Cheap botox?

Yes the holy grail of cheap botox, or is it a poisoned challice? In these tougher economic times it would not be a surprise that many of you may be looking for cheaper botox in perhaps an as yet undiscovered clinic somewhere , trying to cut the costs and yet still maintaining your regular botox treatments. Is this possible? Is there a way to do it? Well here is a quick guide to help you avoid the usual pitfalls in seeking cheaper treatment , and yet still finding  good value botox and most importantly with the best natural results.

Here are some guides and things to avoid:

1. Beware beauty salons offering very cheap botox. Even though you could be very lucky and get an experienced doctor who visits that particular salon, you are more likely to be treated by a very inexperienced doctor or nurse, or even a beauty therapist which is completely illegal, and you may well get horrible side effects such as eye lid droop.

2. Beware watered down botox. Botox from Allergan the manufacturers comes in a “freeze dried” form , and we as doctors have to reconstitute it by mixing it with normal saline. Many smaller clinics and beauty salons working on small margins , will water down the botox with more than recommended normal saline, in order to be able to treat more patients with each vial and to make more money. Many patients have come to me with many such stories, where they had botox in a health centre or salon  and they had almost no results or results which lasted only a few weeks due to the weaker botox.

3. Beware a clinic which advertises as little as £90 for botox! This may well be just a one off price to entice you to the clinic and there may be many other clauses which you have to fulfill to get this price. A bit like a mortgage which is running to the end of the fixed term , once you have had your £90 botox , and you felt good at the clinic, the price may well suddenly jump up to an above average £250 for one area, and you then have to go in search of another clinic.

4. Becoming a model on a botox training course? Well , is this the secret answer in these credit crunched times? (To read my previous blog called The Botox Credit crunch click on: https://www.miloclinic.com/blog/?p=17). Well it would seem so with some courses only charging you cost price, which may be from £70-£150 and some may not even charge you at all! But, and it’s a big but, do you want to be a guinea pig for students doing botox for the first time? Again you can be lucky and get a very good result, but trust me, I teach on many botox courses , and even though I give my pupils strict guidance , I can not control exactly what they do and results can be less than perfect! So if you are a relaxed sort of person and this seems cheap and fun, go for it! But if not…

5. Botox costs £140 per vial when we buy it in the industry. This is a little known fact by the general public and many patients have told me in the past that they thought that the cost to us was actually as little as £20 per vial. So as a rule of thumb, if you see botox being advertised anywhere below this value, there is something fishy going on.

6. Recent new guidance from the GMC and NMC , the doctors’ and nurses’ regulatory bodies, mean that the practice of “remote prescribing” of botox has become “unacceptable practice” by any of it’s members. To explain briefly, botox is a prescription drug and it has to be prescribed by a doctor or a clinician with prescribing privileges. Until these new guidances were published, many nurses would ask doctors to sign batches of botox prescriptions, for a fee , without that doctor ever seeing the patients in  person or ever examining their facial muscles! Hence “remote prescribing”. This new guidance does actually mean that strictly only doctors will be able to administer botox from now on or will definitely be overseeing any botox being administered, so if anybody who is not a doctor is offering “cheap” botox to you, check their credentials thoroughly and find out where the botox came from. “Rogue” batches of botox  are often ordered by unqualified practitioners from the internet, and this can result in disaster.

7. Finally, cheap botox even from a doctor is all well and good, but make sure that the doctor administring the botox is fully qualified and has great amounts of experience. My advice, make sure your doctor is a plastic surgeon or a cosmetic doctor who is a member of the BACD (British Association of Cosmetic Doctors- http://www.cosmeticdoctors.co.uk/). Both bodies make sure that their members are well trained, assessed regularly and kept up to date. The BACD is currently putting their members through a tough and rigorous diploma in Aesthetic Medicine which they hope will soon be recognised by the GMC as the official route to specialising in this field. But can you get really cheap botox from such doctors? Well the answer is that no probably not, but if you look around you will find “reassuringly” well priced botox which in the long term will prove great value, and most importantly which will give you safe and natural rejuvenating results. 

At the Milo clinic , I feel we hold the middle ground with our prices , and having performed up to 10,000 botox cases in the last few years, and being a member of the BACD, you can rest assured that you will be getting best value and the best results.

A common question is: How much does Botox cost? To answer that:

At the Milo clinic, 1 area of botox is £200 , 2 areas £320, 3 areas £400 with seasonal discounts. Botox for underarm sweating is from £600.

Browse and book your botox treatment today.

See you soon!�