S03E47 TRAPTOX - USING BOTOX TO CHANGE YOUR BODY SHAPE

Another Botox trend where people are changing not their facial appearance, but how their bodies look. Should we be doing this?

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S03E47 TRAPTOX - USING BOTOX TO CHANGE YOUR BODY SHAPE

​[00:00:00]

Sam Rhee: So last week I talked about how 20 something year olds were using Botox to prevent wrinkle formation when they got older. I thought it was a bad idea for a bunch of reasons.

This week the discussion is going to center around the TrapTox trend, where people are changing, not their facial expressions with Botox, but their body shape, at least temporarily, with Botox.

A recent Daily Mail article by Lillian Gisen last week said "Tons of TikTok users from all over the globe are giving it a go and sharing their results to the video streaming platform, and they can't stop raving about it."

Basically, people are injecting Botox into their trapezius muscles in their shoulders, so they go from this example picture as demonstrated by this TikTok influencer. If you're listening to this podcast, basically it's making their shoulder contours go down, so they look slimmer.

Supposedly this #TrapTox on TikTok has more than 128 million views and is filled with [00:01:00] hundreds of clips shared by patients and beauticians alike. So let's dive into this latest trend.

First of all, what is the trapezius muscle exactly? There are two large muscles that are connected to the back of the skull, down to the clavicle, scapula, and vertebra on each side of the body.

The part of the trapezius that TrapTox is injected to is the top part of the trapezius right at the base of the neck, but the muscle itself actually extends down past the scapula into the middle back area.

Now, when you elevate and shrug your shoulders, you are using your trapezius muscle.

That muscle is also used for throwing. Exercises that use the trapezius muscle, include any rowing movement, overhead press or barbell clean movement, or anything involving a shoulder shrug. So it's an extremely functional muscle. We use it for so many movements every day. Even simple ones like driving, carrying anything in our hands, and even a regular postural movement, such as standing up straight or tilting our heads or lifting our arms.

[00:02:00] Okay, so who invented this bright idea of weakening the trapezius muscle with Botox for cosmetic reasons? From what I can tell, it looks like all the research papers on injecting Botox are out of Asia, either China or Korea. The first one that mentions the cosmetic use of Botox on the trapezius is from 2017 in Korea, titled, "Botulinum Toxin Injection Site Selection for a Smooth Shoulder Line, an Anatomic Study." After that, there are more and more studies that show the locations in the muscle where to inject and the results of how the trapezius looks after injection.

Here you can see a picture from one of the research studies of before and after three months after treatment, and it requires a lot of Botox.

Recommendations from these papers include, fifty to a hundred units of Botox per side. So at least two to four amounts what it normally takes to treat the forehead for wrinkling. That's around upwards of $2,000 per session.

Now we know what TrapTox is now and who started this trend. So why is it popular [00:03:00] now? What is it about this look that people want?

Well, when I see providers who offer this, such as Rachel Ho, I see examples like this on their websites to my right is what they show is an ideal shoulder contour, and then they show the picture on the left as one that looks unaesthetic.

Now, I don't know about you, but first of all, the picture on my right is a member of a K-pop band named BlackPink. And if you've seen any K-pop singers, none of them look typical. All of them, both men and women appear emaciated and extremely thin. They all wear tons of makeup. And I understand that they have an extreme look for entertainment purposes, but I'm not sure that this emaciated look is something we wanna bring back in a bigger way.

I was kind of hoping we were past this gaunt aesthetic which I remember being called "heroin chic" back in the early nineties.

And for the picture on my left to have a cartoonish example of a guy bodybuilder who has ginormous traps, I don't think I've ever seen anyone in real life that looks like this, and that's just [00:04:00] intentionally over exaggerating an anatomic feature to scare people.

As a plastic surgeon that performs cosmetic surgery, any cosmetic procedure that somehow reduces a patient's ability to function is generally a bad idea in my opinion.

After patients recover, they should not only be able to do what they did before, but they should be able to become more fit if they so choose. Breast implant augmentation, breast lifts, tummy tucks, Brazilian butt lifts. I always tell patients afterwards that they should be able to do what they did before and in sometimes in the case of tummy tucks with muscle tightening, they might feel even stronger or better.

And TrapTox is intentionally weakening an extremely functional muscle. Now, some practitioners argue that TrapTox can alleviate neck tension and migraines, and yes, if it's used for medical purposes to treat pain, that's a decent argument for using Botox in muscles. But there are a lot of other treatment modalities that can be used to manage these issues in the shoulder first before actually thinking about weakening the muscles themselves.

And my final issue is that [00:05:00] as a society, I believe we should be raising children and young people to see women with a body aesthetic that celebrates strong and fit individuals.

One thing as a CrossFit coach and someone in CrossFit for almost 10 years is that I see women who are extremely fit individuals every day in the gym. Like this picture of Katrin Davidsdottir's back rowing. This is an aesthetic that we should be highlighting, not skin and bones K-pop singers.

In my opinion, women who look skinny and weak is a dead look. It's a dead opinion, it's a dead aesthetic. These attempts, such as TrapTox are bad examples of where we as practitioners are doing women no favors, and unfortunately we still have a long way to go. I hear women at the gym worrying about developing large traps or getting too bulky. And in some of my previous podcasts I talked about the negative comments made about man muscles and CrossFit women and how even elite athletes struggle with their self-image and femininity.

Thankfully, once these women realize how fit and strong they can be, [00:06:00] and they also realize that one: getting overdeveloped traps is really hard to do, ask any bodybuilder. And two: functionally fit looks fantastic. It makes all people, including women, look like the best version of themselves.

Trying to become underweight, devoid of muscle and feeble appearing should be discouraged by anyone who's a medical provider and does cosmetic procedures. But it's going to take time. It's still often an uphill battle, but highlighting these bad procedures such as TrapTox that offer bad aesthetics is a start. Thank you.

Do you worry about big traps or do you have a functionally fit body or know someone who does and loves that look? Let me know either way. DM me @BotoxAndBurpeesPodcast on Instagram and thanks for listening.