The AuraSpa Healing Center is kind of like a breath of fresh air when you are looking at the way people approach the face and healing. Everybody is moving towards trying to do things more naturally now, and this is one of the forerunners in doing that. So trying to not just have people Botox and fill their faces, but trying to get the face to look better from healing, from decreasing inflammation, from hydrating, and doing those things rather than just volumizing and operating and things like that. The whole idea of AuraSpa is not to just camouflage the problem by volumizing, the idea is to make them healthier.
Dr. Ben Talei
Would you believe that the above statement came from a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who regularly performs your typical procedures like facelifts, liposuction, injectable fillers, and rhinoplasty? Respected surgeon, Dr. Ben Talei (UCLA undergrad, UCSD School of Medicine, with fellowships at Columbia University Medical Center, Cornell University Medical Center) recently opened the AuraSpa Healing Center to complement his practice, The Beverly Hills Center for Plastic & Laser Surgery. Here’s an intro into some of the technology his new clinic is using to help heal those recovering from surgery but also those hoping for a more natural way to treat inflammation and chronic pain throughout the body.
Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber
There are large comfortable chambers, you can watch a movie inside and not get claustrophobic. They have been used to help heal burn victims heal significantly better. For facelifts, they revascularize faster, form a new blood supply faster, and look healthier faster with less swelling. If someone has a poor-healing wound and wants it to heal faster post-surgery or has chronic inflammation, you can use hyperbaric oxygen and LED light together.
LED Light Therapy
Using LightStim beds outfitted with 18,000 LED lights, AuraSpa uses this noninvasive treatment to heal injuries, increase range of motion, build collagen, increase blood flow, and reduce sun damage. According to Dr. Talei, “We use this bed to help patients in
terms of healing, inflammation, anxiety, high blood pressure, back pain, you name it, it puts energy. This, this bed puts energy into your body and helps produce more energy forming cells and helps decrease the amount of inflammation.”
And now the rest of my burning plastic surgery questions:
I have a handheld Lightstim device, what does that do for your skin?
Dr. Talei: The light that you place on your skin can actually stimulate energy production in all the cells so any area that is damaged it helps it heal faster and can help the inflammatory response calm down. The other things we’ve seen for chronic pain is it can decrease the production of Neuropeptide Y so it can actually calm down pain receptors.
Explain how you are using PRP (platelet rich plasma) to help combat hairloss?
This is a long and complex process, but to summarize: major improvements have been made in the ability to encourage hair growth. Dr. Talei takes the signaling factors present in a patient’s normal circulating blood and concentrates them down to a very small amount to inject in the scalp to signal the hair follicle to stay in the growth phase longer. The concentrated blood (PRP) is mixed with nano fat, which is made of fat molecules which have been broken down and separated– these are known as adipose-derived stem cells. In the words of Dr. Talei, “This doesn’t mean that they’re an actual stem cell, but they do have the growth potential to them. So when you inject it along with PRP, the PRP acts as the messenger and the fat kind of acts as the scaffold. So they work together very, very well. Our success rates have gone up from somewhere in the range of like from 30%, which is what most people have to 90%. Oh Wow. It’s substantial and it’s 90% of patients would get an improvement in terms of diminishing hair loss or stopping hair loss and 30% of patients actually would get a regrowth.”
What ingredients should someone age 25-35 be incorporating in their skincare routine?
Dr. Talei: The most common skin cream used worldwide is Vitamin A. There are a lot of different Vitamin A derivatives. One of them is called Retin-A or Tretinoin, it’s used as a once a day or once every three-day cream which helps to increase skin turnover. Instead of the skin cells lasting 28 days, they last 3 or 4 days and slough off faster. The benefit of that is that your skin is constantly rejuvenating. The downside of that is that it’s inflammatory and your skin can get dry or red. To combat that and to give it a little bit of soothing we’ve been using the AuraSilk it’s an essential oil blend that we use to decrease inflammation and improve healing in the skin. It also lightens the skin slowly. For people that want something less inflamatory, we will combine AuraSilk with DefenAge or Alastin. Those are very basic skincare routines that people can do to keep their skin looking fresh, diminish wrinkles slightly, and to lighten their skin very gently and safely.
What does Glycolic Acid do for your skin?
Glycolic falls into the realm of alpha hydroxy acids. What that does is the little connections that are formed in between the skin cells on top of your skin, it breaks them up a little bit so the pores don’t clog as much and so the skin can also peel off a little bit faster. It’s not what you would call an active peel, but it isn’t very slow, gentle appeal and keeps the pores from clogging.
Any thoughts on the FDA investigations into breast implant illness?
Well, I’m a face specialist so I don’t do breast implants, but I have been following the story. All I know so far is there is zero evidence that there is any actual link so it’s more that they are doing research to find out. Last I checked 3-4 months ago, there were no new updates.