Considering Botox or fillers to treat those facial lines? Aside from deciding what area to treat, you should also consider who will treat you – nurse injectors or physician injectors.
While some of the legalities vary from state to state, it is totally legal for nurse injectors to treat your facial wrinkles with Botox, Xeomin or fillers. However, in some cases, a physician must be present in the practice or partial owner of the medspa in which the nurse injectors operate. The question is where do the nurse injectors receive their training.
Nurse Injectors: How do they learn their craft?
Generally, a future nurse injector starts working in a doctor’s office right out of school or after getting some hospital experience. In other words, nursing school does not teach cosmetic injections as part of their basic curriculum. Over time, they will watch the doctor perform those treatments and eventually move on to injector training. This is often a weekend course with multiple additional hours of on-the-job training as an apprentice of sorts. My feeling is that they have a good deal of training.
However, no amount of weekend courses and experience can replace a full-fledged dermatology or plastic surgery residency/fellowship who also has years of experience. I think the perception by the public is that the cost of injections is less with a nurse injector rather than the doctor. In some cases that is true. I’ve noticed that injections offered by both the nurse or physician in a cosmetic practice are more expensive if administered by the doctor.
So essentially you have to decide, is this where you want to save your money. I get it that there’s no reason to pay more for a Mercedes at one dealership if you can get the exact same Mercedes at another dealership. But is a nurse injector’s skills and experience exactly the same as the doctor’s? It’s hard to quantify and there are no good long term studies that review this question. Quite frankly, if there is such a study, it would probably be subjectively determined by surveys rather than objective scientific comparisons. So we may never know if there’s a difference.
Who handles the complications?
The bottom line in my opinion is that during any medical treatment, cosmetic or otherwise, there’s always the risk of a complication. And if there’s a problem, the nurse injector refers the patient to the person in the room with the most education and experience. Typically that’s the doctor. If that’s the case, why not just go to the doctor first.
Check pricing on injectables from a doctor near you by clicking here.
