The increasing popularity of hair transplant and cosmetic surgeries has prompted
California to legislate new laws effective January 1, 2000. Governor Gray Davis has signed
into law three bills intended to protect Californians from deceptive physicians and
misleading before-and-after photos for cosmetic surgery.
The bills include one that will ban inaccurate cosmetic surgery ads and those that make
scientific claims that cannot be substantiated.
Davis also signed a measure that will require physicians who say they are ``board
certified'' to specify the source of that certification. That will prevent a gynecologist,
for example, from implying in ads that he or she is a board-certified cosmetic surgeon.
This practice is particularly common among doctors who perform hair transplants. The
recent increase in demand for hair transplant has prompted many doctors to give up what
they were originally trained for in order to pursue the more lucrative field of surgical
hair restoration.
The third bill will require that a physician carry malpractice insurance and have at least
one staff member present when performing plastic surgery in an outpatient facility.
While this bill is a good start in the right direction, we are saddened by the fact that
Davis also vetoed a bill that would allow potential plastic surgery patients to check the
backgrounds of their surgeons by logging onto the Internet. The governor said the bill
would have been too costly and might have left consumers with inaccurate information. As a
result, for the time being, we still have to rely on discussion groups and open forum to
find out if a particular doctor has been the subject of an undue amount of complaints etc.
Another issue that has not been addressed by the bill is the
duration of in-clinic surgeries. There have been proposals suggesting that cosmetic
surgeries performed in the doctor's clinic should be limited to no more than a certain
number of hours in order to minimize the possibilities of surgery related complications.
The proposal, if legislated, would deal a major impact on doctors who perform
mega-sessions because these types of hair transplants can last as long as eight hours. As
of now, we are not aware that the proposal has been set in laws.
The bills follow a sharp increase in the use of cosmetic surgery and in the number of
doctors who perform the procedures in their offices or clinics, sometimes with little or
no specialized training.
The death rate for liposuction, a fat-removal procedure, is as high as one in 5,000
nationwide, a state Senate analysis found.
For independent comments and discussions on hair transplant, please go to
Female Hair Loss Discussion Group
Male Hair Loss Discussion Group |
