May Is Medical Spa Month At Pretty City

Pretty City is a 'consumer' site for women interested in all things beauty.

Pretty City is trying to move into the medical spa space somewhate and is offering 'Medical Spa Month' as a promotion during May.

Here's the Pretty City press release.

MAY IS MEDSPA MONTH
$99 Skin-Saving Treatments Stop the Clock at Top MedSpas Across the Nation

CHICAGO, IL (May 1, 2010) – This May, PrettyCity.com announces the 4th annual MedSpa Month. This 31-day, skin-saving campaign is dedicated to educating women about the latest clinical advancements for stopping the clock and offering these Medical Spa services at hugely discounted prices, just $99 all May-long, at the most respected Medical Spas around the country.

Participating Medical Spas in Arizona,  California, Colorado, Florida,  Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin are offering $99 services such as Photofacials, Laser Hair Removal, Injectables and much more – treatments that would normally cost up to $500.

Consumers are invited to log onto www.MedSpaMonth.com as often as they wish for a current list of locations and their $99 offers, a directory that will be growing by the day. During their visit to the site, women are encouraged to browse MedSpa Month’s treatment glossary, an A to Z listing of the most popular, and often most misunderstood, MedSpa services.

If you'd like to participate in Pretty City's promotion by offering a medical spa treatment for $99 and getting some additional traffic, you can create a listing here.

Re-evaluating Your Medical Spas Skin Typing Practices

If patients haven't already started coming to your practice for laser hair removal for silky smooth summertime skin, they're probably starting now. And now is a more dangerous time than ever for them to start laser therapies especially if you or your staff isn't adequately trained on proper skin typing and assessment.

If you're like most practices, you will request a patient complete a skin typing worksheet to determine their Fitzpatrick Skin Type. A couple of problems arise here. First, you're depending on your client to complete the chart and be accurate and honest. Many technicians only look at the final score and never really go over each question. Are they really blonde, or is their hair colored? Do they really tan easily without burning if they're a freckled red-head? Verifying each answer the client has chosen is the responsibility of the technician who should be comfortable "overruling" an answer upon using their own eyes to verify.

Another problem that can arise is exposure to the sun, tanning beds, spray or bottle tans. This is the time of the year where your client may start false tanning. This pigment applied to the skin can very much interact with the laser parameters you have set; therefore, you will need to make an adjustment. Or, they could walk in on a Monday after getting some sun on Saturday and their legs will be a little "pink" to them which should look like a big red flag to you!

Even though a patient may be a repeat client, that shouldn't rule them out from completing a new form and being reassessed prior to treatment this time. Just because they weren't tanned last year when they had their chin and upper lip done doesn't mean they won't be tanned this year when they come in to have their legs treated.

Skin typing should be performed at every laser session, not just the initial visit, as there could be subtle changes each session. If you are a laser technician or aesthetician who is uncomfortable with skin typing your clients, or you have staff personnel you feel lack the necessary understanding of proper skin typing, you might want to consider the Medical Spa Aesthetics Course, Study Guide, and Advanced IPL & Laser Training course available on MedicalSpaMD exclusively. The Patient Selection Chapter discusses Laser Applications, Patient Selection, Skin Color, Skin Typing, The Fitzpatrick Classification Scale, Skin Classification by Ethnicity Type, Medical History, Physical Examination, and Contraindications for Treatment.

Great patient results begin with proper education to develop solid standards of practice. Your patients don't want to get burned, and neither do you.

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Medical Spa MD: Appologies for the occasional, accidental comment deletion.

I've got an appology to make.

To whom, I'm not sure.

Since we focus on cosmetic medicine and discuss everything from IPL & cosmetic laser reviews, Botox and filler injections, internet marketing for medical spas and everything that goes along with that, Medical Spa MD is under constant attack from spammers.

The spam comments are left every day and every day a member of our team goes through and tries to clean them out. We have a very sophisticated site so we can bring up all of the last comments that are left and look at them in one place as a simple list rather than scrounge around the site. Of course with tens of thousands of comments it's not really possible to go through and find or ensure every one but there are some 'filters' that we can apply to bring up a list of likely spam comments.

Today it was my turn. Unfortuanately... as I clicked 'delete and report as spam', I noticed that at least one of the comments was probably not spam at all. It appeared that  it was a legitimate comment from a well intentioned plastic surgeon, possibly a first time commenter who'd overcome natural reticence and was asking a question of the community here.

Of course I only recognized this just as I consigned that comment along with the rest, to the ignominious death of the spam pile and once that's done, it's done.

So, I wanted to voice my apologies to the physician who left that comment, whoever you are.

I'm sorry. I get a 'fail' for that one.

I'll try not to make that mistake again.

We make every attempt to keep our forums clean of spam and imposters (Yes, we can identify them too in many cases). So please don't take my accidental deletion of your comment as anything other than what it was, my overly quick mouse and slightly too slow reflexes.

Our coummunity is our greatest asset. With more than 5000 physicians around the globe who are Members it's an attractive target for the nare-do-wells of the world. If you're a medical provider any where in the world and you've got a question about the Sciton BBL, Fraxel and Thermage settings and results, know what other physicians are saying about Restylane SubQ, or you want to interact with other Members or form a cosmetic laser user group, this is absolutely the best place on the web.

So, I make no apologies for making every effort to protect it... except in this case.

Your Medical Spa Patient Care Coordinator

What is a Patient Care Coordinator?

As Jeff mentioned in his post entitled Your Medical Spas Front Desk, it is very important in the cosmetic industry to find a competent and friendly front desk person.  It is equally important to find a dynamic and motivated Patient Care Coordinator.

In most Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery Centers, Patient Care Coordinators are few and far between. This is unfortunate because a motivated Patient Care Coordinator can exponentially increase your profits.

A first-rate Patient Care Coordinator usually possesses a business/marketing degree and can not only handle your website marketing, blogs, and Facebook, but can also field inquiry calls in a professional and effective manner.

Oftentimes Patient Care Coordinators will even start the initial consultation if they are “complimentary” in your office. Then when a patient is interested proceeding forward with a surgery, they are ushered in to meet with the Surgeon. This way, the Surgeon is not wasting his/her valuable time speaking to someone who is simply gathering information or price shopping. Also, if your Surgeon is not a “warm and fuzzy” type, the Patient Care Coordinator is a good go-between, and is able to relate to the patient on a more personal and friendly level. Patient Care Coordinator’s usually handle all aspects of patient financing and have the ability to help the patient choose which financing plan works best for them, sometimes calling in for the patient to seek approval.

In addition, if any areas are lacking in your practice, such as your employees taking lousy before and after pictures, A good Patient Care Coordinator does not mind stepping in to take over the picture taking or train the right person to handle this task because high-quality before and after pictures are crucial for marketing during a consultation and your photo gallery on the internet.

If you have an employee that you feel is up for the position of Patient Care Coordinator  but is unpolished, don’t worry because there is help out there. The best course I have attended is offered once every few months by Michele Tyler from Dr. Todd Malan’s office in Scottsdale, Arizona.  I myself was literally thrown into this course by my husband, who was taking a fat grafting course from Dr. Malan and wanted to make sure I had something to do while in Scottsdale (although I tried explaining to him there is much to do there!).

As I have been a Patient Care Coordinator for 5 years, I came to Michelle’s course with an overconfident attitude that I most likely knew all there was to know about this position and there was nothing I could be taught. Although I knew from both my own training and trial-and-error on the job training, much of the material being presented,  there were many excellent tricks and pointers that I learned that were worth their weight in gold and paid off many times over the relatively small price we had to pay for the course. One such topic was “What to do when a potential patient is calling and is asking how much a procedure costs?.” I’m not going to give away any of Michelle’s secrets but, if your Patient Care Coordinator or Receptionist does not know the answer to this question and consistently does not get patients into your office who ask questions such as these,  your employee probably needs to take the class!

If you are uncertain if your office employees are answering patient inquiry calls adequately and successfully, drop me an email and be sure to include your office phone number. I will “mystery shop” for you and give you a free of charge brief assessment of whether or not you need a Patient Care Coordinator in your practice.

Wendy Hovorka B.S.  M.L.A.  Valley Laser Surgical Solutions Vein Center,  McAllen, Texas

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Your Medical Spa Frontdesk & Website SEO

Damn! That was a lot of work but we now have a special website SEO reporting tool installed directly in Medical Spa MD.

Frontdesk SEO is a Select Partner and the uber-cool Frontdesk SEO reporting tool is now available directly from this site.

For those of you who have not yet run one of Frontdesk's website report on your site, you'll want to ASAP. It's somthing akin to a credit check for your website and gives you a look at your Page Rank, links, SEO, competion, trends, and lets yo knowwhat Google, Yahoo, and Bing think of your website.

The report is free of course, but you'll undoubtedly receive an email at some time in the future about Frontdesk's do-it-yourself SEO software or outsourcing services (Which are fantasitc by the way and we use them ourselves). That's the trade of course, which is fine. After all, we're all capitalists here.

Healthy Aging Magazine Articles

Healthy Aging Magazine is now a Select Partner. Welcome!

Healthy Aging has a pretty well-stocked store choc-a-block full of the kinds of stuff that makes my eyes glaze over, but is a veritable playground for whoever does the ordering in your clinic.

If you go to the Healthy Aging Magazine page, you'll find a code that will give you an additional 10% off of any purchase you make.

Healthy Aging also has a number of sites and blogs as well as their general publication online. Here are a couple of tidbits from their site.

Evidence-Based Practice Medical Spa

Implementing an evidence-based practice (EBP) change with health care professionals in a medical setting can be daunting, but implementing it in a practice where some staff members are not medical clinicians presents unique challenges. This article discusses an EBP change for the treatment of acne in adult women by nonmedical clinicians in a medical spa setting.
 
With organized team processes, documented plans for intervention and ongoing evaluation, evidence-based practice intervention should be sustainable. Nonmedical clinicians can learn that not all studies are scientifically strong. They can learn to carefully consider study details to determine scientific validity. And they can follow and use evidence-based treatment protocols. Read more.

HGH: Safe or Not

A recent editorial in the journal Aging Healthy (not to be confused with Healthy Aging www.advanceweb.com/healthyaging) reignited the debate of Human Growth Hormone as an anti-aging supplement. Last year the AMA came out against HGH, citing a lack of clinical evidence, yet physicians argue with that claim and continue to endorse its use.  Read more.

Subscribe to Medical Spa MD via Email

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As a Medical Spa MD Member you can subscribe to any content on Medical Spa MD and have it sent directly to your email, ensuring that you don't miss anything you're interested in.

Every time the forum thread or blog is updated you'll receive the content in your email automatically. That way, you'll be able to recieve the content you're interested in without the need to visit the site and see what's new. (Although that's a good idea from time to time so you can see if there's something new you're interested in.)

Make sure that you subscribe to the main blog as well as this one so that you're aware of new updates to the site.

Here's the how to for subscribing as a Member:

Subscribing To Individual Pages

(Blog, Archive, Library, etc.)

Members may subscribe to any content and have it delivered to them via email.

To subscribe to any page:

1. Click on your name in the top right corner of the page.
2. Click the Subscribe to Page Updates >

You will now receive updates to all the pages you subscribe to via email. You may subscribe to any page Medical Spa MD.

Managing Your Page Subscriptions

To manage or remove a Subscription:

1. Click on your name in the top right corner of the page.
2. Click Edit Profile
   
3. Click Subscriptions



Your Medical Spa's Front Desk

Your medical spa already has a receptionist of some sort... perhaps a few.

Sometimes, they're merely a guardian, a sentry to keep the riffraff in the lobby. Or, as in the case of many medical spas or laser clinics, a prettier than average female with lip fillers and clear skin that's supposed to be asperational for the majority of patients.

Other times, though, a receptionist can change the entire tone of an interaction. If you've got someone answering your phone, greeting your clients (who have traveled a thousand miles to visit your office) or otherwise dealing with the outside world, I think it's time to do some simple cost/benefit analysis.

If your front desk greets just 10 people a day, that adds up to 2,000 people a year.  How much is that worth to your business? Is it worth a dollar per interaction to transform all of those interactions into something spectacular?

In many if not most medical offices, the front desk staff sees incoming patients as just another person to get through the process. For some it's just another headache. And the patients feel that in all of the interactions. Fill out this paperwork. Sign here. Wait there.

But what if instead of hiring the cheapest person, or sticking with the existing person because it's easier, what if you invested in a truly remarkable experience?

Cosmetic Lasers, User Groups & Clinical Exchange Forums

Medical Spa MDs forums are getting some TCL.

With tens of thousands of comments, the navigation menu had pretty much outgrown the the previous navigation and was bursting at the seams. The only way to really drill down and find information was to search, and that's somewhat clumsy since you have to know what you're looking for.

We spend the last couple of days and nights attempting to create a better system that allowed physicians to brows by topic as well as have access to holistic search functions. It's still in need of a little tweaking but we're letting you see it now.

Medical Spa MDs new forums are divided into four broad categories:

• Medical spa business

  that includes legal and marketing and advertising forums.

• IPL & cosmetic lasers grouped by manufacturer 

  You'll find a special forum on cosmetic laser & IPL reviews and comparisons as well as forums for Palomar, Cutera, Sciton, Lumenis, Candela, Cynosure, Sineron, Alma, Solta and others. I've also put all of the IPL & cosmetic laser user groups in one place.

• Physician clinical exchange

• Used cometic laser classified listings

These changes to the forums combined with the new area for Medical Spa MD Select Parterns should allow you to navigate the site and find information that's relevant to your needs more easily... at least I hope so.

We'll try to manage the places that posts are found and move them to the appropriate location when we can. Of course there's a huge amount of overlap. I've included pretty much any fat removal treatment under the Bodyscupting & Liposuction forum for example. While it's not perfect, I think it's much better to have only a few forums that you can peruse.

If you haven't used the forums before, please do. We have a very active physician community who are very helpful. Many of the best threads on the site were started with physicians asking very specific questions around treatments, techniques, and other 'down in the trenches' queries.

If you would like to have a forum added or think we've missed something please let us know. If there's enough content or interest we'll add it.

Also, if you're a physician who has some great information or something to say on any topic, please submit it as a guest post and help everyone out.

The Price Of Fake Botox

Are price increases in Botox motivating some physicians as well as non-physicians to sell fake Botox to their patients?

A Houston physician, Gayle Rothenberg was sentenced to 5 ½ months in Federal prison last Friday for injecting patients with a fake Botox product not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for human use. Apparently Dr. Rothenberg injected at least 170 patients with an unapproved botulism chemical. According to testimony, Rothenberg stopped using Botox after a price increase in January 2004 and began ordering the unapproved drug, which was half the price, despite knowing it was not for human use and labeled only for research purposes. In 2004, when fpur people became paralyzed from the counterfeit Botox, the FDA’s involvement has led to 31 arrests and 29 convictions of individuals selling the fake Botox. In addition to a jail sentence, Dr. Rothenberg must pay more than $98,000 in restitution to her patients and cannot reinstate her suspended Texas medical license.

The case of Dr.Rothenberg is no different than the case of Laurie D’Alleva, another fine citizen of my home state of Texas charged with selling counterfeit Botox. So far D’Alleva’s case has yet to be prosecuted as evidence is still being gathered. The common similarities between the two are that both individuals were motivated by greed to jeopardize patient safety ahead of financial gain.  Laurie’s case is especially intriguing to me based on public opinion. Here is someone who seems to be viewed by her customers as a “business woman” who was doing a “good service” for those individuals who felt that Botox cosmetic was too expensive because the “greedy” doctors were charging too much for the filler. While Laurie seems to be viewed by many as a caring individual, making Botulism more affordable to the masses, public commentary on Dr. Rothenberg is quite the opposite. Comments such as “5-1/2 months? Justice is not only blind, it's stupid. (and maybe corrupt) “ and “That sentence is not even one day of confinement for every defrauded patient!.” I feel the same way as the above two comments, but why is the public sentiment different with these two con-artists? Is it because one is a doctor and one is not?

Personally, I find it very frustrating that the price of Botox has doubled in since its introduction. I remember being excited when Dysport came out because I thought this product would be half the price and would drive the price of Botox down so more patients could afford the price. Sadly, this was not the case. As physicians have to pay more money for Botox, so do their patients. These increasing prices enable individuals such as Ms. D’alleva and Dr. Rothenberg to find counterfeit Botox they can buy at a cheaper price to make a greater profit, while sacrificing patient safety. Laurie d’Alleva’s “Botox” price was probably pennies on the dollar, whereas a physician’s cost for Botox is now at $600 per bottle. Hopefully another pharmaceutical company peddling botulism toxin will come along, get FDA approval and drive the price of Botox down to a more reasonable price for physicians to purchase for their patients. Until then, brace yourself for more Laurie d’Allevas and Dr. Rothenberg’s to come along. Thank heavens for the invention of ventilators!

Guest post by Wendy Hovorka, Valley Laser Surgical Solutions Vein Center,  McAllen, Texas

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Effective Link Building Strategies to Increase Your Medical Spa's SEO

If you are new to "link building", it really isn't as hard as it seems.

Basically, link building is just a link from another website back to your own medical spa or laser clinic. The more back links your site has, the higher it will rank on the major search engines.

Link building can be very time consuming, but the FrontDesk SEO tool can really help you go out there and find the sites you should be listed on. This saves you a tremendous amount of time.

Because you will be resubmitting the same text over and over again, make yourself a document that you can keep all of your submission text on. This should include your Page Title, your website's URL address, a brief description of your practice, and important keywords. Website submissions also ask for a name of the submitter and email address. I would suggest setting up a email address with Google or Yahoo, one that you only use for submissions, this way your personal email won't become inundated with confirmation and/or spam emails as a result of your submissions.

View: 5 minute video introduction to linkbuilding and SEO

There are several types of link building methods you can do. Some are just basic data submissions, and some are blog and article submissions. I will describe the differences amongst the major link building methods:

Article Submission

There are directories on the web designed just for submitting articles and some for writing blogs. When you submit something you wrote about your practice or even a particular therapy you offer, you can attach hyperlinks to keywords in your article that direct the reader back to your website. Some quality sites are Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, and Wordpress.com. Let me show you how this works with just one line taken from a blog I wrote on my own blogpost:

"It's your body and you do have to be careful of who you choose to perform your laser lipo procedure. While no physician can have a 100% satisfaction rate, don't be afraid to ask questions about how long a physician has been performing these procedures, who they trained with, how many procedures do they perform a month, and also if they have any satisfied patients you can chat with. Also, it's important to ask to see a before and after photo book with their patients, and not someone else's."

By choosing a keyword you think your reader would be interested in, you can immediately direct them right to that page on your website with the hyperlinks.

Google considers a "Yahoo Directory" link as a quality back link. Unfortunately, they charge an annual fee of $300. It may be worth submitting to; however, there is no guarantee from Yahoo Directory that your site will be accepted.

Directory Submission

DMOZ is a directory worth submitting your site to. DMOZ is an Open Directory Project (ODP) mainly known as DMOZ which stands for "directory.mozilla.org" and is owned by Netscape. While DMOZ can substantially increase your SEO ranking, it's tough to receive their approval and the entire process could take months. If you are fortunate enough to receive their approval, many smaller directories use the DMOZ directory categories so if you can become listed with DMOZ this would mean you would also become listed on many other web directories as well.
There are other major directories you can submit to such as the BOTW (Best Of The Web) directory ($99/year or $299/permanent).

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is changing in it's effectiveness all the time. In social bookmarking websites, users save links publicly (not personally on their own computers) to web pages that they want to store and/or share with others. Usually, these bookmarks are shared within an individual "group" someone may subscribe to (such as "Laser Hair Removal"). You can add descriptions to your bookmarks in the form of metadata, or meta tags, so that other users can understand what the content is of your bookmark without having to download it beforehand. Different types of "descriptions" can include comments or even reader's votes (favorable or not - like on YouTube or Digg). Again, FrontDesk SEO makes this process relatively easy.

Blog Commenting

MedicalSpaMD is a blog and, like most blogs, it is highly susceptible to spammers like we have all seen and Jeff so diligently tries to eliminate on a daily basis as it can be a true nuisance for people like us who use this site as a valuable tool for your practices.

If you want to find blogs to participate in and comment on, try to find quality blogs that are related to what you do as a profession. Again, FrontDesk SEO can help with this. And when you add your comments, try to make them content-relative because not only do your comments add value to the blogpost in general, they also have greater chance of staying on the blogpost with a link back to your website.

Press Releases

Press Releases have worked well for me, and I'm not too proud to say that I didn't write the ones that really worked. There are a lot of good and bad example press releases out there and I am no exception. Writing a quality press release is an art and, frankly, I don't have the talent for them and pay someone else to do it. Let me give you an example of my own good and bad press release experiences.

While this press release still continues to give my website hits, all it is is words: Paula's Bad Example

Now look at the one I paid Fran Acunzo from Acara Partners to do for us. It includes a photo, links and even video: Paula's Good Example

If writing a good press release including videos and back links is not your forte, then it's worth it to farm it out. Just writing a good press release is half the battle. Submitting it to the right press release agencies that will index it effectively for you is the other half.

Social Media Sites

Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube work very well by providing quality and relevant back links to your site that all the major search engines love.

So, this is back linking in a nutshell and we can really go deeper into the categories, but I fear you will become bored or even glassy-eyed if you're not a geek like me. So if you don't have someone out there performing these activities for you and you really are serious about your web presence, you really might want to take a look at FrontDesk SEO and see what it can do for you. Just remember, building links doesn't increase your website's internet presence overnight. It does take some time, like my good friend Jeff keeps reminding me! In a world of available "instant results", it's hard to be patient sometimes! 

Author: Paula D. Young RN runs internal operations and training at Young Medical Spa and is the author of the Medical Spa Aesthetics Course, Study Guide, and Advanced IPL & Laser Training course for medical estheticians and laser technicians.

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FDA Warns 6 Medical Spas About Lipodissolve Marketing

Lipodissolve (or liposolve or mesotherapy) is a staple in any number of medical spas, but the FDA has just issued a warning letter to 6 clinics that they've crossed the line in marketing lipodisolve to patients.

My own experience with lipodissolve mesotherapy is something of a mixed bag. Clinics that I've been associated with have offered liposolve in the past and I'm aware of one really scary incident where a woman had been treated in Park City over a large area (thights and stomach as I remember) and then went golfing. She colapsed at the golf course and was rushed to the ER at the University of Utah.

She recovered but the administering physician faced some pointed questions from the ER docs about what he'd injected and why.

(The lipodissolve treatment causes fluid accumulation and swelling temporarly. That fluid comes from the blood stream and when there's a large treatment area, that can be a lot of fluid. This can affect the patient's blood pressure and volume, in some cases dramatically. This patient's recent treatment combined with golfing in the sun, walking, and dehydration was enough that she tipped over and (I think) lost conciousness for a few moments.)

If you're offering lipodissolve, leave a comment below and detail your experiences, results and thoughts... especially if you're from one of the 6 medial spas named below.

Anyway, here's the FDA story via USNews.com

FDA Issues Warning on 'Fat-Melting' Spa Injections

There's no proof the procedures work and serious side effects can occur, agency says

Claims by spas that "lipodissolve" injections can melt away fat are unsubstantiated and the procedures' safety also remains in question, according to warning letters issued Wednesday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA warned six U.S. based medical spas and a Brazilian company to stop making false claims about the drugs used in these procedures.

Sold on the Internet and used by some spas, lipodissolve is a procedure that its proponents claim will eliminate fat. U.S. companies claim that the drugs used in the procedure are safe and effective, but these products have never been approved by the FDA, the agency said.

"We are concerned that these companies are misleading consumers," Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a prepared statement. "It is important for anyone who is considering this voluntary procedure to understand that the products used to perform lipodissolve procedures are not approved by the FDA for fat removal."

Lipodissolve involves several injections that supposedly dissolve and remove small pockets of fat from areas of the body.

Lipodissolve is also known as mesotherapy, lipozap, lipotherapy, or injection lipolysis. The drugs most often used are combinations of phosphatidylcholine and deoxycholate.

Sometimes other ingredients such as vitamins, minerals and herbal extracts are added into the mix, the agency said.

However, there is no "credible scientific evidence that supports the effectiveness of any of these substances for fat elimination, and their safety when used alone or in combination is unknown," the FDA said.

The FDA has asked for a written response from the U.S. companies within 15 days outlining how they plan to correct the violations and prevent future violations. Failure to correct the violations could result in legal action, the agency said.

Each company has been cited for a variety of violations, including making "unsupported claims that the products have an outstanding safety record and are superior to other fat loss procedures, including liposuction," the FDA said.

Also, some of these companies have claimed that lipodissolve can treat certain medical conditions, such as male breast enlargement, benign fatty growths called lipomas, excess fat deposits and surgical deformities.

"The FDA is not aware of clinical evidence to support any of these claims," the agency said.

FDA officials have received reports of negative side effects from people who have tried the procedure, including permanent scarring, skin deformation, and deep painful knots under the skin in areas where lipodissolve drugs were injected.

Warning letters were sent to: Monarch Medspa, King of Prussia, Penn.; Spa 35, Boise, Idaho; Medical Cosmetic Enhancements, Chevy Chase, Md.; Innovative Directions in Health, Edina, Minn.; PURE Med Spa, Boca Raton, Fla.; and All About You Med Spa, Madison, Ind.

The Brazilian company receiving the warning letter sells lipodissolve products on two Web Sites: zipmed.net and mesoone.com, the FDA said.

The FDA also has issued an import alert against these Internet sites to prevent the drugs from being imported and distributed in the United States.

Well, the zipmed and mesoone sites are both down and have this simple statement.

Due to the current facts, Mesoone.com and Zipmed.net do not sell Lipodissolve vials anymore. Thank you. For more information access www.fda.gov

Leave a comment below.

Need A Critique Of Your Medical Spa Website?

OK, I'm ready to throw some rocks at a few of the medical spa and laser clinic web sites that I'm seeing.

If you'd like an expert (me) to take a look at your web site and let you know what I think about what you're doing right, and where you need some improvment, you can request a review from the contact form. (Just include the request in the body of the contact form.)

I'll review your site right here by making and posting a screencast of my thoughs and digging in to your site's structure, design, functionality and SEO attributes.

You'll get some insight about best practices and things you could be doing to drive additional patient traffic an increase your site's visibility, and everyone else will get to watch.

Request a review of your website >

FrontdeskSEO.com

Frontdesk SEO seems to be gaining some momentum with thier front end search engine marketing solution for physicians and medical spas.

If you haven't run a free SEO report on your current website, please do. With something like 98% of potential patients using the web to search for local businesses online, this kind of marketing solution offers the best bang for the buck by far... and it's easy.

Frontdesk offers do-it-yourself SEO software that lets your front desk staff perform marketing functions in just 5 or 10 minutes a day, or you can oursource SEO to experts and have it done for you. And the pricing starts at as little as $59.