Thermage’s pores and skin tightening therapies have ushered in a brand new kind of remedy for plastic surgeons and medical spas; radio fequency pores and skin tightening.
However, Thermage has additionally applied a brand new enterprise mannequin that fees the doctor for every remedy by ‘deactivating’ a remedy tip after a set variety of pulses or a particular time, even when the tip remains to be usable. This leaves the physician within the place of getting remedy suggestions that might nonetheless work, besides that they have been artificially turned off. With suggestions costing as much as $800 for a single remedy and medical practices beneath growing stress to take care of profitability, many medical doctors are turning to 3rd events to ‘reactivate’ these Thermage suggestions for added use by bypassing the counter contained in the chip and successfully resetting the machine to permit for continued use.
In accordance with Thermage, they disable suggestions to make sure affected person security.
Thermage’s place on reactivating Thermage suggestions:
“The most important examine we all know of involving Thermage is a 4 12 months examine performed by Weiss,1 and it solely concerned 600 sufferers. As well as, the claims within the Stevens publication are additionally wildly inconsistent with immense portions of Thermage high quality and reliability knowledge we’ve got compiled on our personal merchandise through the years. We all know for a truth the dielectric membrane on our remedy tip will break down when subjected to a tiny fraction of the repeated use this publication alleges will be carried out. Dielectric breakdown can lead to affected person hurt.
There are definitely potential issues that may come up from treating sufferers with broken Thermage suggestions that may embrace burns or the destruction of underlying fats that may go away everlasting depressions. However, with increasingly physicians trying to squeeze out a revenue wherever they’ll and grey-market suppliers in a position to promote a reactivated Thermage tip for lots of of {dollars} under the retail value, this development could develop in reputation.
Medical Spa MD gives details about reactivated Thermage suggestions [http://www.medicalspamd.com/the-blog/2007/5/15/reactivated-thermage-tips-thermage-responds-to-supposed-study.html] and different beauty medical subjects to a doctor group of plastic surgeons, dermatologists and aesthetic physicians with over 2,000 members.