One of the most important aspects of Botox injections is ensuring that the patient does not experience any pain from the injection that you give them. This is a lot easier to say than to do, especially as every single patient is different, with different reactions to injections, different sensitivity, and a different approach and psychological relationship with needles.
The skin that lies across our bodies is actually relatively thin, even though it consists of many hundreds of layers. Underneath these multiple layers of skin are the muscles, those ingenious things that enable us to move – and are very sensitive, with millions of nerves running through them in order to be able to move effectively and efficiently. Underneath all of them is the bone.
Now of course, a Botox injection should never be reaching so deep as the bone, but for a good practitioner, the needle should not be getting anywhere the bone at all. That is why, depending on the thickness of the patient’s skin, the needle should be entering their body at an angle to ensure that it does not penetrate the bone. The exact angle will depend on the area of the body that you are injecting. For some areas, a 90 degree angle is appropriate, but this is rare.
By determining exactly how thick the muscle is in the area that you are injecting, you will be able to tailor the way that you give the injection to ensure that the patient does not feel any pain or discomfort. Every patient will provide a unique puzzle, and it is one of the joys of working in medicine that you can never treat a different person exactly the same way as you have treated another – and this is perfectly true when giving painless injections to your patients.
