What Is Medical Aesthetics?

In a world dominated by social media influencers and where beauty is highly valued, it must come as no surprise that celebrities and high profile socialites flock to plastic surgeons, dermatologists and aestheticians (whether in secret or not!) in order to get their appearances enhanced. However, it may be surprising to learn that some of these treatments are carried out by people without proper aesthetics training that you may expect to be required for administering Botox and dermal fillers into people’s faces. 

This can be rather dangerous, especially in countries like Korea or China where these ‘fine-tuning’ procedures, are quite regularly carried out by beauticians or medical students without training that encompasses both ‘medical’ and ‘aesthetics’. 

Medical aesthetics is extremely important because there are many risks involved in these injections that can leave clients with permanent disfigurement or handicap – blindness or nerve damage caused by these cosmetic injections are not unheard of. 

Medical aesthetics need stronger regulations and standards

Most conventional medical degrees do not go into the details that are required for aesthetic procedures as it is generally focused on life-saving procedures, therefore instead of needing the knowledge for superficial procedures, it can sometimes be glossed over. This can be dangerous for clients of these medical degree holders because as mentioned above, there are certain anatomical risks involved in these tiny procedures. 

Some people might feel that injections carry no risk, but disfigurement, scarring, or permanent handicaps can happen anywhere on the body. When it comes to the face, there are significant dangers because facial structure is delicate, and one wrong move can cause damage to the face. 

For example, there are six points along the side of the face and forehead which are level with the bone and can cause significant damage. These six points include: 

1. Supratrochlear notch
2. Supraorbital notch
3. Infraorbital foramen
4. Mental foramen
5. Mandibular groove
6. Deep temple vessels

Aside from that, the mouth or lip area also requires special attention in order to achieve the desired results. These areas include: 

1. Superior & Inferior labial arteries 
2. Dorsal Nasal artery
3. Facial artery 
4. Supratrochlear
5. Submental 

According to experts, unlike the six danger points above, these five areas require specific injection techniques which are either shallowly administered, or injected deep into the vessels in order to avoid complications from arising. This information isn’t widely available, even in medical journals, unless one were to study cosmetic surgery. 

The future of safety regulations on administering medical aesthetics

There aren’t many regulations on the beauty industry of fillers and injections as it is non-invasive and there isn’t much push behind the industry to better their standards. However, as the industry becomes more sophisticated, the practices and procedures will have to mature along with it. Having the necessary training will soon become the norm – just think about the first plane pilot, he pretty much just winged it, but today, you need to go through an extensive training course and syllabus in order to operate a plane. The same should go for the beauty industry, whereby potential medical aestheticians go through a rigorous training program to ensure that they can offer the best services to their clients, at no risk to their faces.