Discounted Botox, is it a lesson to be learned?
In these hard economic times it would not be a surprise that many of you have considered looking for cheaper treatments to help cut the costs and yet still maintaining your regular Botox. Is this possible? Is there a way to do it safely? Well here is a quick guide The Ethos Medispa way, to help you understand the pitfalls in seeking cheaper treatments and how to find good value Botox administered by experienced and talented aesthetic practitioners, so that you get the most natural look possible.
Beware clinics offering very low cost Botox
Even though you could be very lucky and get an experienced doctor who visits that particular clinic, you are more likely to be treated by a very inexperienced practitioner or even an unlicensed beauty therapist who isn’t qualified and isn’t legally allowed to administer aesthetic treatments, and as a consequence you may experience unwanted side effects.
Beware watered down Botox.
Botox from Allergan (the manufacturers) comes in a ‘freeze dried’ form, and it has to be reconstituted by mixing it with normal saline. Many smaller clinics, who want to stretch the product that little bit further, may water down the Botox with more than recommended normal saline, in order to be able to treat more patients, thus making more money. Many patients have come to us with many such stories, where they had Botox with almost no results or results which lasted only a few weeks due to the weaker product.
Beware a clinic which advertises for as little as 100 pounds!
This may well be just a one off price to entice you to the clinic and there may be many other clauses which you have to fulfil to get this price.
What does Botox cost?
Botox costs on average around 140 pounds per vial per person when we buy it in the industry. This is a little known fact by the general public and many patients have told me in the past that they thought that the cost to us was actually as little as 20 pounds per vial.
The legal side of things
Recent new guidance from the GMC and NMC, the doctors, and nurses, regulatory bodies, mean that the practice of remote prescribing of Botox has become ‘unacceptable practice’ by any of its members.
To explain briefly, Botox is a prescription drug and it has to be prescribed by a doctor or a Nurse with prescribing privileges. Until this new guidance was published, many nurses would ask doctors to sign batches of Botox prescriptions for a fee, without that doctor ever seeing the patients in person, or ever examining their facial muscles! Hence ‘remote prescribing’.
This new guidance means that only Doctors or Nurse Prescribers are able to administer Botox from now on or will definitely be overseeing any Botox being administered, so if anybody who is not a Doctor or Nurse prescriber is offering Botox to you, check their credentials thoroughly, ask for their qualifications and find out where the Botox came from.
‘Rogue’ batches of Botox are often ordered by unqualified practitioners from the internet, and this can result in disaster.
Source: * Ethos Medispa, Botox is a registered trademark name owned by Allergan