There was nowhere to go but up now for Dr.
#Brazilian butt lift in florida license
The charges were later dropped, under an agreement with prosecutors but the Florida medical board suspended his license and fined him $30,000. Shortly thereafter, he was hit with felony charges for hiring unlicensed injectors and a foreign surgeon without a U.S. Labrador earned his medical license and was running two clinics in the Miami area where he performed cosmetic surgeries. The biggest offender of all, with a staggering eight deaths from 2013 to 2018, is a Miami clinic known today as Jolie Plastic Surgery-after undergoing three different name changes in three years, each a rebranding effort that made information about complications (including multiple cases of perforated organs), deaths, and lawsuits increasingly more difficult for the public to research.Ī USA Today reports, the man in charge behind the scenes was always, and is rumored to still be, a doctor named Ismael Labrador. Untrained doctors performing a high-risk procedure at a massive output rate creates the perfect storm for complications-and at least 13 women have died in the past decade in South Florida, according to a USA Today investigation. Related: Emergency Brazilian Butt Lift Restrictions in Florida Aim to Reduce Mortality Rates “If you’re charging $2,500 for a breast augmentation, you’d better be doing 40 to 50 a week.” These places charge $3,500.” And because the doctors work on commission, usually taking home 30%, “there’s a lot of pressure on doctors to compensate for the low profit margin in volume, if they want to survive,” he says. Careaga refers to these clinics as “chop shops” and says they’ve created a depressed market: “At a reputable place in South Florida, for liposuction and fat transfer, you’re looking at $8,000–10,000. A large supply of doctors-often trained in fields other than plastic surgery, since legally, anyone who holds a valid medical license can call themselves a “cosmetic surgeon” and perform BBLs without years of specialized training-has given rise to a dozen or so high-volume, low-price clinics that are easier to get to than other popular medical tourism destinations, like the Dominican Republic and Colombia. The promise of quick money, due to the demand, has indeed drawn plenty of doctors to the state. Say you’re a physician in another state, with a struggling private practice: you might as well say, ‘To heck with it,’ close down, and come here to make millions without having to deal with the headaches of running your own business,” he says. “I see ads for clinics all the time on medical job boards, guaranteeing a minimum salary of $1 million a year. Job opportunities abound here, says Coral Gables, Florida, plastic surgeon Daniel Careaga, MD. In 2014, the latest year for which figures are available, the government allocated $5 million to a marketing plan that positioned Florida as a medical tourism hot spot that same year, the industry brought in $6 billion. You need only glance around on the beaches to know that plastic surgery is big in South Florida. Under the new Florida ruling, if a doctor is caught injecting fat into the muscle, their license will be immediately revoked. The emergency BBL rule prohibits injection of fat into or below the gluteal muscle and mandates that “when performing gluteal fat-grafting procedures, fat may only be injected into the subcutaneous space and must never cross the gluteal fascia.” To date, every patient who has died from this procedure has had fat injected into the muscle. Patient deaths were such a concern that the Florida Board of Medicine enacted emergency restrictions on June 17, 2019, regulating surgeon technique. In the United States, last year, 25,168 augmentations involving fat grafting were performed Constantino Mendieta, MD, a Miami plastic surgeon and specialist in BBLs, estimates that doctors in Miami-Dade County were responsible for 15,000 to 18,000 of those. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery’s 2018 report, buttock augmentation is the fastest-growing surgical procedure, up 61% in five years. Yet demand for the procedure, in which fat is liposuctioned from the abdomen, back, and/or flanks before being injected into the buttocks, shows no signs of decline-particularly in Florida. It’s too easy a mistake to make, even for an experienced plastic surgeon, which is why the Brazilian butt lift (BBL) has a death rate of 1 in 3,000-far and away the highest of any cosmetic surgery. Miscalculate that slight margin of error, bend the cannula the wrong way for just a moment, and fat can enter an inadvertently nicked vein, where it can lead to a fatal pulmonary embolism. The difference between life and death during a Brazilian butt lift can be as little as two centimeters.