Sponsored by: MyEllevate
Facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon Gregory Chernoff, MD (Santa Rosa, Calif.), starts out as a “nonbeliever” when devices and treatments first hit the market. Ultimately it is his patients that make him a believer, which is what happened with MyEllevate, the suture suspension system recently acquired by Cynosure (Westford, Mass.). His patients were so enthusiastic about MyEllevate, Dr. Chernoff expanded his use of this system. “Without exception, every one of my patients that have had MyEllevate really love it,” he reported.
For those patients seeking a minimally invasive jawline procedure, MyEllevate fills the void in treatment options.
Dr. Chernoff started using the suture suspension system as an option for patients between 25 and 40 years of age, who came in with a common complaint; they did not like the definition of their jawlines.
“They point to their submandibular glands, which often are low lying and detract from the jawline’s definition,” he noted. MyEllevate is a very minimally invasive procedure that allows us to improve jawline definition dramatically and to lift up the submandibular glands if they are low lying. The treatment enhances patient's profiles. As one patient put it, ‘It made my face look like I lost 25 to 30 pounds.’”
As Dr. Chernoff explained, “If you just liposuction a patient’s neck, you have not addressed the gravitational descent of their neck muscles. Furthermore, I was always underwhelmed with what Kybella does for the neck. It was not just a one and done, and patients could be as swollen as a pelican swallowing a bird.”
Young patients with genetically poor jawline definition are not the only patients to benefit from MyEllevate. Many surgeons report that patients in their 40s and 50s are ideal MyEllevate candidates.
Dr. Chernoff has expanded the MyEllevate option to surgical patients. Specifically, he recommends MyEllevate to patients with poor neck skin elasticity who plan to have a traditional surgical face or neck lift.
“Without good skin elasticity, we might get poor recoil of the skin when we surgically lift it. We use MyEllevate in those patients to give them better neck definition in conjunction with doing more of the deep plane lifting in the anterior face,” Dr. Chernoff shared.
He might also recommend MyEllevate to post-facelift and neck lift patients who want more jawline definition.
MyEllevate is a suture system, but it is not a traditional thread lifting procedure. According to Dr. Chernoff, when inventing this surgical suture system, Beverly Hills, Calif.-based plastic surgeon Gregory Mueller, MD, specifically noted the problems related to gauging depth with suture systems of the past.
MyEllevate’s patented Light-Guided Surgical Suture System, or ICLED, allows surgeons to easily place a suture support system without incisions that immediately elevates and approximates underlying structures.
“Start to finish, I can do it in about 45 minutes,” Dr. Chernoff stated. In Dr. Chernoff’s experience, MyEllevate treatment has mini- mal risk, pain and downtime. “The vast majority of my patients just take Tylenol, if that. In most cases, if I treat a patient on a Thursday or Friday, they are fine by Monday. Patients really like that aspect of the procedure.”