McCall McPherson and a clinician warn that many aesthetic injections are performed by non-healthcare professionals like aestheticians who can't handle complications. Ask for board certification in a relevant specialty, check before-and-after photos, and talk to previous patients before booking.
I would say like anybody can inject, you can push a syringe, it's not hard, doesn't take that much skill, but it's the complication recognition that's the main issue.
That bleeds over the same constructs into aesthetics, which you're so right. I would say the vast majority of people who go to an aesthetics practice are seeing probably an aesthetician, an injector, not a healthcare professional.
Absolutely. And somebody that may not know how to manage a complication, which is the scariest part. And those are the ones that come to me because, right, something happened, they didn't know what was going to happen, and that person didn't recognize it.
What would your advice be to them, guide them in the the right direction to land in the hands of the right clinician, surgeon, et cetera?
I think the bare minimum is just a specialty training in what you're going after, right? So you'll see cosmetic surgeon, you'll see board-certified surgeon, but there's a lot of resume padding and trying to trick the consumer into knowing, okay, they might be board-certified in sleep medicine, not in surgery, but your psychiatrist could do a bleph in the office and there is no law to prevent them from doing that. So I think the bare minimum is just board certification. In the field that you're looking after, talking to patients that have had the same procedure because the office should be able to give you that, looking at their before and afters, meeting them virtually and in person if you can. All of those things are more of a vibe check, but the credentials part, it can be tricky, but it's worth taking that extra step because even though there are laws to prevent false advertisement, people get around it all the time.
