In a culture obsessed with retaining beauty indefinitely, a new craze has swept the country. As seen on television commercials or in advertisements run in such publications as People and InStyle magazines, Botox is touted as the new miracle wrinkle eraser. The advertisements, targeting 28- to 65-year-old females, sell the idea of wrinkles disappearing before your very eyes.
Recently, the Food and Drug Administration has required Allergen, the company that manufactures Botox, to pull their ads. The FDA says that the advertisements are misleading because they fail to mention the fact that the treatments are temporary.
People using Botox are going to great lengths to improve the way they look. Is potentially harming your body worth the temporary benefit of something as drastic as injecting poisons into your face? Botox is said to be the beauty treatment of the future. What happens if the approximately 1.6 million people who were injected with Botox last year find out that it was detrimental to their health?
The FDA approved Botox in April for the temporary relief of wrinkles. Produced from the same toxins that cause the food poisoning known as botulism, Botox works by freezing the muscles in which the drug is injected. The theory behind Botox is a muscle that cannot move, cannot wrinkle. So, rather than actually getting rid of the wrinkle, the treatment renders the facial muscles immobile.
According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Botox injections are the fastest-growing cosmetic procedure in the industry. More than 1.6 million people received injections in 2001. This number is 46 percent higher than the previous year.
A new, more controversial, way to administer the Botox treatments is in the form of “Botox parties.” These parties entail a group of people in a home, appetizers, maybe some wine, and most importantly, a doctor willing to perform the surgical procedure in a non-sterile environment. Social surgery? Seems quite inappropriate and dangerous to me.
It seems as though history has established that “miracle drugs” are not really as miraculous as they seem. Once thought of as a miracle weight loss drug, ephedra (ma huang), the active ingredient in many weight loss products, may be unsafe. The FDA reported that products containing ephedra have caused several illnesses including heart attacks, seizures, strokes and even death.
Botox treatments, among other cosmetic surgical procedures, show that American society is severely, and maybe even dangerously, narcissistic. Aging is a natural process, and every human being will eventually get older. Along with the aging process comes certain elements, one of them being wrinkles. Deal with it.
The treatments range anywhere from $300 to 1,000 per session. Instead of paying such an exorbitant amount of mone for a temporary solution to a lifelong problem, why not pay the money for some worthwhile counseling sessions? Self-esteem is priceless, and when a person has enough, I would bet that the need for Botox diminishes.
Rather than get a poison injected into your body, I propose that college-age people, as the next generation to deal with wrinkles, age gracefully without the aid of cosmetic treatments. Instead of having a frozen face, have one laden with wrinkles and feel fine with that.
If the norm does become Botox injections, and American civilization walks the streets with paralyzed faces, then I will be far more wrinkled than the rest. Refuse to go to great lengths to retain your youth, especially if those lengths could potentially jeopardize your health in the end.
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