We are looking for Clinical Providers and MedSpa Owners to help us with our Continuing Education Efforts. 

We want to provide quality content on Medical Spa MD to act as a stimulus for meaningful clinical exchange activities.

One type of Clinical Exchange is the discussions and the conversations that occur on blogs and websites.  Medical Spa MD is currently one of the only internet based clinical exchange platforms for Cosmetic Medicine.  We want to take advantage of Medical Spa MD’s leading position and large readership base to enhance its already strong presence in the Clinical Exchange field.

Our plan is to have people do summary notes of Webinars, Articles and Clinical Meetings.  These notes will be posted on Medical Spa MD and then a discussion can take place.  The conversations and debates will instruct us all!  Hopefully by sharing experiences and opinions, we will move the whole field forward in a positive and more rapid manner.

The first such Clinical Exchange Post was the summary of The IPL Dog and Lemon Guide.  This post has stimulated a lively discussion of the various IPL Systems.  Sciton and Palomar seem to be the favorite systems.  The clinical settings for treating Hair, Pigment and Vascular are being discussed.  We are all learning a great deal and a few knowledgeable and experienced thought leaders are emerging – Charry, Med Spa Guy, pmdoc, LH and SpaDocinCR.

Our second post will be a Summary of the DeepFx Round Table Webinar (May 2008) produced by Lumenis.  The Webinar was a Round Table Discussion between four of the most experienced and well known cosmetic physicians in the country – Jeffrey Dover, MD, Robert Weiss, MD, E. Victor Ross, MD and James Heinrich, MD.  Our post will summarize the Webinar.  The original Webinar is available to everyone on Lumenis’ Website.  We are hoping that our summary will prompt people to view the actual Webinar and then participate in the resulting discussion.  In the future, we hope that Lumenis will make their Webinars available in a form that can be downloaded onto iPods so we can listen in our cars.

Finally, it is our goal to get summaries done of the various meetings that are happening in the near future.  A few upcoming clinical meetings are The Cutera Clinical Forum in Chicago (August 2008), Controversies & Conversations in Laser and Cosmetic Surgery:  An Advanced Symposium in Whistler, BC Canada (August 2008) and the Harvard Conference in Boston hosted by R. Rox Anderson, MD entitled  “Laser & Aesthetic Skin Therapy:  What’s the Truth?” (October 2008).  We are hoping that conference attendees will write notes about the lectures and the sessions and then will submit those notes to Medical Spa MD to be posted.  We will be able to read these notes, learn from them and then discuss the content.  This will bring the information to countless more clinical providers.  In the future, we hope that the organizers of these conferences will record their sessions and sell the audio so we can benefit without having to travel and take time off from work.  At this years ASLMS Meeting, the lectures were recorded and you can purchase them for a nominal fee ($11 per Tape).

This Clinical Exchange Project is a grass roots activity that is meant to take the place of formal activities that Allergan and the big Laser Companies are not doing.  We are not sure why they have left this “information gap” and do not support meaningful continuing clinical education and meaningful clinical exchange, but we hope they will join our efforts once they see the value in these types of activities.  Better clinical outcomes and fewer adverse events will benefit the whole field.  By sharing information and communicating and making more information available to more providers, we can advance the field much more rapidly then our current method of each provider trying to figure things out by trial and error.

We hope you will join our effort as a summarizer of Webinars and Conferences or as an active participant in the resulting discussions and debates.