by MARISA FAIRCLOTH, PA-C
If you’ve ever wondered about the difference between a plastic surgeon’s services and the work of Restoration MedSpa, here’s some clarification. I’m sure you’ve heard about wonderful results from facelifts with surgical practices. Perhaps you’ve even read about those results here in this magazine. While I won’t dispute the results, I don’t believe that every person needs a facelift. In fact, many people who walk into a surgeon’s office for a smaller concern might end up leaving with a full facelift without needing one. In my experience, non-invasive procedures can provide equally wonderful results and often without the risks or downtime associated with surgery.
If you are open to the non-invasive cosmetic treatments and services we offer at Restoration MedSpa, you may never need to resort to a facelift. However, that said, non-surgical alternatives can also pose some risks. If you’re questioning why that might be, let’s look at some common reasons.
Many practices offering non-invasive procedures have practitioners with less training providing these services. Perhaps they might even include practitioners with MD credentials whom you might feel obligated to trust, such as plastic surgeons, dermatologists, dentists, and family practice doctors.
When these practitioners start to offer these services, it’s to broaden the scope (and profits) of the practice without the additional hassle of insurance claims. They may get a few hours of training on these techniques and services when they first decide to offer them (and usually do not continue their education hours further). Or they may even delegate these services to someone beneath them. Even worse, unqualified and non-medically trained aestheticians are also offering non-invasive services at some of these practices. Whether the doctor performs these non-invasive procedures themselves or not, it’s unlikely the practitioner you are seeing in these places has the breadth of experience you’ll find in a medical spa (like Restoration MedSpa), which is solely focused on non-invasive cosmetic treatments.
Not only is all my training, and the training of my staff, focused on these treatments, we get hundreds of hours of training, and we get phenomenal results. We hear horror stories about services received at different practices, and at least once or twice a week I find myself correcting the mistakes of others. For these patients, not only are they having to pay more to have a second treatment done, it takes an emotional toll on them.
A current client of ours had four separate treatments, from two dermatologists. In all these treatments, she was having everyone’s Botox fear – the eyelid droop. The first dermatologist she saw told her that she needed to sleep on her back for a week after her injections to solve the issue. And the second dermatologist told her that she wasn’t a candidate for Botox because her face was “just too asymmetrical.” When she came to me, I was happy to ease her worries because her previous problems resulted from poor placement of the injections – a simple fix with an experienced injector. She is now a happy patient who sees us regularly and no longer experiences this negative result.
We had another patient whose physician told her that her poor results came from her being allergic to Botox. I’d never heard of this before, but, after pouring over aggregated results from more than 5,000 clinical studies, I learned that it was extremely unlikely that she was allergic to Botox. In fact, in all these clinical studies, there has never been a confirmed allergy to Botox. I treated her in a way that was appropriate for her, and now she is not only happy but hasn’t experienced the effects that she had under a previous physician’s care.
I personally do all of my own research into the non-invasive treatments that I offer. Restoration MedSpa is generally the first to innovate and adopt new procedures in our area. I train others in my own practice and throughout the country. I’ve also written a book that discusses my personal ethics. My practice doesn’t focus on dollars, but instead on the confidence our services can instill in patients. What this means to you as a patient is that we provide the services that are appropriate for you, We will never tell you that a service is right for you when it isn’t. One of our goals is that our patients never leave our offices looking “done.”
So, whether it’s lasers, energy based devices, injectables, threads, CoolSculpting or CoolTone. It’s best to have your beauty and renewal services provided by someone who has the right skills, credentials, and education. At restoration MedSpa, all our providers are fully credentialed and trained by the best and for good reason. Training and experience matter.
Marisa Faircloth, PA-C, is the author of Empowered by Beauty: A Testament for Unleashing Confidence. She’s also the owner and chief practitioner at Restoration MedSpa of Winston-Salem and Greensboro, known for its innovation and being the region’s best practice for non-invasive cosmetic treatments, including injectables, aesthetics, body sculpting and services, laser light and energy devices, micro needling and permanent makeup. Marisa has dedicated more than 40 years of her healthcare career towards aesthetics, healthy aging, and weight loss. She is credentialed as a Master Level Injector with Allergan, makers of Botox and Juvederm, which ranks Restoration MedSpa in the top 250 among approximately 40,000 medical spas nationwide.
