited bad bone structure or sun damage, which would require dermatology treatments. Rubbing a product on your skin will do nothing to help the sagging muscles. Those muscles have to be tightened through an electromicrocurrent, or nonsurgical face-lift, or the FaceMaster. This addresses the underlying muscle tone rather than being limited to just the superficial skin, sanding off the skin or moisturizing the skin.

2. The nonsurgical face-lift restores proper circulation and eases inflammation in areas of redness, such as the eyes. Stimulating with electricity gets the body back to normal, restoring its levels of cortisone, and that is probably the mechanism by which the red goes out of the eyes.

3. If you are considering a face-lift because your facial muscle tone is poor, you can be assured that using the FaceMaster should at least put off the need for one.

4. If you do facial exercises day and night, all you are going to get is increased wrinkling. If you were to spend your whole life scrunching up your face to exercise the muscles, your facial skin might fold all the skin lines into permanent positions.

5. Sun-damaged skin needs to be treated by a dermatologist. In addition, creams and lotions are the best bet for sun-damaged skin.

CHAPTER 33
T
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RAP-UP