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Cover Story; Med Spas
Face Value
Loosely regulated, the medical spa business in Florida is growing fast, selling everything from $350 Botox injections to $2,000 laser hair removal treatments.
 Med Spa Opportunity: Brian Sidella (with wife Diana Santa Maria) got the idea to start Forever Young MedSpa in Cooper City after watching an episode of Fox's extreme makeover show "The Swan." In the show, no longer on the air, women received a cosmetic-procedure transformation and then competed to win cash and other prizes. |
Control issues
In May, Gov. Jeb Bush signed a law, House Bill 699, that limits the number of "satellite" offices a plastic surgeon or dermatologist may operate to one. (Physicians already operating two are grandfathered in and will be allowed to operate two until 2011.) The law, which took effect July 1, requires that the offices must be located within 25 miles of the physician's primary practice and that all satellite offices must be within 75 miles of each other.
More significant for the med spa industry, the law also states that only dermatologists or plastic surgeons may serve as medical directors of med spas. Some in the med spa industry say the change is a blatant move by plastic surgeons and dermatologists to corner the market on the lucrative med spa procedures, particularly Botox -- and kick other physicians off the gravy train. After all, they point out, other types of physicians may still perform Botox injections, medical microdermabrasion, chemical peels and laser treatments in their primary offices -- but House Bill 699 means they can no longer perform them at a med spa.
"It's a push by the dermatologists and plastic surgeons to control the industry in the guise of safety," says Eric Light, president of the International Medical Spa Association, which sent 200,000 e-mails unsuccessfully urging Bush to veto the bill.
Industry groups also complained that one of the legislation's co-sponsors, Rep. Eleanor Sobel (D-Broward), is married to Hollywood dermatologist Stuart Sobel and operates a skin care products company. She should have recused herself from the debate on the issue, the groups say. Sobel did not respond to requests for comment.
Florida state Rep. Joe Negron (R-Stuart), the original sponsor of the legislation, says he never intended to regulate the medical spa industry when he introduced the bill. That effect, he says, was merely one of several unintended consequences of legislation meant to enhance patient safety. "When I filed the bill, I had no interest in regulation of the medical spa industry, didn't know anything about the medical spa industry, and this is not a medical spa bill," Negron says.
Negron says he was worried that doctors, and dermatologists in particular, were juggling more offices than they could supervise and taking on more patients than they were capable of handling. Negron says one local dermatologist showed him files of patients who had been referred to dermatologists for treatment but never even saw one. Instead, they'd been treated solely by physician assistants and often never even realized it.
Labor Intensive Rudnick, who ran a chain of weightloss centers before getting into the med spa industry, says that finding qualified help is also so difficult that he plans to launch his own "MedSpa University," where he can "breed" future employees. If all goes well, he plans to open another Sleek location in Aventura Mall in the first quarter of 2007. He hopes to have 12 locations from Coral Gables to Palm Beach. Rudnick says that so far he hasn't been adversely affected by H.B. 699, but that's only because of the way his business is structured. The plastic surgeon affiliated with Sleek MedSpa independently owns and runs a medical corporation. Sleek, in turn, serves as a retail company that has a service agreement with that physician's medical corporation. He says the regulations won't pose any threat to his expansion plans. "We only work with plastic surgeons, and they benefit from this. If we have to have 12 plastic surgeons, so be it." |
"There was a Tampa doctor talking about opening a satellite office in Tallahassee," says Negron. "There are doctors with five, six, and -- particularly in the dermatology arena -- up to seven satellite offices. Could they actually supervise that many offices, and were they actually seeing patients?"
After the bill passed, Negron says he changed his mind after fully understanding the effect of the legislation on med spas but stopped short of asking Bush to veto the bill. He believes "that's something I think the Legislature next year should take a look at." A lawyer with Akerman Senterfitt, Negron dismissed suggestions that his firm's work on behalf of the Boston-based laser technology manufacturer Palomar had anything to do with his change of heart, saying that he has always kept his legislative work separate from his professional life.
Palomar, one of the largest makers of aesthetic laser equipment used for hair removal, tattoo removals and other cosmetic purposes, hired Akerman to help defeat Negron's legislation two days after the Florida House passed it.
