Hyperhidrosis – Excessive Sweating – What to expect during treatment

Adrian Richards, Leading Plastic Surgeon at Aurora Clinics explains what to expect during a Hyperhidrosis treatment, how it is performed and the expected results following the treatment. For more information on Excessive Sweating please call one of our dedicated patient advisors on 01844 214362

Hyperhidrosis Excessive Sweating – What to Expect During Treatment

Hello. My name is Adrian Richards, and I’m a plastic and cosmetic surgeon and I’m the Surgical Director of Aurora Clinics. Today we’re going to talk about what’s actually involved in Botox treatments to the underarm areas.

The first thing to note is that the area must be shaved. If you are a man, it does help if you can shave your armpits prior to the injections. It’s not absolutely essential, and we can do treatments if you haven’t shaved. It’s just a bit more technically difficult to get the Botox in the right place because we need to place it very carefully in the skin. If you’re really averse to shaving, it is possible to do the treatment, but it may not work really quite as well. We like to have the area clean. No deodorant on which is important because we actually do like to see where the area is sweating. It gives us a good clue if we actually see the sweat and which areas to concentrate on.

Come in with shaved, clean armpits, no deodorant, and then what we like to do is lay you down, arms behind your head and really look at the underarm area to see if we can see little beads of sweat. Sometimes it’s very obvious where it’s coming from. Other times we might need to do a starch iodine test. In the starch iodine test, what we do is paint brown iodine on the skin and then we put corn flour over the top of this area, and any sweat coming through actually turns the area black. We can map out exactly where the sweating is coming from which makes it slightly more accurate.

Once we’ve assessed really which areas to treat, you need to tell us if one armpit is worse than the other, which it quite often is. We might need to concentrate slightly more Botox on that side. So we work out where the area is, and then typically we use a numbing cream. We tend to use one called EMLA, which is the white cream that you put on the back of your hand if you’re having an operation just to numb where the injection will go in. We leave that on for at least 15 minutes normally to numb the area.

Then we start off with very, very small superficial injections in the skin. It’s not normally that uncomfortable actually because the armpit isn’t a particularly sensitive area of the body. Normally, we’ll give about 20 injections into each armpit. The reason we need to give 20 is because we need lots of little injections, and the Botox covers an area roughly the size of your thumbnail. So you can imagine that to cover the whole area evenly we really need to give that number of injections to cover the whole region. Slight discomfort during the procedure. At the end of the procedure, there isn’t really much discomfort left. You may feel slightly bruised but not too bad, and you can go home and resume normal activities straight away. If you wanted to go to the gym, that would be fine that evening. Social events should be fine. You will notice a reduction in the sweating. Interesting, some of my patients tell me it’s really very rapid, within a day, but normally it does take slightly longer than that. We normally say you should expect a reduction in sweating within a week and then a significant reduction within two weeks.

I hope that’s been helpful explaining the procedure. If you have any questions about the procedure, whether it’s right for you, whether you’d like to go ahead with it, costs, those sorts of issues, please contact us either via the website, which is Aurora-Clinics.co.uk, or ring us on our phone which is 01844 214362. Thank you very much.