Is your medical spa using a new vial of Botox for every patient?
If your medical spa is using a new vial of Botox for every patient, yours will be the first medical spa or cosmetic practice of any kind that I've ever know to do so.
Here's a story from the Las Vegas Review Journal that specifically points out Botox as a 'contributor' to an outbreak of hepatitis C. Of course, if you read the story you'll see that some nurses were observerd 'reusing needles' that contaminated vials of Botox. A very different cause indeed from just using the Botox on multiple patients.
And of course, there's the cost, which almost every medical spa mentioned in the story. (You'd have to get all of your Botox from Canada to afford that.)
Single-use Botox vials used on more than one patient.
That practice at the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada, public health officials have repeatedly said, contributed to the hepatitis C outbreak in the Las Vegas Valley.
A phone call to inquire about the cost of a Botox party was greeted with this information: "It will be cheaper if all the partiers use the same vial."
One business that seems to be going well in Las Vegas is known for throwing Botox parties. That's an ongoing phenomenon across the country where friends get together and drink champagne while their wrinkles are needled away.
"We just couldn't handle it financially," said one medical assistant who asked to remain anonymous. "We would have gone out of business."
Medical assistants at two different spas said their owners only stopped multipatient use of single-use vials of Botox "until things quieted down" after the hepatitis outbreak was announced.
The Review-Journal had little trouble finding medical providers who said they and their companies knowingly broke state and federal regulations.
"You can't have doctors worrying about breaking the law or guidelines or whatever," Niamtu said.
A new company called Dysport is manufacturing a similar product, and the competition could force Allergan to provide smaller dosage vials to physicians who want them, he said.
Now a federal lawsuit filed in California by Las Vegas physician Ivan Goldsmith argues that sales representatives for Allergan Inc., maker of the popular anti-wrinkle drug Botox, promote multipatient use of its 50-unit or 100-unit single-use vials.
Goldsmith's lawsuit alleges that doctors can only make a profit using Botox if they reuse the single-use vials that the drug comes in.
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