Skin Clinic MD

Is Your Plastic Surgeon or Dermatologist Using Old Thermage Tips!

Thermage Skin Tightening treatments from Solta Medical have ushered in a new type of anti-aging and skin laxity treatments for your local skin clinic, cosmetic dermatologist, plastic surgeon and medical spa that adds another nonsurgical treatment to a cosmetic medical practice… Radio Frequency Skin Tightening.

Thermage has also implemented a new business model that charges the physician for each Thermage treatment by ‘deactivating’ a treatment tip after a set number of pulses or a specific time, even if the tip is still usable. This leaves the cosmetic dermatologist or plastic surgeon in the position of having treatment tips that would still work, except that they’ve been artificially turned off by the company. (Treatment tips with higher ’shot counts’ cost progressively more money. There’s no difference between tips other than the number of shots programmed into the Thermage tip.)

With high-count Thermage tips costing more than $800 for a single treatment and medical practices under increasing pressure to maintain profitability, many doctors are turning to third parties to ‘reactivate’ these Thermage tips for additional use by bypassing the counter inside the chip and effectively resetting the device to allow for continued use.

According to Thermage, Thermage tips are disabled to ensure patient safety.

Thermage’s position on reactivating Thermage tips:

“The largest study we know of involving Thermage is a four year study conducted by Weiss,1 and it only involved 600 patients. In addition, the claims in the Stevens publication are also wildly inconsistent with immense quantities of Thermage quality and reliability data we have compiled on our own products over the years. We know for a fact the dielectric membrane on our treatment tip will break down when subjected to a tiny fraction of the repeated use this publication alleges can be done. Dielectric breakdown can result in patient harm.”

Potential complications can arise from treating patients with damaged Thermage tips that can include burns or the destruction of underlying fat that can leave permanent depressions in the skin. But, with more and more cosmetic dermatologists and plastic surgeons looking to squeeze out a profit wherever they can and grey-market suppliers able to sell a reactivated Thermage tip for hundreds of dollars below the retail price, refurbishing or reusing Thermage tips may be used in an increasing number of cosmetic practices and medical spas.

For the most current information on new non-surgical cosmetic medical treatments visit the Thermage & Fraxel physician forums at Medical Spa MD.

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