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Micro-current For Enhancing Facial Appearance

 

Today’s presentation will be microcurrent for enhancing facial appearance. For those of you who practice cosmetic facial, acupuncture, you’re gonna love this

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Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors. Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hello everyone. My name is Shelly Goldstein. I’m the doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine and licensed in Florida and in New York. Today’s presentation will be microcurrent for enhancing facial appearance. For those of you who practice cosmetic facial, acupuncture, you’re gonna love this. And it’s actually, and then for those of you who practice facial acupuncture of any sort, this is right up your alley.

Today, microcurrent is one of the most rapidly growing ancillary services for facial acupuncturists, but a lot of people don’t really know what it’s about. So here we go. Let’s begin now.

Patterns Microcurrent is what I call low level electrical current for skin and muscle re education. And this is what’s important because many of the ancillary services that we offer, Address the skin level or address the tissue level, but they don’t go down to the muscle level. So this type of service is addressing both skin and muscle.

When we think about the history of Microcurrent, it’s been used for decades. It was been used by acupuncturist, physicians, physical therapists, and chiropractors, and it’s primarily used for. Muscle education and tissue healing. So if you’ve ever damaged muscle damage or muscle strain or pulled a muscle and you go to physical therapy and they put these pads on you, it’s a form of microcurrent.

It’s a little stronger. And the intention of it is to actually heal the tissue, the trauma in the tissue, and reeducate the muscles on that level. What we’re talking about here is just a little bit different. And because we’ve been looking at it for so many years, particularly with patients with Bell’s policy, it started with people being treated with Bell’s Palsy, with low level micro.

And what happened was after they were treated and after the Bell’s Palsy had resolved, they noticed that their fine lines were softer, their face was more lifted, their eyelids were a little bit drier. And this really started the impetus to start exploring various forms of microcurrent for cosmetic treatments and appearance enhancements to lip facial appearance.

Just to give you a little bit of perspective about how this works, when we analyze the face from our perspective, You wanna look at the face in thirds. So the top third is the forehead to the eye to right underneath the eyes. The middle third is from right underneath the eyes to the corner of the nose, and then the lower third is the corner of nose to the chin area.

And in our younger years, when we look at someone, the height of the face or the widest part of the face is at the top of the middle. Third, it’s right below the eyes. You can see it in this image if you look at the triangle. So the base of that triangle is where the height of the, of your appearances.

So when you. At someone what is the upper portion of the face what happens as we age, whether it’s due to gravity, whether it’s due to tissue change, or bone resorption, or bone changes. The tissue begins to drop and the weight of the face moves to the jo area as opposed to the height of the face.

So what happens is when you look at someone with the, who’s older, with that drop, it looks as though the face is heavy, it’s saggy. And oftentimes this is when our patients come in and they say, I look old. I feel old. I, my jaw line is lost in. My cheeks feel flat. I just look old. And that’s what you’re looking at is this organic movement of the weight of the face shifting from the upper aspect to the lower aspect of the faces.

And not only does it move from top to bottom, it moves from the lateral aspect, the corner of the zygomatic area where the cheek bone is. To the middle area. So you would get a deepening of what we call the nasal labial fold, which is that full between the corner of the nose and the corner of the mouth, and the corner of the mouth and the jaw area.

So the weight of the face moves from outer to inner. And then also the forehead starts to shorten, in which case you start to see putting of the eyelid, puffiness underneath the eye. Some of it is organic. It changes within the tissue itself, but some of it is just the redistribution of weight in the face.

And many of those changes occur on multiple levels of the face. So we have the bone changes and starts to change the tissue layer on top of bone on the face. We have muscles. We have two different groups of muscles. On top of the muscle, we have what known as the subcutaneous of the hypodermic layer.

It’s where our adipose tissue is the fat in the face that fills out and gives you volume. So muscles gives your movement to all of the the math, the cheeks, the eyes, and all of the expressions that we make. The hypodermic. So the subcutaneous layer gives you the fat or the plumpness of your. And then the health of the tissue or the health of your skin is really determined by the dermal and dermis and the epidemics cells start at the base of that dermal the orange layer, and float up to the surface of the skin as it reaches the surface.

And in that dermis dermal layer. It’s bathed in hyaluronic acid and nutrients so that they grow healthy and strong and plum. And then as they move to the epidermal layer up to the surface, then they start to slough off and then new cells move their way up. And then all of these layers are surrounded by what is known as connective tissue.

Connective tissue looks like this. It’s sticky. It’s afl. It’s like a sticky film or sarn wrap, and it’s designed to either encapsulate, say the muscles and keep them protected. Or it’s also used to connect, so it can either connect, it can either protect the muscles and surround them and isolate them.

Or it can be used to connect, say the muscles to the more superficial layers of the tissue and then and top the skin, which is why we can see when the deeper, when the muscles of expression move, we talk, we blink our eyes. We smile, we frown. These are all the ability, the muscle’s ability to express themselves on the surface of the skin by virtue of that connective tissue, holding everything together and connecting them.

And collagen, we’ve heard this word a lot. Collagen is the primary component of connective tissue. And what’s unique about. Is that collagen has a mechanical and an electrical property, and it’s that property, the electrical and the mechanical property. That’s the basis for being able to interact with other tissue.

So in the presence of external influences, they can be pressure, they can be vibration, they can be an acupuncture needle going into the surface of the skin when the collagen is altered by any type of external influence that current or that electronic electrical current permeates from the connective tissue throughout.

The other areas of the body and migrates into neighboring structures. And this is how a lot of our ancillary services work. Works in this way, cupping face, cupping works in this way. A number of different services that we use, even acupuncture work by activating the elec, the Paso Electrical effect of collagen.

To create that electrical charge, which then vibrates through the connective tissue into migrating structures. And Microcurrent is another example of how this works. When you. Microcurrent is a vibration. You turn it on, it has a vibratory effect. And in that vibratory effect, it has a number of wonderful functions.

It a, it improves skin tissue circulation. When that happens, skin tone and texture start to change and improve also by going a. Deeper, we talked about the epidermis, the dermis, and then into the deeper fat layers, and then into the muscle. So it starts to move through all of those different layers so it can soften the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles.

And then also it’s used to re-educate muscle activity and interpreting. And this is what you, my current is unique for because a lot of the other service. Like cupping, wash out are primarily for more surface skin, for removing limp from the tissue and for sculpting the tissue, but not necessarily.

Integrating and educating the muscles. So in doing so, by changing the muscle integrity, you can lift and into the cheeks, the lower and the midface muscles. Now, microcurrent is different than tens, the tens that we use. You have needles, you have the little prongs that you put to the needles, and then you turn it on and it causes the muscles to twitch.

This is not what we’re talking. So TENS devices is delivers milli amps of current. This current is designed to blocking messages from the spine to the brain, and that’s why it’s very effective for say, back brain damage. It’s going to help mitigate the pain messages that move from the spine into the brain and help to heal the tissue.

Microcurrent on the other hand, delivers a sub censory micro amperage as opposed to milli amperage. So this current micro amperage is 1000 times less than that of milli amperage current. And when you use this type of current, first of all, the muscles are not gonna twitch. It’s gonna be, and it’s gonna be sub sensory, which means you don’t feel it.

So the current is actually moving into the tissue at a very low cellular intensity. And. Activates or it aligns with that collagen, Paso Electrical current and all of the other currents that we have in our body. So our body is always vibrating. There’s a current that runs through, we may call it Archie, that’s constantly running through our body.

This low level microcurrent actually. And its sub sensory format mimics the body’s own low intensity and this at the cellular level to do a number of things. So here’s what I’m talking about. Here’s the top image is the microcurrent. It’s that low level current. So it’s a very small current that’s moving through the mechanism and into the tissue versus the lower, more charged microcurrent.

Tense machine. Now, when the current moves through this tissue, it goes into the cells and it moves into the mitochondria to activate the Creb cycle. How many of us remember in high school learning about the Creb cycle? The most important aspect of the Creb cycle is to produce at. Triphosphate. Now, Atine Tri Phosphate is like Archie.

It’s what charges the body, keeps it activated, keeps it moving, and keeps us alive. So without atp, we do not exist according to the Western world. When ATP is activated, a number of things happen. It enhances the healthy synthesis of number of proteins. It stimulates the proliferation of fiberblast, or needed to collagen.

And it does it at such a high volume that it actually can increase ATP up to 500%. It can improve the cell wall permeability, and we’ll go into this in just a minute. By 30 to 40%, it increases protein synthesis up to 73% and increases collagen activity up to 60%. These are huge numbers. How does it do it?

First of all, when we produce ATP one, one of the things happens. It creates a the mi, the crib cycle begins. You get the production of atp, and then another couple of things happen. One is it stimulates the activity of the electric transport chain. The electric transport chain is very important for producing the healthy wall of the cell.

But it also helps to boost healthy skin dermal protein development, including collagen and safe development. When we have a cell and when we have the cell wall, there’s a kind of a, some gateway. Which means that there’s a charge that goes back and forth through the cell wall, and you need that fluidity within this cell membrane, not just to pass ions like sodium, potassium, and chloride, but in a bioelectrical potential at this charge as well.

As we age that the tissue of the wall gets heard, it gets damaged, and then we get an imbalance within that bioelectrical potential, which means the cell’s not activating and it’s not doing its job. The body naturally follows the path of least resistance. So in the effort to get that bioelectrical charge into the wall, it’s gonna pass the damage areas and it’s gonna try and get in other places.

And in doing so, it actually damages the cell even more. Microcurrent starts to reverse that process by healing the wall of the cell in order to create and boost that and restore that electrical transport. Also within that Creb cycle and when the activity of the mitochondria, we are also creating an antioxidant effect.

So what do we know about antioxidants? Antioxidants stop cells from oxidizing. If too many cells oxidize, they start to die. So it’s a way of rejuvenating cells and keep them. When we do that, we can heal the tissue. So microcurrent is beneficial for enhancing tissue repair and when tissue repair, when we get a wound a or some type of a physical wound microcurrent is actually beneficial for healing that wound and for our purposes for cosmetic acupuncture, it’s going to improve and reeducate muscle.

I. And this is what we need in order to lift those muscles that we talked about. Start to bring the weight from the base of the chin area all the way up to the top of the chin. It’s not good. Here’s an example. Oops, I’m gonna go back. Sorry about this. I think I’m gone the wrong direction. Oh no.

I don’t wanna do that. Sorry. What you’re gonna need to do is you’re gonna need to reshare that if you can, and then I think we’ll be okay. Okay. Yeah, so just make sure that you have that slide open. Then do share and it’ll be back. Everyone will be very patient. It’ll only take a minute. are did it work while you’re sharing the whole screen rather than just the slide?

So you wanna stop sharing. I’ll help you with. What I’m going to do is help by doing this for a second. So now they can’t see us . And let’s go back to.

Hi, welcome back. Okay, so here’s what happens. Take a look here. You see the microcurrent coming in. It’s. Moving its current into the tissue, and you can actually see the multiple layers, including the orange one. The orange one is the tissue, is the muscle itself. You can actually see the change that occurs.

Now there are some side effects although this is a very low risk treatment. Sometimes let me just say with the side effects are dizziness, headaches, tissue, swelling, pain, discover, redness, bruising, tingling. I have not found these in my practice. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.

Every once in a while, someone may be red, but you can actually just turn the volume down and it’s not in my personal experience, I haven’t. These side effects. There are a few contraindications and precautions. So a contraindication is when not to use it. A precaution is to be aware.

Pregnancy is a precaution. If someone is cleared by their physician, no problem. You, if you are under the age of 18, that’s just because they’re a minor. So that would be a precaution. Active cancer, for me, that’s a contraindication because you wanna deal with the problem first. And then epilepsy seizures, it is current and it’s, but it’s very mild current.

So things like epilepsy, seizures, muscle nerve disorders. You just wanna make sure that’s not something that they’ve had recently or under, or is under control and it should be fine. Reach some facial surgery, filler implants and injections. You just need to wait a couple of weeks after their surgeries, fillers, implants and injections to begin pacemaker or electrical implant device.

Now we’re on the face and it’s a very mild current. So again, that’s not something that. Experience, but it’s in the literature. And then severe acne or inflamed skin as usual, you want, it is current. You are stimulating the face, and so you want to manage that situation or avoid the area.

So again, it’s very space, but you just need to be wise and be a little cautious. It’s a very mild current that you’re buying on someone’s. But the advantages of using it are just tremendous. So if you look at this image, in the remembering the weight of the face, moving from the upper face to the lower face.

If you look on the left where it says baseline, you can see where there’s puffiness and jowling on this image and this woman’s jaw area. And then after 60 days of five minutes of use. So this would be as like retailed as a home treatment, but also you can use it in the office. You will see the jawline begin to lift.

You can see the weight of the face starting to change, moving upwards. It’s actually a little more clear in the sculpted jawline area. You can actually see not just the weight of the face dragging in the jaw area, but you can also see the skin is starting to be creepy and drooping as well. So in this situation, The microcurrent is not only addressing the muscle level, but the tissue level as well.

So this is a really good indication. If you look at the 60 day of all of tightening of the muscles lifting the jaw area, but you can also see the collagen area that has been. Built and building collagen is tightening and lifting skin as well. And then the bottom one is smoother wrinkles, and this is the far ahead area.

And you can actually see the visible changes that occur from forehead, creasing, and lack and diminished creasing after. Microcurrent. So it’s a great treatment to use both in your office, but it’s also really good to use at home too. And there are many different devices that you can use. So the one that it, for those of you who are just starting, you’re interested in microcurrent and you don’t wanna put out a lot of money for it.

New face is a really good way to start. It’s very lightweight. It’s very easy to use. You can use it at home. You can use it in your treatment. You, it has an auto, a charging station that you put it on. I can help you get those. I give you a discount for being a part of the American Acupuncture Council.

For those of you who know you wanna do this, you’re investing in it. There are programs like Biotherapeutics, they’re a wonderful company from was. They have that Suzuki sequencing, which we talked about. It’s microcurrent going into. And to the body and matching the electrical vibration of our body. And this is the key to it.

If your system doesn’t do that, it’s just throwing current at you instead of working with you. This particular instrument is about five to $6,000. And then for those of you who really wanna jump in and know this is what you wanna do, and this is only what you wanna do, or a huge part of what. To do you can spend, 15 to 25,000 pounds.

And then this Casey is the workhorse or the gold standard of microcurrent. But honestly, if you’re just starting, either the new face or the biotherapeutics are really good. Microcurrent machines. And again, if you need help, I can help you do that. So if you have any questions or need additional information about Microcurrent or this lecture, you can contact me at hampton’s acupuncture gmail or at info hampton’s acupuncture.com, or you can watch.

On Instagram as well. So this is a, just an abbreviated lecture about Microcurrent. There are many more out there. And again, I just wanna thank the American Acupuncture Council for allowing me to be here today. And thank you for joining me as well.