Dr. George Semel: Looking Younger On A Budget and Reverse Aging Now
Beauty Now
Teri Hausman
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Episode 59 - Dr. George Semel: Looking Younger On A Budget and Reverse Aging Now

This economy is a big stress but everyone wants to stay young looking. What are the best and most cost effective way to do this? Beauty Now interviewed leading plastic surgeon on the easiest and best ways to save money and save your face. Peels are a dime a dozen and can really reverse aging but what ones work? Dr. Semel tells us how to find them and what products work. Dr. Semel also shares with us the latest in stem cells and growth hormones. What is fact and what is fiction? Also, find out about the time lapse wand. I know I want one. Download this podcast and find out now.

Transcript

Transcript

Teri Struck: I’m Teri Struck, host of Beauty Now, a weekly podcast that brings you the latest in beauty innovations. Check out our past shows that have included top experts in the world of beauty, including Dr. Perricone on your skin, Dr. Moelleken for your breasts, Dr. Toby Mayer on facial implants, Dr. Liu on the lap band, experts on hair, lash, lasik, lasers, lifts and more.

Teri Struck: And in today’s economy, we’ve chosen Dr. George Semel, a top plastic surgeon in Southern California. He’s going to give us his best tips to keeping up your appearance in a tough economy. Welcome Dr. Semel and thanks so much for being with us today.

Dr. George Semel: It’s good to be here.

Teri Struck: So what can we do in this economy? Many people are cutting back and beauty treatments, I’m sure many husbands are like, “Sorry honey, you’re not going to get to get that done.” What’s your best advice?

Dr. George Semel: Well before you do anything, first of all half the population is about 39, or really under 39, and the thing is they need to do a preventative strategy, and most people want to do a preventative strategy. The time honored traditional thing is to do a chemical peel.  Now chemical peels come in many flavors. There are home peels. The home peels include resorcinol peels where you get brown and peel in a day or two and you’re really very freshened. And you can do a slow lactic peel like twice a week. When you do a lactic peel, you could go to your daughter’s wedding after doing it twenty minutes later. Your skin is smoother, you’re flushed, you look good and it doesn’t make trouble. It is the safest of the lactic peels.

Teri Struck: So when you call it a peel, a lactic peel and you can go somewhere twenty minutes later, how does that peel you?

Dr. George Semel: It actually exfoliates you and smooths the skin, it just doesn’t create a lot of visible damage, and it’s noticeable. If you try it you can see and feel the difference. You do it, you put it on for about twenty minutes and then wash it off in the shower or at the sink, but very, very thoroughly, and it just dissolves the outer layer of the skin. The way peels work is by irritating. The way a laser works is by irritating as well, but see a laser is very hot. They’re unpredictable with pigmented skin, they’re unpredictable with light skins because there’s an atrophy that comes with laser later. Peels have been around since Cleopatra. There were buttermilk baths, which is a lactic acid peel basically, and they go back into ancient times. So the thing is you have a great safety factor and you don’t have a healing factor. There are stronger peels that you can use, as I mentioned, that are resorcinol or that are acetic acid, and they are really much more difficult to deal with.

Teri Struck: Well this is kind of confusing. So you’re saying that there’s lactic acid. How do we differentiate between all these different types of peels?

Dr. George Semel: Well we make a thing called lactic peel. When you go to a doctor for a peel they will tend to use thioglycolic acid. Thioglycolic acid is a short molecule. A short molecule is unpredictable because you can have a perfect result ten out of twelve times, and then one time it can go a little deeper because it runs a little deeper. The doctors peel that’s safe to use is a phenol peel, but that isn’t something you would do at home and that carries a ten day downtime and that’s a lot to go through, so the thing is you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to go through laser because you don’t want the late atrophy. The heat of the laser will hurt your stem cells. You don’t want to have a healing factor at all in a bad economy. You don’t want to have a healing factor in any economy because you want to do your peel, do it very, very slowly, get your effect over a period of time. What difference would it make if you did a home peel twice a week for four months and got the same result as you had from a peel that you are going to go to a doctors office and have a week of healing from?

Teri Struck: So I think many women and men are probably going, “Thank god”, I mean something that you can do at home and not have to go and rely on the doctors treatment, especially now.

Dr. George Semel: Well the thing is, we send it to you in the mail. 7 or 8 lactic peels would cost you about fifty dollars, and…

Teri Struck: Wow, that’s great.

Dr. George Semel: you do it at home when you feel like it. I mean it’s a very inexpensive way to go.

Teri Struck: What else can we do?

Dr. George Semel: Well there’s another thing that’s occurred. I don’t know if you’ve read the latest research out of Europe, but the things is they’re talking about changing Botox into a topical. And they’re not sure if it’s safe, and that’s, Botox is a toxin. But there are analogues of Botox that are very, very interesting. There’s lavender extract. There’s bamboo extract. There’s Gaba. The way these work is they interrupt the neuromuscular junction but incompletely, so you still have motion so you look natural, you have smoothing of the wrinkles. The theory is that you’re going to relax the muscular junction, and when the muscular junction is relaxed you then apply peptides, and the peptides heal the skin…

Teri Struck: And where do we get this?

Dr. George Semel: Well there are a number of gaba products. We make one called Timelapse Wand and Timelapse G. But if you put in gaba onto the internet, you would find any number of people making them. And some of them are on television and…

Teri Struck: Well to find a good one, I mean, go to personallifemedia.com and we’re going to link you up with Dr. Semel’s website, which we can get your products, correct?

Dr. George Semel: Yes, easily.

Teri Struck: Right.

Dr. George Semel: And there’s another trick too, which is if you take the protein and put it in the cream, you can fill the lines at the same time you’re relaxing the neuromuscular junction, and that’s what Timelapse G does. In order to get somebody to repair their skin, you can’t really count on their nutrition or what they’ve been doing. So when we made our products we had a very interesting idea. We supplied the neuromuscular junction relaxation. We use more than one active because different people are different, and when you use multiple actives you can use less of each kind so that there’s less risk. Then we give you the raw materials. We give you proline, we give you vitamin C, we give you vitamin A as a retinol, so you have the building blocks in which to make the collagen that we’re stimulating the repair of. We give you proline as well and lycine, which are the building blocks of collagen, and then we use a peptide. Hydroxy proline is the original peptide, we’ve been using it since 1995, and what that originally was though to do and does do is it makes collagen 3. Little children heal very well and they’re entirely made of collagen 3 so that they’re very, very stretchy, it’s like stretch nylon and they bend and they move in any which way and they heal without a scar. That’s why the cleft lips and palates when they’re repaired, in the United States, they’re repaired on very, very young children in order to avoid the scar formation. So that’s really a very, very good thing. When you’re 18 you almost have no collagen 3. What happens then is that by spraying – we make it as a, our first product was a thing called Collagen Stimulator which had just peptide in it. We’ve since added other peptides and corn based growth factors because we’ve kept up with the times. But it was originally a very good product because we made it for our surgical practice to spray on fresh wounds so that people would heal without a scar. When you have surgery, it’s great to have it but you don’t want to have a story to tell, so if you spray this on when you’re healing the scar goes away and you don’t see it. And we…

Teri Struck: And it really helps…

Dr. George Semel: It’s a wonderful thing. We have a loyal following since 1995 with this, it’s when I first began doing research. And you know, as an English major, I went to art school, I have the totally opposite background than somebody who would be going basic science and working in a laboratory.

Teri Struck: Well that’s good they know. So, and it’s so confusing for all our listeners really to hear about all of these different peptides and…

Dr. George Semel: How can I make it less confusing? What would, should I sort of summarize it and line it up so it isn’t confusing?

Teri Struck: That’d be really great.

Dr. George Semel: Okay look, chemical peels go to ancient times. What they do is they irritate the skin and the skin then heals. They have the advantage of not disturbing the stem cell. When you use phenol in a doctors office it only goes so deep, so it’s safe. The other peels have a less of a margin of safety. There are home peels. A phenol peel has one of each group (unintelligible). Resorcinol is related to it. It creates a minor crusp, but it only goes so deep and it’s safe. If you’re going to have a peel at home, there is this glycolic series of peels. Of all the glycolic acids, the safest one is lactic acid. Lactic acid can be used at home. You can send it in a jar to somebody you haven’t seen, and if they follow instructions and leave it on for 20 to 30 minutes, it will be okay. Frankly I’ve tested it. I’ve fallen asleep with it on myself and woken up the next day and had nothing happen; it has a tremendous margin of safety. Slow peeling is like cooking in a crockpot. The food is just as cooked in the morning with a crockpot with slow heat as it would be if it were brazed on a grill. If you go slow you don’t have downtime because the cells get to repair themselves in a very slow and methodical way. What people have always done to look young and to keep their skin smooth and to get that little bit of contraction to stimulate the collagen to form is to use chemical peeling. In the modern day lasers came, but lasers require great skill, they’re somewhat unpredictable, they’re done by a technician generally, not by a doctor and the heat is a factor. Boiling water is a hundred degrees centigrade. A cool laser is 95 degrees, very close to boiling water. A regular laser is 600 degrees centigrade so you’re depending upon some kind of a cooling system to cool the outer surface of the skin, where you’re burning the inner surface of the skin, and in the process of this heat you’re destroying the stem cells. A long time ago, when, before fire retardant clothing, when burns were more prevalent, when a little child grew hair on the burn you knew the child would heal and nobody really knew why. When they learned about stem cells they found that each hair follicle has a stem cell, so when the stem cells appeared they would grow new skin and do well. If there was no hair the child would die because they couldn’t repair. When you lose your stem cells with the heat activated process you’re really doing yourself a disservice because most people have a really good chance of living to be 85 or more, many people living to be over a hundred are an increasing group. What 40 year olds know is that they have the same hopes and desires that they had at 18, and 60 year olds know that between 18 and 40, I mean you’re more mature, your goals are more realistic, but you still have the same hopes and desires of a young person. You don’t get too old to live, and so you have to preserve yourself over a long period of time. The future is stem cells because stem cells don’t require repair instructions. They will, they will do it without instructions…

Teri Struck: Yeah, but how are these stem cells applied. I mean, are these in the products themselves or…

Dr. George Semel: Well we don’t, the way you get stem cells in my practice is with a fat transplant. It turns out that fat transplants have the most stem cells of any other part of the body. When you inject filler into a face the face looks better. When you inject fat into a face the face lights up and the skin changes. Fat is a permanent thing if it’s done correctly. You have to build it up, you have to take the fat very carefully under low pressure, you mustn’t handle the fat too much, and then the stem cells go in and they repair with the tissue. And so the skin smooths out and it stays. I’ve had fat transplants and lipsin since 1989. You know, they’re successful, they’re very successful.

Teri Struck: I want to talk more about this. We’re going to talk more about the fat transplants and the stem cells. This is really interesting. We’re going to be right back with Dr. George Semel. Hang with us. We’re going to thank our sponsors.

Teri Struck: I’m Teri Struck, host of Beauty Now. We’re back with Dr. George Semel. He’s telling us what we can do in this economy to keep ourselves looking young and feeling great. Welcome back Dr. Semel.

Dr. George Semel: It’s good to be back.

Teri Struck: We were just talking about fat injections, that it contains stem cells. So tell us more about it. So how do we do this? You go where?

Dr. George Semel: Well the thing is that the way that you experience aging is that you start to look tired. And that can come with too much sun exposure where sunscreens will help, and if you use the right sunscreen and you use the right topical peptides and the right topical vitamins, your skin will, the skin will revive. We make a whole line of products for that. You can repair DNA. The way DNA is repaired in that circumstance… So you can take a product derived from plankton, and if the cell has damaged DNA the cell will die. If it has one good set of chromosomes, the plankton will come in, the plankton enzyme will come in and cut off the bad chromosomes so that the cell can then repair the other chromosomes and you have a whole cell. When cells are badly damaged that’s how skin cancer occurs, that’s how keritosis occur. So the thing is that topicals are very, very advanced, and this is short of a stem cell application. The closest to stem cells being injected now are fat transplants. When you begin to age, some people get fine lines and some people lose fill. Fat is a very good way to restore fill in a permanent way. The hyaluronic acid fillers were lumpy. There’s a whole new series of fillers coming out that are probably better than hyaluronic acid, and there is a new collagen out that is not terribly expensive. You know, collagen was a good filler, you just had to do it too frequently. But there’s one that’s coming out that’s going to last between six months and a year, depending upon your own metabolism. But if you do…

Teri Struck: And is this product out of Europe? And a lot of times there…

Dr. George Semel: I believe it is out of Europe, yes. It’s a European product, but it’s just hitting the market here. The, but the thing is from the point of view of your own pocketbook, if you do fat it’s once, you’ll do it again in five years maybe to restore it because you’ve lost some fat and you’ve aged more and things have changed. And by keeping the volume up and by keeping your skin elastic, say with peptides that stimulate collagen 3, there are other peptides that tighten the skin. There’s a product called Argireline that was in any number of products that will stimulate the turnover of collagen period, just all the collagens, and it causes a tightening of the skin.

Teri Struck: You’re telling us that we can come in for fat transplants and that works, but doesn’t that only work in your lips and around your nose? What…

Dr. George Semel: No, you know, the best place to use it is to re-suspend the face. You go… See, people don’t do their lower lids like they use to. When you take the fat out of lower lids, when you have puffy eyes, it looks very clean, but then when you get old you get a hollow eyed look because you lose the fat, so somebody has a little puff around the eye. Now this isn’t everybody, you have to have good clinical judgment and some people need their bags removed. But many people just have like a big trough, like a tear circle, and you fill that in with fat transplants very, very gingerly into the muscle, not under the skin, in lumps with, deep, deep along the bone. And when you do that you then restore the contour and you’re lifting the face. And then you go along the side and you’re restoring the fill of youth. If you look at young people, they have a little bit more fleshy faces than older people do. And so you can restore that fill as you go. You don’t have to let it fade. When you do an older person, they’re going to look operated if you just lift. And so you need to restore, you need to restore the face with fat.

Teri Struck: How long does the fat last?

Dr. George Semel: I think it lasts forever if it lives. Not every graph is equally successful, but the successful ones go on for long periods of time.

Teri Struck: Well what can people do about their hands or chest? You can inject fat there, can you?

Dr. George Semel: Where?

Teri Struck: In your hands, in your chest. That’s where a lot of women complain about same aging. And I know you can probably peel them, right?

Dr. George Semel: Chemical peeling works well for the chest. You can put that in the hands. You can peel a hand carefully?

Teri Struck: Do you do that?

Dr. George Semel: I do.

Teri Struck: You do, you stick fat in the hands. ‘Cause I’ve seen actually on one show, they were injecting some sort of filler into the hands, which was shocking actually.

Dr. George Semel: Well, you can’t wake the dead. There’s another way to handle hands entirely. And this of course is for the appropriate person with the appropriate blood tests. When your upper lids begin to fade, you’re having a change in your estrogen or testosterone and sometimes hormonal replacement will fix that. With the fist jowls at 38, it’s failure of growth hormone, and sometimes if you give growth hormone, assuming that you have low blood levels of growth hormone that won’t repair that. I went back to school at the University of Barcelona in 2005 to learn a very sophisticated anti aging. That course isn’t given anymore, but they were trying to do plastic surgery with hormones because I believe that over time stem cells, hormones and topical agents will replace most of plastic surgery in moderately, young, and early older people. And I think that these are (unintelligible), these acumens make the surgery last longer. You don’t want to look tight, you want to look believable, so if you, you can go through the side of the ear and tighten the side of the face with almost no scars and not go in the hair and not go behind the ear and get a wonderful result. You need to be patient, it’s a lot of work, but you can do it. And then if you restore the mouth and the middle face with fat, so you have a curve of a youthful lip and the fullness of a youthful lip – and I’m not talking about, you know, Hollywood big lips, I’m talking about…

Teri Struck: Right.

Dr. George Semel: nice normal lips.

Teri Struck: People that look normal.

Dr. George Semel: Yes, I’m a very conservative person.

Teri Struck: I think that is good because you do not want to look like some of these people that are scary.

Dr. George Semel: You don’t want to look like work. If it looks like you’ve had work done, kill your surgeon. No, I shouldn’t say that.

Teri Struck: Well we know a couple we could kill. That’s kidding.

Dr. George Semel: You need to… I work in a small building by myself, I’m very cautious…

Teri Struck: And you’re still alive…

Dr. George Semel: I need to be able to go around by myself and be okay. But the thing is that if you restore the fullness of the face, and there’s a fluff to a young face that fat restores. Now when you look at somebody 40 and you look at somebody 60 trying to be 40, the difference is in the skin. And then you can do a peeling and product and sun (unintelligible)…

Teri Struck: I’m a big believer in peels. I’ve always loved the product Retin A, I think it’s good when done correctly and alternated with different things.

Dr. George Semel: Key word is alternated. Retin A is good in cycles; every six weeks, every two months, every three months. It doesn’t build up collagen the way the newer products do. It was developed in 1978 I think at Boston University. I can’t remember the man who did it, I knew him at one time, I just lost the name. But it’s not, it’s a very good enduring product. What Vitamin A does is it turns over the protein, and small amounts of Vitamin A are very, very effective. It can be Retinyl Palmitate, it can be Resinol, it doesn’t matter what type of Vitamin A. Small amounts of Vitamin A are anti cancer. So aesthetically you want to take Vitamin D, probably a couple thousand units a day ‘cause that’s really anti cancer, particularly D3.

Teri Struck: Can we get that from sun?

Dr. George Semel: Well you need some sun for it, for it to work, yeah.

Teri Struck: Right.

Dr. George Semel: A little sun exposure is good, a lot is bad.

Teri Struck: Right.

Dr. George Semel: The reason sun is bad right now is because the magnetic field is changing. You know, the Poll’s change every ten thousand years, and the North and South Pole are reversing now, and it’s going to take another thousand to two thousand years to complete. No one’s, it hasn’t been written in history doing this before.

Teri Struck: Well you’re really showing some innovative stuff. I mean this is great, the stem cells, I’m interested in all this stuff, it’s really interesting.

Dr. George Semel: I’m glad you’re having fun. The magnetic field kept out the radiation, so the radiation that’s coming through is much stronger than it used to be. And so the thing is you need very short exposures to sun, but you need a little sunlight.

Teri Struck: And the sunscreen helps with radiation?

Dr. George Semel: It helps, sunscreen, there’s a new one in Europe that’s a little bit better, but a sunscreen should be waterproof. There’s not a lot of difference between a 15 and a… A 15 sunscreen is 95 percent effective, like a 50 is like maybe 7 percent effective. So waterproof is what makes the sunscreen effective, and what makes one better than the other is the vehicle and how they apply. But you have to apply smoothly and evenly to be effective. There’s a whole story with the titanium’s and the zinc’s because although they’re reflecting right out they think they may be effecting the right back in as well, they may not be as good as we originally thought they were. So I don’t know if that’s necessarily the best thing to do, but there are really good sunscreens coming out.

Teri Struck: Well lets recap what you’re saying. You’re saying that to peel your skin we can alternate it with different products, which you can go to personallifemedia.com and link to your website, and also Dr. Perricone has some products coming out, and I think you really have to research the different products to say, to get what exactly you’re saying that they have in them.

Dr. George Semel: Well yes. There are a lot of choices, and most people, we manufacture, we formulate and manufacture our own stuff. And I answer the phone, I mean I’ll talk to you.

Teri Struck: That’s great.

Dr. George Semel: and tell you what’s good.

Teri Struck: That’s really important, because I think it’s just so confusing, there’s so many different products out there today.

Dr. George Semel: For example, one of the key ingredients that’s very interesting is Isoflavone. Isoflavone is a soy. Now systemic soy is probably not as good for you as we thought it was five or six years ago. The topical Isoflavone, both for males and females, will smooth out the skin and you can see the difference and it’s worth putting in.

Teri Struck: Now that, is that what Pervage has in it?

Dr. George Semel: I don’t know. I’d have to look it up.

Teri Struck: I think it’s… What’s a Isoflavone?

Dr. George Semel: It may be a soy product. I don’t know if it’s an Isoflavone…

Teri Struck: Yeah.

Dr. George Semel: You want the Isoflavone. The other word for it is Genistein. They were using it for male prostates for a while, but the thing is soy takes away the testosterone receptive for the male, it’s not really a good thing.

Teri Struck: Now do you believe in hormone testing too for your patients or how do you…

Dr. George Semel: We do. I’m glad you asked that.

Teri Struck: Who do you refer that? Do you have your own special doctor or do you do your own blood tests?

Dr. George Semel: We do our own blood tests. We have a deal with the lab because it can be very expensive. When you have hormonal testing you need to ask the lab. And one of the things, you not only want to know what the hormones are, but you want to know what the normal hormones are for a young person. It’s smart if you’re 30 or 40 to go and get baseline hormones and then lock them up in your vault so you know what they should be and know what the normals of the lab were. But you want… See having hormones isn’t enough, they have to be circulatory and free. So the thing is that you need to know what your sex hormone binding proteins are, or your IGF One binding proteins are. You only need to run one of them. If your binding proteins are high, then the hormone isn’t getting out. When people get fat, and if you talk about liposuction in fat, when you do liposuction on somebody you don’t change their numbers. There’s a thing called metabolic syndrome, it was described certainly in the last five years, and what metabolic syndrome is it’s insulin resistance where you don’t respond to insulin. You tend to have high insulin as a result of it, you have low growth hormone. You have high binding proteins, so your hormones aren’t getting out. And you’re fat. If you give somebody like that growth hormone they begin to get thin. They need to be on a good diet, they need to exercise, but, you know, 30 percent of the people who are fat eat less than the people who are thin and they say so and they’re taking a bad rap.

Teri Struck: So how do you take growth hormone? Do you get it injected or is it…?

Dr. George Semel: That’s injectable, and right now it’s very expensive, but it could come down again. I mean it wasn’t expensive for a while when we were getting it in from China. I mean it’s a marketplace, it will come down again as more people use it.

Teri Struck: I actually read though, and correct me and tell our listeners, that growth hormone can cause cancer. Is that true?

Dr. George Semel: No, no. I’ve been on it since 1990. It does not cause cancer. There isn’t accident on growth hormone that anyone can point to.

Teri Struck: So, what you think is we use growth hormone as we get older and that you replace it and it helps with your anti aging and stem cells?

Dr. George Semel: Absolutely, and you’ll hold a facelift better if you can and you certainly stay lean and mean.

Teri Struck: Lean and mean. I just want to be lean, not mean.

Dr. George Semel: Well lean and mean in a good sense.

Teri Struck: Okay then. I think I’m too…

Dr. George Semel: In a Shakespearean, (unintelligible)….

Teri Struck: Well I am really interested in the growth hormones, there’s very little men that think about it.

Dr. George Semel: They were originally testing in Sweden on six or eight old men, 75 years old, not so old by today’s standards, but it was in 1990. And they gave them pretty high doses of growth hormone, and they became muscular, they became alert, they were pretty active and they were on it for six months, and when they took them off it, it all went away after a period of time.
Teri Struck: But how does this apply? Let me say, do you cover injections or do they give themselves injections?

Dr. George Semel: They five their selves injections. It’s based on blood levels. You monitor the blood levels, so you have a normal blood level for say somebody 40. You only replace what you need. You don’t do what you don’t need. All hormones are safe only if you exercise. Half of any anti aging strategy is exercise.

Teri Struck: Yeah, you just need to get out there and do something, even if it’s walking or something like that.

Dr. George Semel: There’s a bit more to it. And that it is that it has to be upper body exercise. Conductors with the longest of our testing people are testing people longer than anybody, and that’s probably because they don’t pay nobody no mind and they’re happy and they’re single minded, they do what they need to do. But the conductors the longest of them because they use their upper bodies and nobody quite understands what that’s about. But upper body exercise seems to have some contribution…

Teri Struck: Weight training?

Dr. George Semel: Yes. Absolutely.

Teri Struck: I so appreciate you (unintelligible) I think.

Dr. George Semel: Well the thing is if you have a great diet, and the secret to a great diet is very simple; it’s no sugar, you know, no free sugar, you can have all the complex sugars you want, all the fruit, all the vegetables you want. You should have slow cooked protein, which we made reference to the crock pot earlier…

Teri Struck: Right.

Dr. George Semel: And exercise, and replace your hormones as you need it, you could go forever. Young people don’t get sick. Young people don’t get cancer. Their hormones are good. When people get sick things are out of whack. And so the theory, though unproven, is that if you have everything corrected you shouldn’t get sick.

Teri Struck: And what I’d really like to tell all the listeners and I pretty much say on any show is go to specialists, go to a board certified surgeon in their area, whether it be a derm, plastic surgeon or… I wouldn’t go to a dentist for a breast aug I’m pretty sure.

Dr. George Semel: They’re pretty big in Vegas I hear.

Teri Struck: They are, I just heard it. So I want to say that on every show in case somebody misses that. Look up the doctor, you can go and check out their credentials.

Dr. George Semel: Yeah, my dentist, whom I adore, does fillers, I can’t believe it.

Teri Struck: It’s true. I had a girlfriend call me, and I’ve said this on another show, and she said this doctor doesn’t believe in endoscopic (unintelligible), and I said, “Well lets look up his credentials”, and it turned out he was like an internist that had taken a cosmetic surgery, you know, weekend course. So, no, he doesn’t believe in it because he doesn’t know how to do it, it’s not what he went to school for. Not that he’s not a great internist, but… So check out your doctors and especially when you’re dealing with hormones too. So I think it’s all key. We’re running out of time. If…

Dr. George Semel: Can I add my two cents?

Teri Struck: Please do.

Dr. George Semel: You need to go to somebody who’s going to look at you as a whole person. There’s a Russian proverb that says “A shoemaker sees the world as a shoe.” You don’t want to go to the surgeon for surgery. You want to go to a surgeon who’s going to tell you that you should lose weight and not want to operate on you and might offer you some hormones or guide you in the right direction. You don’t want to just be harvested. You don’t want to send somebody’s kids to school, you want to, you want care and be treated like a whole human being.

Teri Struck: You know, you said that very well, I am very impressed, it’s so true. I mean it’s so sad when somebody goes in and the weigh three hundred pounds and they’re going to ask for lipo, that doesn’t work. We’re out of time. We’ll have you back Dr. Semel.

Dr. George Semel: I hope so. I had a good time. It went very quick.

Teri Struck: It did go very quick. We’re going to definitely have you back. You gave us lots of great advice today. If you’d like to be linked to Dr. Semel’s website, please go to personallifemedia.com. You can get transcripts. If you want to send me email, email me at t-e-r-I @personallifemedia.com ([email protected]). And we’ll be back next week with more tips. Thanks again Dr. Semel.

Dr. George Semel: Thank you.