Real plastic surgeons have complained about the widespread existence of non-invasive cosmetic surgery training services. When competent agencies take inspection tours to unlicensed cosmetic surgery centers, the owners of the centers disappear very quickly but turn up again after a short time. 

Meanwhile, large hospitals receive patients who are victims of bad cosmetic operations conducted daily at underground centers, spas, nail parlors and hair salons.

Dr Pham Duy Linh, MA, from Duc Giang General Hospital, told VietNamNet that he often receives patients with complications caused by filler and botox injection operations conducted at unauthorized establishments. Most of the patients had an embolism which causes necrosis and infection in the injected skin areas. In some cases, filler injection operations in the nose area blocks the eye artery, causing blindness or loss of vision. 

Linh once received a patient with necrosis and oozing fluid at the temples. The patient came from a spa where she had worked as a model for training on how to inject fillers to have a baby-like face.

Linh thought the cosmetic surgery center did not use a filler it had promised, but used another low-cost product, or even a prohibited product, such as silicon and paraffin, which causes serious consequences.

Nguyen Dinh Quan from the National Hospital of Dermatology said his hospital receives cases with complications because of filler injections. The main reasons behind the cases are bad operation techniques and the low quality of the filler.

Patients with mild complications have symptoms of swelling, bleeding, or infection. In severe cases, patients may die.

At the Vietnam-Germany Friendship Hospital, Dr Nguyen Hong Ha said he receives similar cases every week. In previous years, the patients were mostly young, but now they are mostly aged 45-50.

They believe that filler injections are a simple operation, so they tend to come to private spas or nail parlors instead of hospitals. In some cases, they even buy fillers in the market and inject fillers into each other to save money.

Who can provide services?

According to Dr Pham Thi Viet Dung, Head of Plastic Surgery Department of the Hanoi Medical University, under current regulations, only a few medical schools and specialized hospitals are granted licenses to offer training in filler injection and eyelid surgery.

Doctors can conduct such surgeries on clients only after nine years of studying (a resident doctor). If they fail the exam to become a resident doctor, they will have to spend 10-13 years to study to obtain a master’s degree or become a specialist-1 doctor. 

In order to run a medical facility which provides filler injection services and eyelid surgery, the doctor will need to have a 54-month (4.5 year) practice certificate, and the trainers must be doctors and lecturers at medical schools. And the hospitals must be certified as having met the requirements to give training. 

Meanwhile, training establishments advertised on social networks are offering training courses at a training fee of just VND50 million per training course. The low training cost and the number of patients with complications every day indicates that these establishments are providing substandard services. 

The establishments organize classes and practice activities at the centers. The classrooms and labs at the centers cannot satisfy the requirements set by the Ministry of Health (MOH) on infection control and other conditions.

Currently, the spas which provide services are business units which are not under the control of MOH. The facilities have the right to provide skin care services with normal methods, using cosmetics. Therefore, they easily provide filler and botox injections and other services underground.

A doctor majoring in cosmetology, while criticizing the current loose management over cosmetic surgeries, wrote on his Facebook page that a doctor with 10-year training cannot earn as much money as a barber trained for three months.

When the doctor asked one patient, who had been hospitalized because of complications from a filler injection case, why she let a worker at a spa inject chemicals into her face, she explained that the worker showed her many professional certificates and degrees to prove her capability of providing such an operation.

However, in fact, the certificates were granted to each other by unknown cosmetic centers, not by any hospital or medical school.

Phuong Thuy