Love handles can be shrunk without surgery

[Terinox]

2004-02-25 Love handles can be shrunk without surgery Toronto doctor develops alternative to liposuction People who want to lose their love handles but hate the idea of liposuction now have a non-surgical alternative that offers them something in between.

The brainchild of Toronto-based Dr. Stanley Gore, founder and director of Lipidoctor Medical Slimming Clinics, the new technique -- infusion lipolysis -- is designed to shrink rather than remove fat cells.

The treatment program comes in two parts. In the first step, two drugs -- isoproterenol and epinephrine -- are infused into fat tissue to help break it down, a process called lipolysis. This takes 30 to 60 minutes with local anesthesia.

"The procedure is not painful but patients feel a weird sensation of getting bigger," Gore says. In fact, patients leave the clinic about one clothing size bigger than they came in because of the amount of fluid they receive.

"We send people to the gym to work out because we want them to burn all the fatty acids that have been created from the initial lipolysis."

Having kick-started the process of fat breakdown, Gore has patients apply two pharmaceutical creams every day for at least 10 weeks.

One, ideally applied to the treated area before working out, activates lipolysis through a combination of caffeine, vitamin B6, vitamin B12 and the herbal extract forskolin.

The second cream, applied at night, reduces the accumulation of fat by blocking receptors on fat cells. The main ingredients are the drug yohimbine, another drug called an alpha blocker and conjugated linoleic acid, which reportedly increases lean body mass and decreases fat content.

"What we're ultimately doing is changing the metabolism of fat cells," Gore says. The procedure also shrinks the skin, rendering it more cosmetically pleasing than is possible with liposuction.

However, infusion lipolysis can achieve no more than half the reduction in fat volume possible with liposuction, and is not intended to replace the surgical procedure, Gore says. "We are not taking out extra fat cells. We are shrinking what you have."

He says lipolysis is the only technique that truly treats cellulite, which he describes as a metabolic abnormality that happens when fat cells become trapped in honeycomb structures, leaving them nowhere to go but up, where they create lumps and valleys on the skin.

More than 200 patients have been treated at Gore's clinic since it opened in April 2003.

Cost of the initial procedure and the creams ranges from $1,100 to $1,850, depending on the size and number of areas being treated.

[decadbal]

how about dieting, or not eating super high sat. fat foods..

[daem]

Cost of the initial procedure and the creams ranges from $1,100 to $1,850, depending on the size and number of areas being treated.

5 years of gym membership to eliminate them myself sounds much more appealing to me.

[Jdawg50]

Sounds like lipostabil to me

[daman1]

how about dieting, or not eating super high sat. fat foods..

ditto

[PurePower]

sounds interesting.............im sure this will be a big hit with the "fattys" =-)

[usualsuspect]

Yep sounds like someone once again is trying to cash in on the thousands of people that want to lose weight but don't want to learn how to eat right or step foot on the cardio machine.

[Red Ketchup]

Naaah won't catch on... with this people have to go to the gym and work out...

It's not a magic pill that makes you "shed the pounds like crazy"

Red

[Polska]

Another easy way out........

nobody wants to work it for anymore.

I agree with red.... going to the gym is too much work for most people