“Concerns surrounding sharp increase in cosmetic procedures”
This headline appeared in The Telegraph today, March 24, 2018.
Not for nothing does the central government have the slogan “Watch out. Making yourself more beautiful can turn ugly. A successful procedure starts with a good doctor”. Anything can go wrong if you don’t get treated by a good doctor where you get clarity on the products he/she uses.
Cosmetic surgery regularly leads to serious medical complications
‘I regret it so much’
The quest for a more beautiful body or face (too) often ends in agony. More and more Dutch people – especially women – are resorting to a botox or filler treatment, only to have to draw a painful conclusion afterwards: ‘How could I ever have started this…?’
Fillers, injected directly into a blood vessel of her upper lip. ‘Mrs. C., 31 from South Holland’ looks as if she has run into a hefty fist. The lip is swollen, consequently crooked and shows a large, dark-colored bruise. “I am ashamed of my appearance,” the administrative assistant says emotionally. Talking she is willing to do, but no mention of first or last name, let alone a picture of her face. “Absolutely no recognition!” she emphasizes in the cautious conversation.
She just wanted fuller lips, Mrs. C. For beautification. But the end result is a (temporary) mutilation, which has caused her much misery and grief in recent weeks. “I believed I had registered with a good cosmetic clinic for filler treatment. But the opposite turned out to be true. The filler was injected incorrectly, it also hurt a lot. The result was a huge open wound on my lips, followed after some time by pain in my gums.
Yesterday, she reported for check-ups at the three-day cosmetic surgery complication clinic at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. Ms. C. is one of five hundred “serious complications” each year following cosmetic treatments performed incompetently at home or abroad. That figure relates to filler treatments gone wrong and mutilations caused by incompetence. Fillers, which sometimes turned out not to be real fillers….
Rotterdam dermatologist Peter Velthuis substantiated, “The other day I saw a Dutch patient who had supposedly been injected with a filler in Lebanon. That treatment was apparently cheaper there than here. He then developed bumps everywhere and came to us complaining. It turned out that they had injected him with a drug that must be applied óto the skin.”
Lisette, now 29, wanted more curves. Say fuller buttocks. She received it after being treated by “a Colombian lady in Scheveningen,” to whom she had been referred by an acquaintance. “That has been the biggest mistake of my life,” she says now. “Temporary that filler was supposed to be temporary, but it’s been six years now and I’m still in pain every day. It started with a lump in my groin. What the lady injected, I don’t know. She said hyaluronic acid, but that’s definitely not it! It would be something like silicone.”
Bumps, resembling a beaded necklace, have been pulled across her body and now cause pain all the way down her back, ankles and toes as well as a “numb” feeling. “I’m so terribly embarrassed, I feel so stupid. How did I ever get into this!” Tom Decates, cosmetic physician and researcher in Rotterdam, explains, “See, so this is what happens: the embarrassment is great. I’ve had women sitting across from me at the surgery who have cried out, ‘My mother had advised me not to have anything done about my appearance.’ If only I had listened. I regret it so much…'”
Fog
Together with three colleagues, Dr. Decates is attempting to provide a first step toward, what he calls, “dissolving the fog” in this shadowy field of external embellishments that sometimes turn out to be mutilations. Their work will be published next Monday in the scientific journal Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology. This provides an insight into the total volume of cosmetic procedures in the Netherlands.
Why? “Because it allows us to ultimately map out how often things go wrong,” Decates states. “In other medical disciplines, we know exactly how many surgeries take place and how often something goes wrong. With those figures, you can calculate the risk of such an operation. The big problem in this industry is that no one in the world can tell you that right now. We will later.”
In 2016, there were 390,000 filler and botox treatments in the Netherlands. In 2017, the mark of 400,000 was comfortably passed, state the authors of the article in question – researcher Linde de Wijs, head of the department of dermatology Prof. Dr. Tamar Nijsten, dermatologist Dr. Peter Velthuis and cosmetic physician Tom Decates. The latter hopes to receive his doctorate on the study in 2020.
Ultimately, according to the physician-researchers, this cosmetic inventory should lead to the Netherlands having visibility into “the crooks, the bunglers and the reliable practitioners.”
The suffering is significant, they say. “Patients who, instead of being more beautiful, now go through life disfigured. Who no longer dare leave the house, or only walk the streets with a very large scarf around their heads. Those patients go through hell after being injected with bad fillers or even some kind of plastic in a back room of a tanning salon, or at the barber shop.”
The Dutch Cosmetic Medicine Association applauds the desire to unravel the industry. President Catharina Meijer: “The NVCG, in cooperation with government and other medical disciplines, is committed to quality improvement in the cosmetic sector. We have now been able to make good strides there, including the development of a recognized training program for cosmetic physicians. Currently, proceedings are also underway at the College of Medical Specialties for title protection of the cosmetic medicine profession, which will allow patients to be confident that a cosmetic doctor is actually competent for these operations.”
Source: The Telegraph, March 24, 201
