Lipo & fat transfer using Beautifill by an APRN & electrocologist - is this allowed/safe/legal?

Question

Hello! There is a dermatologists office offering liposuction & fat transfer using Beautifill. The person performing the surgery/fat transfer is an APRN & electrocologist. Is this “allowed”? Is this safe? Is this legal? There is not an MD in the operating room meanwhile.

Darryl J. Blinski, MD · Answer

Surgery must be only preformed by state of Florida license medical doctor! Something sounds very off. Please be careful

Mats Hagstrom, MD (license on probation) · Answer

Whether it is legal or not is one thing. The real question you should ask yourself is if it’s appropriate.
I can tell you that deliver in consistent quality Liposuction and fat transfer results is far more difficult than most people believe and this includes board-certified plastic surgeons.
Even board-certified plastic surgeons with years of experience sometimes have a hard time and leave patients with disfigurement from these procedures.
Both Liposuction and fat transfer are permanent and more or less irreversible. You can easily disfigure people with these procedures.
Different people have different moral ethics and standards and greed seems to be one of the primary driving motivations for many people in the field of aesthetic medicine.
Anyone interested in liposuction and fat transfer procedures should spend a significant amount of time searching for the most talented and experienced board-certified plastic surgeon in their community for these procedures.
To do that I suggest patients schedule multiple in person consultations with board-certified plastic surgeons who seem to do a lot of these procedures and have been in practice for many years.
Rely exclusively on in person consultations. During the consultation ask each provider to show their entire collection before and after pictures for the procedure you’re interested in. Simply seeing a handful of pre-selected pictures which must likely represent the best results of the providers career or in the case of unethical providers pictures they found on the Internet.
This is insufficient to get a clear understanding of what average results look like in the hands of each provider. For that reason you should have to provide it to show as many pictures as possible of patients with similar body characteristics to your own. and experience provider should have no difficulty showing you a minimum of at least 50 sets of quality before and after pictures. Highly experience surgis will have hundreds or even thousands of before and after pictures. As the surgeon to show you examples of excellent outcomes, average outcomes and less than outcomes.
Finally I suggest patients read all reviews on various a physician review websites avoiding providers for any significant number of justified negative reviews. The absence of justified negative reviews is more important and more telling than having an abundance of positive reviews.
Continue having consultations until you feel quite certain you found the most talented and experience provider you feel comfortable with for this procedure. The failure to put in your due diligence and properly vet providers for permanent buddy changing procedures puts patients at unnecessary risk for permanent disfigurement that cannot be corrected.
Continue having consultations until you feel quite certain you found the most talented and experience provider you feel comfortable with for this procedure. The failure to put in your due diligence and properly vet providers for permanent buddy changing procedures puts patients at unnecessary risk for permanent disfigurement that cannot be corrected. This happens on a daily basis and you don’t have to look very far on this website to find patients desperately asking how they can reverse poorly done body contouring procedures.
There are anti-competition laws that severely limit restriction on medical practice so for most things when it comes to cosmetic surgery the environment is caveat emptor or buyer beware.
In the end surgeons are responsible for the outcome of the procedure but patients are fully responsible for who they choose to do the procedure.
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of provider selection for any cosmetic surgical procedure.
It is the single one variable that always has the most influence and determines whether something comes out as a positive experience or not.
Find the right plastic surgeon and everything falls into place.
Letting a nurse practitioner with zero formal cosmetic surgery training do cosmetic surgery is about as an intelligent of a decision as it sounds.
Best,
Mats Hagstrom MD

Robert T. Buchanan, MD (retired) · Answer

You are very insightful with your questions. Florida has had a significant problem with liposuction done improperly and dangerously. They have strict rules that you would have to check locally. From what I can tell, they expect liposuction to be done by physicians only. Having been among the first trained in the US by the European developers and done significant liposuction, I can tell you that any type of liposuction is a major procedure with significant risks and should only be done by a well trained physician. This does not generally include dermatologists. Fat transfer is also a procedure that is best done by someone very familiar with the principles of grafting, such as a plastic surgeon.

Lipo & fat transfer using Beautifill by an APRN & electrocologist - is this allowed/safe/legal?

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Lipo & fat transfer using Beautifill by an APRN & electrocologist - is this allowed/safe/legal?

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Everything you need to know about BeautiFill

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