Cosmetic treatments don’t really matter, right? It’s just silly vain women who have them and if they end up botched, disfigured or even dead - that’s on them for being so vain. This appears to be the attitude of government policy on the regulation of cosmetic procedures. In mainland Europe and North America, anyone caught administering invasive procedures for cosmetic purposes without being a registered healthcare professional will face a custodial sentence.
In the UK, however, these people don’t even need to hide what they are up to: they can set up shops on high streets all around the country, concentrated in some of the most deprived parts of our cities, and the Government just lets them get on with it. In September Alice Webb, a 33-year-old mother of five, died after having filler injections performed by a non-medically qualified "aesthetics practitioner" in a Gloucestershire clinic that looked more like the garden shed. In May this year, an unnamed woman was admitted to hospital with botched filler injection carried out in a hotel room in Glasgow.
The "practitioner" was issued with a prohibition notice from Environmental Health telling them not to do it again, but only if they breach the prohibition notice will they face any real charges or repercussions. This is simply not good enough. People who are not on a statutory medical register have no business carrying out medical procedures or dishing out medicines.
The medical profession has been drawing this evolving.