The ugly side of HK's beauty industry in 'Wild West' with no sheriff

The beauty industry is in the limelight again because of a horrific scandal. Two doctors and a technician from the DR Beauty clinic chain are being prosecuted for manslaughter due to gross negligence. The procedure they used on a 46-year-old woman in 2012 was an experimental therapy for terminal cancers and they convinced her it would make her look younger. The procedure involved drawing a pint of her blood, incubating it with a powerful cellular extract called cytokine to "activate" white blood cells called "killer cells", before re-infusing the blood back into her. It might sound simple enough but the inherent risks can be serious.

The defendants, with no training or expertise in cancer treatment, learned the technique in one afternoon by watching the procedure performed by scientists from a hospital in Guangzhou. They then coaxed the gullible woman into having it done for youth restoration, and charged her a high fee for it. Things went terribly wrong when the equipment they used was contaminated by bacteria; she became seriously ill after the procedure and subsequently died.

In Hong Kong, most of the scandals are about unethical sales tactics and complaints from disgruntled customers for treatment side-effects, but some practices are so fraudulent that they boggle the mind. The current scandal on trial made front-page news internationally, and if it did not strengthen our authorities' resolve to regulate the beauty industry, I don't know what would. Yet I am not holding my breath to see it happen anytime soon, because the obstacles ahead are huge.

The first step is to identify all available procedures and put them into different risk categories. This is no easy task because the broad spectrum of services are constantly changing and expanding. Risk assessment can be controversial and new procedures and equipment are invented on a regular basis. Updating and revising the government gazette's section on beauty treatments will keep the personnel in charge eternally busy.

Also, any attempt to define non-medical and medical interventions is fraught with conflict of interest because of overlap between the beauty industry and medical practice, with each sector trying to protect its own turf. The primary concern is money. Doctors have been fighting tooth and nail to ban laymen from performing any minimally invasive procedure, such as those requiring a sharp instrument or laser.

The beauty salon workers argue that since anyone adroit with a needle can safely and effectively administer Botox into a forehead, why should medical doctors be the only people allowed to make a living from it?

Any procedure, no matter how small, should be performed only by personnel with proper training and the certificate to prove it - a process generally known as accreditation. This applies to not only laymen but also healthcare professionals, because a generic medical or nursing qualification does not guarantee competence in all things medical.

There have been proposals for a university-based institute of aesthetic medicine that could oversee training and accreditation for aesthetic practitioners but local plastic surgeons vehemently object to it because it would compromise their income. Confronting so many opposing forces and thorny issues, regulating the beauty industry is not going to take off any time soon with our government.

Meanwhile, despite all the scandals, women continue to flock to unethical beauty vendors and untrained doctors for bogus and substandard beauty treatments. Sadly, with the unregulated beauty industry universally compared to the proverbial "Wild West", it is virtually impossible to protect all the fools in Hong Kong from parting with their money, and gambling with their lives.

(HK Edition 06/27/2017 page10)