Preventing complications is a hot topic in aesthetic medicine, and practitioners are constantly seeking out new methods for ensuring that they keep their patients safe while obtaining optimal results. In recent years, aspiration has emerged as a technique for avoiding a vascular occlusion, but the effectiveness of the method has been greatly debated amongst practitioners.1 In this article, I will outline what I believe to be the pros and cons of aspiration and discuss whether practitioners should be implementing it as part of their clinical practice.
Aspiration refers to the technique where prior to an injection with dermal filler, a practitioner fixes the needle into the position on the skin where they are about to inject, pulling back on the plunger of the syringe (typically for 5-10 seconds) to ensure that no blood has pulled back into the syringe.2 If blood appears in the syringe…
