Possible side effects of dermaneedling

With 100,000 customers, Vaughter Wellness is by far the largest dermaneedling company in the world. Below is a screenshot I took today of our backend ordering system, where if you click on the picture, you can see we're processing order #75957 today. We've processed approx. 25000 orders with ZenCart before using our current online store, making a total of a hundred thousand customers. The great majority of those have purchased dermaneedling instruments from us.

After nearly a decade of selling dermaneedling instruments and getting feedback about the results, we are in a unique position to discuss possible negative side effects of dermaneedling. Based on feedback and a margin of error of an order of magnitude, we think that no more than 0.1% of our customers experienced a visible deterioration of their treated skin. The rest either saw no significant improvement or a moderate to very substantial improvement. Improvement appears to be permanent.

A 0.1% chance of the skin becoming less aesthetic in appearance are better odds than the likelihood of things going wrong when using laser treatment, Botox or a facelift. We have received a grand total of no more than five such complaints, but we're assuming that for every customer with side effects who complained, nine did not. It is conceivable that nearly all people with negative effects got back to us with that information and asked us for advice, in that case the incidence of negative side effects of dermaneedling is closer to 0.01% (one in ten thousand people) than our assumed 0.1%. Even though bad effects are extremely rare, having so many customers still means we occasionally hear about these sad, worrying occurrences and because we have a conscience, this is not easy to live with, even though tens of thousands of people permanently improved their lives, using our products. Usually, these customers were using medications or herbs that interfere with wound healing. When using medicinal herbs that contain steroids or corticoids or precursors to these, you should never needle the skin because corticoids interfere with wound healing. Anantamul (Sarsaparilla root) and Gotu kola are such contraindicated medicinal herbs. You should treat all herbs as potentially contra-indicated medications and only after thorough research into their active ingredients and their possible effect on the healing of skin injuries should you take them. Many Chinese and Ayurvedic medicinal herbs contain chemicals with powerful medical effects on the body and those effects can be beneficial for certain conditions and harmful for other conditions, also depending on the dosage.

Educate yourself before treatment

"OwnDoc", the name of our website, is intended to mean "Be your own doctor". Dermaneedling is a medical procedure, The FDA has not approved dermaneedling yet, since no manufacturer of dermaneedling instruments has the millions required to do the clinical studies. Therefore, dermaneedling instruments are therefore medical instruments and illegal to import. When you decide to be your own doctor and treat yourself with unlicensed medical instruments that you illegally imported, it is of vital importance that you educate yourself first. You take full responsibility for the outcome of the treatment you self-administer. It is illegal for us to give personalized medical advice (answering ANY question apart from "where's my package" is a criminal offense) but we are permitted to give generalized advice, which counts as our "general opinion on dermaneedling" instead of "giving specific advice about a specific issue to a specific person", which is practicing medicine without a license. Our general advice (which is very specific!) can be found in our guidelines and instruction PDF's and in our forum as well as in our articles. We assume that people who purchase dermaneedling instruments from us are qualified in using them, and our Terms & Conditions state that we do not assume liability for any negative results. Dermaneedling is by far the most effective way to permanently improve the skin for nearly all people using that method. However no medical treatment is fully without the risk of side effects. Dermaneedling is an invasive procedure, a very powerful medical treatment that usually diminishes the treated skin flaws by around 50%. Take our guidelines seriously. And do a test patch first.

Genetic cause

Those exceedingly rare negative effects of dermaneedling can express themselves as increased pigmentation, scarring, larger pores, indentations due to loss of subcutaneous fat - basically things can get worse instead of better. Since it is so extremely rare for people to experience negative results, we're quite certain that the reason they occur is some kind of genetic predisposition.

What to do when the skin deteriorated

The only advice we can give therefore is to permanently stop dermaneedling and hope the skin will recover. Since the number of people that reported side effects is so low, we have no usable data on the long-term prospects for a (partial) recovery.

Other causes for dermaneedling side effects

There have been some cases where people grossly deviated from our dermaneedling instructions, which caused skin damage. Extremely shortening the recommended treatment intervals or exposing freshly needled skin to hours of intense sunlight are risk factors. Even riskier is to use medications that have skin deterioration as a possible side effect. We know of two people who suffered skin issues due to these factors. Skin infection is not a risk factor. We have never heard of anyone getting an infection from needling with even the longest needles. Other factors that we noticed were an age above 50 and a history of heavy smoking. Still, nearly no one reports negative effects of dermaneedling, meaning genetic factors are the most likely major factor.

What to do to prevent dermaneedling side effects

We advise people to always do a test patch first, on skin in a comparable condition, in a place normally covered by clothes. This is unfortunately an elaborate method to ensure that treatment will not cause skin deterioration on the face, for it usually takes several treatments before deterioration becomes visible. Dermaneedling is injuring the skin, which means that in order for successful regeneration, you need to eat healthily (especially regarding vitamin- and protein intake), avoid alcohol or tobacco during the entire treatment period and avoid sunshine on the treated area like the plague during the entire treatment period, while securing sufficient vit. D intake. The best way to get vitamin D is to expose the skin to the sun. Skin that has not been needled. "The entire treatment period" means from the start of the first treatment to one month after the end of the last treatment, and every day in between, especially when treating with longer needles or when you're not that young anymore).



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