Aestheticians seem to be one of the primary components for medical spas these days. Almost anywhere you look a medical spa now has a Aesthetician who is posted on their website. Medical spas that are primarily cosmetic, seem to have a bunch, but there are a growing number of physicians who are hiring individual aestheticians to provide skin care consultations, do the microdermabrasions and facials, and give a little fluff to their practice.

Aestheticians on the whole are a difficult bunch to work with, especially those that come out of a day spa setting. Day spa aestheticians are used to working in either a booth rent situation, a commission structure, or some other highly competitive environment.

My own experience with aestheticians is that I try to find aestheticians that are either just coming out of school or aestheticians that were doing something else and have gone back to school and are now coming out with a change in career in mind. Aestheticians that are older and supposedly have their own clientele I have found to be problematic. I don't mean to break balls here, but in a medical practice the physician is the medical care provider. Aestheticians have a hard time kind of understanding this because they come from an environment where they are the care provider and so they consider patients to be their patients.

I cannot tell you the number of times I have had physicians complain to me that their aestheticians gainsay what their opinion is to their own patients. An example here recently was a physician who had prescribed a series of Fotofacials for complexion issues that one of her patients has had, and had sent the patient into an aesthetician in order to have her look at her under the black light and talk to her about products and such. The aesthetician countermanded the prescription by the physician and instead talked the patient into a series of microderm treatments, for which of course she would receive tips. This is not uncommon, but it is no way for a real business to work. Aestheticians in a medical setting have got to conform to physician administered prescriptions and cannot just go run willy nilly deciding what people need.