One of the most common areas that I’m asked to treat as a facial plastic surgeon is neck and jowl laxity. Most patients will ask me how this can be treated in a nonsurgical manner. While there have been many nonsurgical modalities developed over the last 10 years, these universally have fallen short in achieving significant improvement and high patient satisfaction. Some of these treatment modalities are Thermage, Fraxel and most recently Ulthera.
The gold standard of treatment has been a facelift which addresses the lower jowl and neck area. While a facelift achieves high patient satisfaction, it does involve surgery and significant healing time. There are many patients that are not interested in surgery but would be interested in a minimally invasive treatment option if it achieved noticeable improvement.
There is a new leading edge technology called ThermiTight. This procedure tightens the jowl and neck area and is done under local anesthesia with minimal to no downtime. This procedure provides a new approach to tightening of the skin. The concept behind ThermiTight is to use heat to tighten the collagen fibers. This tightening of collagen in turn tightens the skin improving the contour of the treated area. Whereas previous technologies have tried to use heat externally to tighten collagen, this technology uses heat beneath the surface of the skin to create the tightening. This is an essential difference in that the majority of collagen is located in the lower layers of the skin.
I was one of the first doctors in the Chicago area to begin using this technology and now have over six months and 30 patients experience in using this treatment. The results have been very promising with high patient satisfaction and minimal to no downtime. The procedure is done in the office under local anesthesia and takes less than an hour. I am very excited to be able to bring this new leading-edge technology to our patients.
