Botox

29-07-23 00 / episode: 194

Script

"Botox.

Do you know what this stuff is? Botox? I can't remember when it first debuted as a popular thing, but it's been probably 10, 15 years now, at least.

And it's kind of cool.

Botox is a horribly toxic poison.

It comes from uh Bottu uh botulism.

Now, botulism is uh, well, it's a poison.

Uh, it's a disease.

If you get it, you die, right? And it comes from bacteria and the bacteria eat meat.

Ok? If the bacteria are growing on the meat and there's no oxygen, they produce this horrible poison Botox and it produces a horrible death.

Ok.

However, the really cool thing is, it's a nerve toxin.

It works on the nerves and the doctors discovered that you can inject it into people like into their skin and it'll only affect the nerves locally.

It turned out that it was a great way to um help people get rid of wrinkles on their face.

You could get a Botox injection and then all the muscles around that area of your face would relax because the nerves are stopped and then because they're relaxed, your skin relaxes and there's no more wrinkles, wrinkle free.

One of the really cool things though recently is that they're discovering Botox is really good for depressed people because what happens when you're depressed or stressed, you sort of send a message from your brain to your face to make certain facial expressions.

But those facial expressions don't happen because the muscles aren't working.

And then the funny thing is it's a feedback loop when you're really stressed or depressed and your face can't make those, those expressions.

You don't get messages back from the face saying, hey, I'm making this depressed expression.

I'm making this uh stressed expression and the brain starts to think, oh, there's no expression there.

So I guess I'm not so bad.

What they found out was Botox injections to the face could help make depressed symptoms a little bit better.

Now, it's not a magical cure.

It's not a be all and end all.

But it helped people feel a little bit less of those bad emotions.

Pretty cool.

Huh? Kind of called the Botox effect.

OK.

See you later."