COSMETIC SURGERY? ONLY IF YOU RELY ON TRUE QUALIFIED PROFESSIONALS. THE ALARM LAUNCHED BY "EL PAIS". MEANWHILE THE WORLD LIPOSCULTURE MARKET TAKES AWAY

di Maria Serena Patriarca

Retouching? Yes, but only if you rely on qualified centers and real professionals in the sector. There is no joking with cosmetic surgery, and the prestigious Spanish newspaper El Paìs . Aggressive commercial promotions that promise miracles in looks and low-cost clinics “are giving rise to a superficial perception of the implications of these operations,” reads in El Paìs , regarding cosmetic surgery. All this, according to the Madrid daily, is “trivialized”, because “there are people who believe that going to the cosmetic surgeon is like going to the hairdresser, and do not understand instead that there could be complications”.

That is why, in order not to risk repenting the whole life of the reckless surgery, it is once again important to reiterate that you must entrust your rejuvenation and beauty only to the hands of a truly expert surgeon.

An overview of current trends in Europe is also illustrated in the El Paìs dossier. The most requested interventions? Breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, botox, liposuction. Another interesting fact to record is that on the world market of cosmetic surgery, liposculpture is worth a total of 2 billion dollars, injectable fillers 2.7, breast implants 1.3, botox 2.1 billion. The point, however, according to the Spanish newspaper, is that “in many low-cost clinics, those who inform patients, or rather customers – and about 85% of them are women – are salespeople, often without health training, and whoever undergoes the operation only has a brief meeting with the surgeon ”. The result? a mostly summary approach, in which the patient is neither protected nor guaranteed, and most of the time finds himself in disarray.

The members of the Spanish Association of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery (AECEP) say they are worried about the spread of “this business that interests companies that only look at money and profit, rather than the patient’s well-being”. Accidents in the operating room are growing due to the proliferation of low-cost clinics, “where medical professionals who do not have a specialization in plastic surgery often work” and not even an adequate qualification, leveraging the enormous growth in the number of operations “, reports the newspaper. The debate on this issue in Spain is so heated that after the summer the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, decided to present a non-legislative proposal to Congress to bring order to cosmetic surgery. Three points: that a qualified doctor always performs the interventions, a regulation of advertising and an informed consent that includes the specialty of the doctor who operates.

Aesthetic reconstruction in the US and Europe is a trend in all respects, so much so that in Spain alone, for example, in the space of a decade, surgeries have almost doubled, from 119,637 in 2010 to 221,935 in 2019, according to data from the International Society of Plastic and Aesthetic Surgery (ISAPS): and up to 397,512 interventions in 2020.

In the latest ISAPS report, which analyzes 2020, the data decreased due to the pandemic (165,906), but it is estimated that it will return to previous levels and will continue to grow in the coming years. With these figures, Spain ranked as the 11th country with the most procedures during the year of the pandemic; the first three places were occupied by the United States, Brazil and Germany.