Today’s lecture is about microneedling the hands, because one of the things that happens as we age, our hands can develop age spots. And the skin itself can lose its elasticity.
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Hi, my name’s Michelle Gellis and I am an acupuncture physician. Today I will be speaking to you about microneedling for aging hands. So just a little bit about me before we get started. I am a former faculty member and clinic supervisor at the Maryland University of Integrative Health, and I am currently on faculty at Yoan University in California.
And I’ve been teaching facial and cosmetic acupuncture classes since 2005. I have been published several times in the Journal of Chinese Medicine, acupuncture today, and also the acupuncture desk reference. So here are some pictures of me teaching. This was in Sydney and in Sydney, Australia, and in California.
So I do travel and teach internationally.
The first thing I wanna speak to you about is microneedling. I mentioned that I teach cosmetic. . And facial acupuncture classes. Neuromuscular conditions. Cosmetic conditions. So why would you want to, might, why might you want to think about adding microneedling into your. Cosmetic acupuncture practice or into your practice at all?
Microneedling is an alternative to surgery and it can address things skin level conditions such as fine lines, acne scars, loose skin, enlarged pores crow’s feet, lip wrinkles. Dark spots and even stretch marks on the body and can be very beneficial for hair restoration. And that can be head hair eyebrow hair, even empty spots if you have a beard.
So how does this work? What does it do? It helps to stimulate your body’s own collagen production and any products that you put on your skin like serum, it will help to increase the absorption of those products by up to a thousand percent. And all of this is clinically . Proven there have been hundreds and hundreds of studies on microneedling and its effectiveness for hair growth, stimulating collagen, treating scars, and increasing product absorption.
The benefits of microneedling are that there is very little downtime, unlike some other . Cosmetic procedures like lasers or surgery, there’s very little downtime. There’s very low risk. It is extremely effective and it can, as I mentioned, help to boost the natural collagen production in the body. It’s very comfortable.
Most people don’t need any numbing cream. But it, the process itself is quick, it’s comfortable, and the results can last up to five years. So here is a cross-section of skin. So this is what a piece of skin looks like, and here we have the epidermis, and then we have the dermal layer. And then below that we have the subcutaneous later layers.
So when you’re doing microneedling, you’re only affecting, all you need to affect is the epidermis. And here is a cross-section of the epidermis. And this very top layer is called the stratum corneum. And this is . The way that skin reproduces is, it starts at the bottom and then all the new good cells work their way up.
And this top layer flakes off. So microneedling when you’re microneedling, you have two different types of tips you can use on the pen. And I’ll talk about those in a minute. But one type just sloughs off the sh stratum corneum. And then the other type will go a little deeper down into the epidermis and we’ll get right into the base layer of the epidermis, which is this stratum based saw layer.
And that is where the new . Healthy skin cells get produced and by needling down through these upper layers, you will create new healthy skin cells more quickly. And this helps with wrinkles, the dark spots, and can even tighten the skin up a little bit. If your skin is . Sagging. It used to be believed that you had to go down into the dermal layer here and this can be very painful and there can be a lot of bleeding.
But what they have found in the past couple of years is you really don’t need to go that deep in order to . Affect these new fibroblasts, these new skin cells to be created. So this is what a cross-section might look like of the microneedles going down into that epidermis. And when these very sharp needles just puncture the epidermis, they go up and down very quickly and they create
They stimulate new stem cells and also fibroblasts. And this helps with things like scars and wrinkles, discoloration, and the other things that we. Mentioned, so it looks like this. You have your piece of skin, maybe this is a wrinkle or a scar, and you poke little holes into the epidermis.
You get new arterial and venous capillaries and the fibroblasts, and they all come together to form these new collagen fibers, which makes your skin look smooth and healthy and youthful. Another benefit of microneedling is it helps with the endothelial cells inside your capillaries and blood vessels, so this can help with things.
Like spider veins, it can increase the blood supply to the scalp. So this helps your scalp to be more healthy. And in addition to your products getting absorbed and exfoliating the all of the old sebum that can build up on your scalp, it helps the blood supply to the hair follicles, which helps your hair follicles to stay healthy, and it helps the little hairs to poke out.
So this is a picture of a microneedle pen, and we have a little bird joining us for today’s webinar. So I have a microneedle pen here and I’m gonna show this to you really quickly. If we can go to meet. Thank you. We can go to me. They are . Package like this, and then this end, you can plug in if you want to, or you can screw the plugin end off.
And it comes with two batteries and the batteries screw on like this, and then you would put the tip. So this is a needle tip. . And if you just, if you press, let’s see, where am I going? If you press on the end, you could see the little needles poking out. So what happens when you put the tip on the pen?
You click it on nice and tight, and then you turn the pen on
and it will. You see the numbers changing and the higher the number, the faster the little needles will go up and down. They’re moving in and out. And then you can also adjust the height right here. That’s my little adjustment. You can height you can adjust the height of the needles, and this determines how deep the needles will go in.
And the other type of tip I’m just gonna show you while you have me on full screen is called a nano needle. And as you can see, the needles are very tiny. You can hardly see them. They are like little tiny cones. And those are used for the red part of the lip. Inside the orbital rim areas that you normally would not want to needle.
Okay. We can go back to the slides. Today’s lecture is about microneedling the hands, because one of the things that happens as we age, our hands can develop age spots. And the skin itself can lose its elasticity. So when you pull on the skin on the back of the hands, it doesn’t snap back and it can look saggy.
And also the veins on the back of the hand can become very prominent. And I noticed this on myself as I was getting older. I’m 62 now and I was really becoming conscious of what the back of my hands looked like. And I used to derma roll them. But once I started microneedling and the microneedle pen that I showed you is made by AccuLift and there are a lot of great
Microneedle pens out there. So I strongly recommend we don’t have time today to talk about microneedle pens, but I strongly recommend doing your research about pens. But I started microneedling the back of my hands and it really helped with any dark spots and veins. And I was very happy that Really faded out the dark spots and helped my hands to look really youthful because most people focus on their face or their neck, but they’re not thinking so much back of their about their hands.
Now there are special concerns though when you are talking about the hands, and that is the hands are very bony. The veins can be very close to the surface. They can be very sensitive, especially when you’re microneedling on bone and because the fingers and the hands do not have as much blood circulation as other parts of the body.
especially in the elderly, the healing capacity can be reduced. So these are things you have to think about when you’re going to be microneedling the hands.
Also you, even if you’re just microneedling someone’s hands, let’s say they’re coming for cosmetic acupuncture, you do the cosmetic acupuncture on their face, and you wanna do some microneedling on the back of their hands, you want to make certain that you inquire about all of your usual contraindications, things like steroids.
Blood thinners, any prescriptions they might be on. And then after they have their . Procedure, their treatment that they use sunscreen on the back of their hands because our hands, we always think, oh, sunscreen, I’m gonna put sunscreen on my face. But we don’t always think about the back of our hands.
And then we’re driving, we’re biking, we’re golfing, we’re playing tennis, and our hands can be exposed to the sun just as often as our face. So the protocol. And again, this is just an overview. This is by no means in-depth training. If you want an in-depth training, you can go to my website facial acupuncture classes.com, and I go through a full microneedling training.
But just as an overview, the patient would wash their hands. You need to wear gloves. You can apply numbing cream if they’d like it, and that it needs to stay for about 20 minutes. Then the numbing cream comes off. You can use a cotton pad with alcohol on it or even some makeup remover with alcohol on it.
And, Definitely wipe the back of their hands with alcohol. Then you’re going to apply your treatment serum, usually a hyaluronic acid, and then you are going to adjust the pen height and needle depth according to the directions. And normally the technique with the pen is just up and down. You’re not gonna wanna go left to because you’ll be going over.
You’d be going over tendons and you don’t wanna do that. So it’s up and down when you’re on the hands. And then you might use a stamping motion if they have any spots, and you might get a little pinpoint bleeding, but that’s okay. It’s perfectly fine. You just. Go through that. And then if there’s any prominent veins, you want to go gently over those if they have any veins on the back of their hands.
So here’s an example of someone that I did. I. Just a couple of treatments on and you can see that hopefully you can see better there. This one spot in particular really faded tremendously and this had bothered her quite a bit. And little bit more collagen starting to form after just a couple of treatments.
So the treatments are spread out once a month. And normally four to six treatments is what is required. And if you want more information about microneedling training, I do live classes. And my schedule is at fa facial acupuncture classes.com. And you can also follow me on my social. It’s . You can just find me at Michelle Gillis and I have a facial acupuncture Facebook group as well.
I’m on all forms of social media under Michelle Gillis. Thank you so much and thank you to the American Acupuncture Council for hosting this. .