Twice in two days Botulinum toxin (Botox) has graced our front page, and it's not just because it makes Joan Rivers look like The Joker.
Yesterday we reported that Botox has helped infants with CHARGE Syndrome and today we discovered an article in Medical Hypotheses talking about its many beneficial effects.
Not bad press for an often fatal poison produced by a rare type of food poisoning bacteria.
Botox blocks the activity of ‘cholinergic’ nerves, basically causing muscles to become paralyzed and some glands to stop secretion. But in tiny doses, write Erle CH Lim and Raymond CS Seet from National University of Singapore, Botox has many medical uses, including treatment of eye-squint, excess fat removal by being used as 'chemical liposuction' and even as an asthma treatment.
It cures everything. It is basically the Prius for 2008.
Like the hidden dark secret of Prius batteries, it's easy to sweep away potential disaster in the future for optimistic hope today. It certainly merits more research before designating it 'aspirin for the 21st Century.' Any glands or muscles that receive their nerve supply from the cholinergic system can be helped by Botox, the authors write. It can even be used as pain relief. That's a lot of benefits.
But relaxing glands and muscles in this way is clearly not a natural act and, since it was originally used for treatment of twitchy eye muscles, Allergan was not even advertised as a cosmetic cure-all. Still, it became one and Botox is the most popular cosmetic procedure in the US, with some $1.2 billion in sales from people receiving injections last year(1).
It's so lucrative you can get a faster appointment with your doctor to get a Botox injection than you can if you're worried about skin cancer(2).
That's part of the issue. It has caught on without having enough time to conduct studies of possible long-term effects. Botox injections for cosmetics have to be repeated 3 times a year or more. That sounds like a lot of toxin, even in small amounts.
So use some caution. Until then, read in abject wonder how Botox can even improve the lives of spinal-cord injury and multiple sclerosis sufferers. Now if it could just cure global warming.
The article that inspired this is 'Botulinum toxin, Quo Vadis?'doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2007.03.019, the winner of the 2007 David Horrobin Prize for medical theory, a £1,000 prize awarded annually by Elsevier, the publisher of Medical Hypotheses.
(1) A wrinkle in the Botox story, John Simons, Fortune, February 12 2008
(2) Botox May Beat Cancer Concern in Race to Dermatologist, Dan Childs, ABC News Medical Unit, Aug. 29, 2007
