Seattle Plastic Surgeon shares a very quick history of Botox.
My very first Botox patient. I injected her scowl lines and was met with great success.
I remember, years ago, hearing about doctors injecting each other with Botox to reduce their scowl lines and thinking: how crazy is that?????
But the anecdotal reports kept coming in and in 1992 a Canadian ophthalmologist, Dr. Jean Carruthers and her husband, Alastair, published their finding that Botox is effective in treating moderate of severe glabellar frown lines (those nasty vertical scowl creases right between the eyes). Dr. Carruthers got the idea to try this because Botox had been used for years by ophthalmologists to treat involuntary squinting. She and other astute opthalmologists noticed that the areas injected with Botox would loose their wrinkles.
Botox quickly became one of the most widely researched pharaceuticals in the world with more than 2500 articles in scientific and medical journals written about it. Ten years after the paper by Drs. Carruthers and Carruthers, the FDA approved Botox for cosmetic use and well, the rest is history. Botox is now approved for 25 unique indications in 85 countries. In 2011, according to the American Society fo Plastic Surgeons’ procedural statistics, 5.6 million Americans opted for Botox treatment. Some days when Botox is flying off my freezer shelf, I feel like I’m the one doing all those injections!
It is the scientific serendipity of the Botox story that I find so interesting. It makes me wonder what other discovery is just an astute observation away from being the NEXT BIG THING.
Thanks for reading! Dr. Lisa Lynn Sowder
@lisalynnsowder
