Botch-ups at boozy Botox parties By Jonathan Fine. June 14, 2017.
It’s summer, wedding season. Thousands of people will be trying dermal fillers and Botox for the first time over the coming weeks. Last week I wrote about an open goal for dentists and a few days later, to demonstrate my point, the Sunday Times kindly ran the headline: Botch-ups at boozy Botox parties cost NHS dear.
People buying cheap dermal fillers are ending up in A&E with filler leaking out of their skin or blocked vessels near their eyes nearly blinding them, according to a consultant plastic surgeon the paper spoke to.
This is nothing new. There’s been a steady stream of similar stories for years — here’s one MailOnline did recently about “lip filler cowboys” targeting schoolgirls.
The Sunday Times, June 11 2017
Despite these stories demand is not going away and in fact the opposite is happening as people try to emulate the celebrity look, as I’ve noted here before.
What does this mean for you, as a dental practice owner? It means you can quite easily position yourself as the safe alternative to cheap and dangerous facial aesthetics in your town. There won’t be too many other people doing this properly, for the simple reason that they can’t. Very few people are as good at this type of work as you. You have the facilities and the clinical skills for it.
You can use the kind of messaging Sk:n uses, with an emphasis on your clinical excellence and hospital-grade facilities. Yet you will be able to come across as even better than corporate groups like Sk:n, because you already have a relationship with your patients — they already trust you.
People keep reading horror stories and keep looking for clinicians they can trust to do this work. They know by now that disfigured faces and infections are the work of unqualified practitioners, not a result of facial aesthetics being inherently dangerous.
In the Sunday Times piece a consultant in Liverpool reports that local nail technicians are visiting clients in their homes and injecting facial fillers in their kitchens. These practitioners might have one or two days of training under their belts, and have no concern for the sterility of the environment they work in, hence the infections…
Save Face, a group that provides accreditation for reputable clinics, warns that treatments by poorly trained practitioners are being offered at basement rates on Facebook and performed at Botox parties.
If your patients are asking you for advice on facial aesthetics there’s no need for hyperbole: in the wrong hands they can cause permanent damage. Handled appropriately they are safe. Until dermal fillers are regulated, the only way to be sure you’re safe is to stick with professionally qualified clinicians like dentists.
If you’re interested in leveraging your practice’s powerful position for the very lucrative provision of facial aesthetics treatments give me a ring — my team and I can help.
JJF | [email protected] | 07860 672727
“People keep reading horror stories and keep looking for clinicians they can trust to do this work”
Jonathan Fine, MD