Jason Hall, MD - Plastic Surgeon in Knoxville, Tennessee

Eva Sheie (00:03):
The purpose of this podcast is simple. We want you to get to know your doctor before meeting them in person because you're making a life-changing decision, and time is scarce. The more you can learn about who your doctor is before you meet them, the better that first meeting will be. There's no substitute for an in-person appointment, but we hope this comes close. I'm your host, Eva Sheie, and you're listening to Meet the Doctor. Greetings and welcome to Meet the Doctor. My guest today is Dr. Jason Hall. He's a board certified plastic surgeon in Knoxville. I've known him for a long time and he also has an amazing podcast called The Trillium Show. So before I introduce him, I want to tell you to definitely go listen to that, so welcome to the podcast, Dr. Hall.

Dr. Hall (00:47):
Well, thanks. Great to be here, Eva.

Eva Sheie (00:49):
I reached out to you recently because I noticed that you wrote a book, so I'd love to start there and hear more about what prompted you to write the book, and I'm pretty sure I said, you're solving a problem that we all have was my reaction to the book.

Dr. Hall (01:02):
Looking back on it, I had no idea how much work it was going to be, but it was, I just got tired of seeing all of, this industry is so full of garbage, especially when you get on the internet and start browsing social media. There is so much bad information out there, and that's what really prompted it, is wanting to put out something for patients, for prospective patients that really just cuts through all the junk and tells people in the facial rejuvenation space, what works, what doesn't, what to spend your money on, what not to spend your money on, and that's really where it came from.

Eva Sheie (01:42):
It covers everything from skincare to nonsurgical to surgery, is it the whole thing?

Dr. Hall (01:46):
I don't get into surgery. It really is focused mainly on skincare and nonsurgical things.

Eva Sheie (01:52):
Okay, fascinating. What forced you to write this book? Was there a specific thing that happened?

Dr. Hall (01:58):
I've been in practice now for 15 years, and so it's been just a culmination of seeing patients coming in for surgery and so many of my surgical, my facelift and eyelids and brows, so many of those patients have gone hither and yon and have spent thousands and thousands of dollars and still end up in my office and say, well, I tried X, Y, or Z. Didn't work, didn't accomplish what I was looking for.

Eva Sheie (02:30):
What are some of the biggest scams that you've seen?

Dr. Hall (02:34):
I don't want to call it scams because I think the things out there work. All of the things that are out there have some utility. There are obvious exceptions to that in my opinion, but a good example is the middle age, my demographic, 40 and 50-year-old who comes in for neck rejuvenation, who's spent $5,000, $6,000 Ultherapy or CoolSculpting. It's a matter of either wrong diagnosis or right diagnosis, wrong plan.

Eva Sheie (03:07):
Do you think that we try to diagnose ourselves first?

Dr. Hall (03:11):
I talk about that in the book. I refer to it as Burger King Medicine. You get it your way, right away, even if it's bad for you. Patients come in, they google up a symptom, they come in and say, well, I want CoolSculpting. I want Ultherapy because I saw that this gets rid of my neck. Somebody says, well, great, we've got Ultherapy for sale this month, I can get you a deal on that. Instead of backing up and remembering that cosmetic surgery and cosmetic medicine is still medicine. You're still supposed to diagnose before you treat a problem. That part of it seems to be forgotten or under appreciated. Now, there are certainly lots of injectors out there and physicians out there that prioritize that, and you can see that with some of the content that people are putting out. Chris Subio being the first who really is into educating on proper diagnosis and choosing the right treatment plans, but a lot of the social media stuff that comes out in the aesthetic space is ads, is just trying to sell something.

Eva Sheie (04:18):
Have you been watching the Pit on Max?

Dr. Hall (04:21):
I haven't. What is that?

Eva Sheie (04:22):
It's a new, it's got Noah Wiley in it. Remember when he was on ER when he was super young?

Dr. Hall (04:27):
Yeah.

Eva Sheie (04:28):
Well, now he's got a new hospital show on Max. There was an episode the other day where the social media influencer came in and they thought she was having a schizophrenic episode, and it turns out she was just poisoned by her skincare cream.

Dr. Hall (04:45):
I'm not sure. I haven't seen that yet, but I'm sure it's coming.

Eva Sheie (04:49):
It was not from the United States. They made sure that the story was accurate. It was like she was getting it overseas somewhere and then trying to make money on it by making tiktoks.

Dr. Hall (05:00):
And I talk about that, about buying stuff online from influencers. And not to pick on anybody, but there is a trend out there, you look at the skincare market, it's a billion dollar market. The influencers with white labeled products that come from one of a handful of labs around the world, you can't tell me that some influencer has spent more time and knows more about the skin than the PhD scientists at Alastin or SkinMedica. No way.

Eva Sheie (05:32):
I remember having a terrible rosacea flare and going to, finely getting off my butt and not diagnosing myself and going to a real dermatologist and she made me stop everything and she put me on Vanicream and CeraVe and that was it and nothing else. She was like, you have to stop using everything so we can figure out what's going on.

Dr. Hall (05:56):
And what happened?

Eva Sheie (05:58):
I got better very quickly within a week it went away. She did give me something later that treated it more, but everything calmed down very quickly. But if you are using all kinds of things, you have no idea what's working or not working or causing you an issue.

Dr. Hall (06:15):
That's kind of the thrust at the end of the book. I have kind of a plan at the end of the book. I put it together for people not, sorry, I'd love for 'em to come to my office and spend their money with us, but you can take it wherever you want to and kind of go through the different areas of aging that you're concerned with and kind of see this is kind of what works. This is why you're seeing what you're seeing, and these are the things that work. They were scientifically proven to treat that stuff.

Eva Sheie (06:47):
It's really interesting, I think the plan part is overlooked everywhere. Everyone wants to talk about it, but nobody wants to give you a framework, so that's exciting first of all, but then I'm curious, did you break the plan down by ages or by skin types or how did you do that?

Dr. Hall (07:04):
I kind of picked 35 as the cut point. So there's the plan for the 35 and and then plan for the 35 and older, primarily because once we hit around 35, that's when you start seeing collagen loss in the skin and you start seeing loss of elasticity, your skin starts to get thin, and so the over 35 set and that's me, needs a different skincare plan than the under 35 set. So that's kind of where that line was drawn, and then going into skincare products and devices and things like that.

Eva Sheie (07:45):
If you're somebody who, like many people right now is losing weight rapidly, how would you prevent your skin from unnecessarily looking bad if you're losing weight very quickly?

Dr. Hall (07:57):
I kind of talk about facial aging in four separate categories. You've got skin changes, you've got dynamic changes, you've got volume loss, and then gravity. Where we're really seeing the changes with these weight loss drugs is you're seeing changes in the skin and you're seeing changes in volume, so your collagen boosting treatments, first off being nutrition, is just making sure you're getting enough protein. That is a huge one with all of these weight loss, either methods or drugs, is not suffering from protein malnutrition. Collagen supplementation, oral collagen supplementation has been shown to help. Some of these where there's two growth factor serums, so Alastin's Restorative Skin and then SkinMedica's TNS advanced are really the only two human growth factor serums that have data behind them to physically improve the collagen levels in your skin. Then you can branch out from there to other collagen boosting treatments. There's Sculptra, which is injectable, which you've got to kind of be careful with if you're looking to have surgery down the road that we're not messing up surgical planes with injectables, and then radio frequency microneedling is a great collagen booster add-on in terms of procedures.

Eva Sheie (09:23):
Okay. You said something really interesting about Sculptra and surgical planes. Can you expand on that because I have heard a lot about filler messing around with facelifts later on and filler not dissolving as intended or lasting much longer than we think it should staying in face, but I've never heard that about s Sculptra.

Dr. Hall (09:43):
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence by those of us that do a lot of facial surgery that if you've got somebody who has had a lot of Sculptra injected where you're trying to raise tissue planes, that stuff acts like glue and it makes dissecting tissue planes much more difficult. I tell our patients, if you're thinking about having surgery down the road, we need to be careful using injectables where we're going to be working to prevent some of these tissue planes from getting obliterated or make 'em sticky. And then you've got the HA's that there's some data that just came out I think early in 2024, really interesting study out of France, and they looked at patients, it's a small group of patients, but they looked at patients who had had fillers, so the jelly fillers, the Restylane and Juvederms and all of that. The companies tell us that you need to kind of touch those up, they go away after a year.

Eva Sheie (10:48):
But they're not?

Dr. Hall (10:49):
No, they did MRIs on all these people and they were seeing evidence of HA still around 15 years later. They don't just last a year.

Eva Sheie (11:03):
There was data that I recently saw about it was related to weight loss patients, but they were saying that fillers were down 5% year over year from 24 to 23, but the Sculptra was up, Biostimulators were up 11% and actually the revenue was up because that's a more expensive product, so this was a global data for the whole United States. People are starting to make different recommendations on the practice side and patients are starting to say, I don't know if I want to do that now. That's definitely happening at scale. So you also mentioned that you are bringing in an associate, a partner?

Dr. Hall (11:46):
We're bringing on a new surgeon here as an associate starting 1st of March.

Eva Sheie (11:52):
She's coming. Five days.

Dr. Hall (11:53):
Four days.

Eva Sheie (11:55):
Four days.

Dr. Hall (11:55):
Four days, yeah, four days, five days. I don't know how many.

Eva Sheie (11:55):
You're going to make her work on the weekend.

Dr. Hall (11:58):
Oh, no, we don't do that. We don't do that here, or at least we try not. Medicine's one of those things, you can't really choose it. We try not to though.

Eva Sheie (12:07):
How did you find her and can you tell us more about her? We'll have to have her on the show too.

Dr. Hall (12:10):
Sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so her name is Dr. Jessica Walker. She's double boarded general surgery, plastic surgery. She's been here in Knoxville for two and a half years, something like that. Her primary focus is breast and body surgery and gets a, I mean, her results are just fantastic, and so just looking at her results and seeing what people were saying about her online, she very quickly developed a very good reputation in our community. I'm subspecialty trained in facial surgery, and so that's my passion. Still do it all, still enjoy doing it all, but wanted to have somebody who really wanted to focus on breast and body and kind of the higher level things, adding the skin tighten of Renuvion and things like that to the practice. That if I have to focus on something, it's going to be on facial lift techniques and brows and eyes and noses, and she really, really has a passion for breast and body surgery. We're looking forward to a very healthy working relationship.

Eva Sheie (13:14):
And she didn't even have to move across the country. She was right there already.

Dr. Hall (13:18):
Right? She's right here. Her husband's a dentist here, so they're settled and live on a farm and have a dog and they're here.

Eva Sheie (13:27):
I'm so excited that you wrote a book. I'm going to check it out and I'll write a review of the book for you. I'm sure that will help too.

Dr. Hall (13:35):
Oh, I appreciate that very much.

Eva Sheie (13:37):
It sounds really interesting, and I'm really interested in the plan because I started hearing this couple, two, three years ago that what you want to look for, you'll have to tell me if you do this in your practice too, is a partner. As you start the aging process, you want someone who will plan with you and say to you at this age, here's what we need to be doing and you need to be prepared for this around this time so that you have it in the back of your mind. This is where we're going. I'm going to get a facelift 10 years from now, or whatever that looks like, so can you maybe talk a little bit about how you partner with your patients to do that kind of planning? Is that something you do?

Dr. Hall (14:18):
Sure. I think that the main thing is taking time during that first visit to kind of figure out what the goals are. Is this somebody who wants to have surgery or is somebody who has totally surgery averse? Because those patients exist, they can't imagine ever wanting a facelift. It is partnering with them, kind of meeting them where they are at that first visit and saying, okay, what is it that you're looking to do and let's see where you're starting and then we can plot a course to help get you where you want to be. Most of my patients are in their thirties and up. It's starting a good skincare plan is if they need a little bit of volume correction, planning, what that looks like. Is it a teeny bit of filler under the eyes and the cheeks to kind of help restore some of that early volume loss? Are we starting to see gravitational changes? Maybe we are seeing some early jowling. We are seeing some early laxity in the skin, in the neck and they need, it's something they've always dealt with, and that may be young neck lifts or a thing for people whose anatomy is right. Maybe that's the first place we go.

Eva Sheie (15:35):
I had a friend who at around 30 went down to UTMB and had a student do her neck lift. Her neck was so bad at 30 that that was about the only option she had, and I remember it had a huge impact on me because she looked amazing. It didn't go perfectly, but she was fine.

Dr. Hall (15:54):
And we see that in that younger demographic, isolated deep neck lift is a game changer. It totally changes the way people's lower face and neck look what you see 'em coming in for. They say, I just want some liposuction here. That's where it starts, and those are the patients that come in at 30, 35 and say, well, I've spent five grand on CoolSculpting and it didn't do anything. Well, it's because it's subliminal fat. It's under the platysma muscle. They've got hypertrophied muscles underneath. They've got a little deep fat pad. They've got submandibular gland ptosis, and you've got to reshape all that to get a good result. Lipo or CoolSculpting isn't going to work, but you got to know what you're looking at and got to know what you're looking for.

Eva Sheie (16:43):
Yeah. What's that old saying? If all you have is a hammer, everything's a nail.

Dr. Hall (16:48):
Yep. That's the first quote of the chapter of the book.

Eva Sheie (16:52):
Is it really?

Dr. Hall (16:54):
Yeah.

Eva Sheie (16:56):
I could have ghostwritten it for you.

Dr. Hall (16:59):
The. I wouldn't have had the fun of writing almost 300 pages.

Eva Sheie (17:03):
Yeah. Okay, so tell me about the process of writing the book. That's really interesting.

Dr. Hall (17:08):
It was exquisitely painful. It was exquisitely painful because I'm in solo practice running a business with my wife. We've got two girls that are teenagers, and so we'd never stop moving and going, and so a lot of the writing was evenings, mornings, a lot of early mornings working on this.

Eva Sheie (17:31):
Did you type, did you hand write? Did you dictate, how did you do it?

Dr. Hall (17:36):
Dictating and typing. Yeah. Quite a bit of the material came from podcast episodes that I'd done that was taking little bits, the 20 minute show here, 30 minute show there, five minute show somewhere else, and then combining a lot of that stuff into coherent chapters and kind of tying it all together.

Eva Sheie (17:58):
Having a podcast is one way to write a book because once you have enough episodes, especially if you started with the end in mind and knew you were going to do that, you could. I mean, I've thought about that a lot in particular, that you could organize a podcast around being the foundation of a book at some point. Maybe your second book, you can do that. Make a roadmap.

Dr. Hall (18:19):
Yeah, yeah, that'll be great.

Eva Sheie (18:21):
He's like, there's no way, Eva. There's no second book.

Dr. Hall (18:23):
It's too early. I was laughing. I was telling some of my friends, they're like, oh, what's the second one going to be? And I said, I think it's kind of very much reminiscent of my wife after our first daughter was born. We're really glad that we had her, but she's like, I'm never doing that again. It takes some time and some distance and you forget the suffering, and then you're like, oh, well, we'll do that again. Yep.

Eva Sheie (18:51):
They're so cute and funny. You're like, we should double the fun.

Dr. Hall (18:55):
Yeah.

Eva Sheie (18:56):
Yeah. I know. After that first one, you ask all the time, you're looking around, how do people do this more than once? It makes no sense.

Dr. Hall (19:05):
And we did. We did, we're in that boat. We were like, okay, we're a one and done, and then like, oh, no, let's do it. We need another one. But I think I learned a lot in the process because I kind of started and just said, I'm going to do this, and didn't have a real strong outline. I just kind of started and ended up spending a lot of time going back and reconfiguring and editing and chopping things up, and so the next one, and if anybody out there is crazy enough to do this, get a good outline first. A strong outline will make the writing process a lot easier.

Eva Sheie (19:52):
At what point did you go, who's going to publish this thing? Or were you just sort of stepping out in faith a little bit there?

Dr. Hall (19:59):
I kind of knew from the very beginning I was going to self-publish. That was kind of the goal from the start because if you listen to guys like Tim Ferris or I wasn't going to write a big long book proposal and go hunt for an agent and spend 30, 40, $50,000 trying to do that. I was down the self-publishing track from the very beginning.

Eva Sheie (20:18):
Did anybody else help you with the book? Was there any contributions from others?

Dr. Hall (20:23):
No.

Eva Sheie (20:23):
No, no. It was solo effort.

Dr. Hall (20:25):
No. It was me. Yeah, it was me. Next time, should there be a next time I'm going to recruit some suckers to write some chapters for me/

Eva Sheie (20:32):
That's how they do it. They just get everyone else to write a chapter and then Presto, we've got a book.

Dr. Hall (20:40):
I'll edit instead of writing every word. YouTube for the podcast, we jumped onto that platform right when they open the podcast stuff, and that's been neat tool to use to get the message out.

Eva Sheie (20:52):
Do patients come in saying, I found you on YouTube or watched your YouTube videos?

Dr. Hall (20:57):
They do. Getting a larger and larger volume of people that are coming in that say, oh, I've really enjoyed your show. I listened to the shows about my breast lift and implants or my facelift, or I listened to all the stuff.

Eva Sheie (21:13):
They tell you, shut up, I already know what you're going to say. They're like, you don't have to tell me.

Dr. Hall (21:16):
But I tell you, it makes the consult so much better because we can talk on a little deeper level instead of doing the high level overview because they already know the stuff.

Eva Sheie (21:30):
It's magical.

Dr. Hall (21:31):
Yeah.

Eva Sheie (21:32):
There's an old consultant who gives lots of presentations, who calls this concept is getting to the second date instead of the consultation being the first date, it's the second date. So whatever you do, there's lots of ways to do this, but I think you and I agree, podcasting is a great way to do it, they have the first date with your podcast and then they come in and that's the second date for them. They already know you. Do they ever get a little fan girly like, oh, Dr. Hall, you're real.

Dr. Hall (22:00):
I've had a couple people that have told my coordinator, it feels like I'm meeting a celebrity. I'm like, no, you're in the wrong office. There is no celebrity here.

Eva Sheie (22:13):
Nope. Just a lot of hard work. That's really cool though. I love that.

Dr. Hall (22:18):
It's neat. I, and you can attest, you've been in the space way longer than I have, podcasting is not easy either. When I started this stuff, I was like, well, I'm just going to take my consults and I can have my little consult schtick. I can sit down and do that in my sleep, and you turn a camera on and try and do that with nobody else in the room and talking to a camera, and it does not come off the way that you think it does.

Eva Sheie (22:45):
I bet you learned a lot about your consults doing that though.

Dr. Hall (22:48):
I did. Podcasting has changed the way I do a consult, has changed the way that I interact with patients when I first meet all for the better. It's been fun, but it is a lot of work. If you're somebody listening to this and you're like, I'm going to start a podcast. It's a lot of work.

Eva Sheie (23:05):
It's worth it though. You said that too.

Dr. Hall (23:08):
Yes. Yes. You need somebody like you who can take the raw material, cut out the ums and the hus and the, because you're going to do tons of that stuff, make it something coherent that people want to listen to.

Eva Sheie (23:21):
I think it was one of those things I took for granted because I went to music school and when you do that, they force you to record yourself and listen to yourself, which is very painful, but by the time, it's sort of like going to medical school maybe or art school, anything where you get a lot of critical feedback externally about something you're performing, that forces you to get to a better place. That just felt normal to me. That wasn't like something I had to get my head around at all. I still hate listening to myself though.

Dr. Hall (23:53):
It's humbling to listen to you, especially at the beginning because you realize how dumb you sound without practicing. When I started, I was doing, you know this, I was doing everything myself, and part of that was because I wanted to learn how to do it so that I could, I kind of took a page out of Tim Ferriss' book. I'm going to do 10 episodes, and if I hate it, I'm not going to do it anymore, and if I hate it, I will at least have learned something about how to do it, have developed that skill. I enjoyed it, but still kept doing it by myself for a long time. Writing, recording, editing and that part of it, listening to yourself and looking into transcript. There's a lot of ums and sos and filler words that I don't need.

Eva Sheie (24:43):
But you did it and you're, I think, almost to 90 episodes. I was looking at it earlier today and it's great.

Dr. Hall (24:49):
Yes. We're closing in. We'll record our hundredth episode in the next couple of months.

Eva Sheie (24:55):
Yeah. Congratulations.

Dr. Hall (24:56):
Thank you.

Eva Sheie (24:57):
It's fantastic. That's a huge accomplishment.

Dr. Hall (24:59):
It's fun. It's a lot of work, but it's fun. Books out there on Amazon. You can buy it hard copy, Kindle, paperback.

Eva Sheie (25:06):
Oh, yes. I'll make sure we link it in the show notes so it's easy to find. It's called The Art of Aging.

Dr. Hall (25:11):
The Art of Aging

Eva Sheie (25:11):
By Jason Hall.

Dr. Hall (25:12):
Absolutely.

Eva Sheie (25:13):
Where else can we find you online? Learn more about you?

Dr. Hall (25:16):
My website is drjasonhall.com. Instagram @DrJasonHall. Those are the best two places to find me. Obviously. Spotify, apple Podcasts, check out The Trillium Show with Dr. Jason Hall. New episode every two weeks. Drops on Thursdays.

Eva Sheie (25:31):
Wonderful.

Dr. Hall (25:31):
It's fun.

Eva Sheie (25:33):
Thank you, Dr. Hall.

Dr. Hall (25:34):
Well, you're very welcome, Eva. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure talking to you.

Eva Sheie (25:38):
Come back again.

Dr. Hall (25:39):
Absolutely.

Eva Sheie (25:42):
If you are considering making an appointment or are on your way to meet this doctor, be sure to let them know you heard them on the Meet the Doctor podcast. Check the show notes for links, including the doctor's website and Instagram to learn more. Are you a doctor or do you know a doctor who'd like to be on the Meet the Doctor podcast? Book your free recording session at MeettheDoctorpodcast.com. Meet the Doctor is made with love in Austin, Texas and is a production of The Axis, theaxis.io.