The ugly side of beauty salons(2)

Koreans the key

Why do people prefer to pay considerably more for a face-lift on unlicensed premises? Sun said one reason was that many of these "clinics" targeted customers by hiring South Korean surgeons and marketing them as the key members of their staff - in China it is commonly believed that Koreans have the greatest skills in cosmetic surgery in Asia, if not the world.

When the Global Times visited the cosmetic surgery department of the Shanghai Sixth People's Hospital in early July, one of the patients was a young woman with a noticeably swollen, ugly nose. She told the Global Times that she had gone for a "100 percent Korean-style rhinoplasty procedure" at a local beauty parlor, for she believed that was the best she could get in Shanghai.

"When I went for the consultation I met the Korean expert who was advertised. The way he presented everything it seemed organized and professional so I had a good feeling about it. But it backfired quickly.

"Now I think of it, I ought to have spent more and flown to South Korea to have the surgery," she added.

Some of the Korean qualifications are dubious. Tang Jianli is a lawyer and former head of the Shanghai Lawyer Association's medical and health law research team and has dealt with many cases where procedures have gone wrong. He believes most of the so-called Korean practitioners in Shanghai were operating illegally.

"Many beauty salons use Korean doctors as a selling point, but they don't follow the law which says that these doctors have to be registered with the local authority and they must obtain temporary licenses to work in China.

"What's more, most of them don't have licenses in South Korea in the first place - they're medical school graduates who can't find employment in their home country," Tang told the Global Times.

Some licensed cosmetic surgery clinics use similar promotions. When the Global Times accompanied the health institute inspectors on a raid on the Weikai clinic in a townhouse on Huaihai Road Middle on June 30, a Korean practitioner (whose picture was the center of the entrance hall's photo wall) could not show inspectors his license.

Even if the operators are professionally trained and registered, not all licensed cosmetic surgery clinics are legal. The health supervision institute said all these clinics are rated and given one of four rankings - clinics cannot perform procedures that they are not rated for. However at the Weikai clinic the raid unearthed evidence of chemicals and patient records that suggested procedures the clinic was not allowed to perform were being carried out there.

No heavy penalties

Both the lawyer Tang and doctor Sun emphasized that a very serious problem is that these illegal clinics and operators can escape without heavy penalties. Apart from fines and the confiscation of earnings, equipment and drugs, few illegal operators have been jailed. According to the health supervision institute, every year dozens of illegal practitioners are imprisoned. The institute did not provide precise figures but said fewer people were imprisoned for conducting illegal operations.

The institute said that under the law, unlicensed practitioners can be imprisoned for their first offence. Licensed practitioners can be imprisoned on their third arrest - if they have not previously caused physical harm to a human being. "It is down to the police to investigate and determine whether harm has been caused."

Sun said the vagueness of the regulations had made it difficult to imprison offenders and he believed a revision of the law was the key to cleaning up the cosmetic surgery market. "In China, practicing medicine without a license is not a criminal offence but a civil matter, so the consequences are generally limited to financial compensation and the like. This means that many illegal businesses lose some money then reappear under another name and in another place, and continue doing harm. This would not happen if they could be imprisoned immediately."

Lawyer Tang confirmed that it was very rare for unlicensed practitioners or licensed practitioners working in illegal clinics to be sent to prison. "In some Western countries, this is unimaginable - 99 percent of the unlicensed practitioners in China would be in jail if they were in Australia for example.

"Apart from being struck off and fined a lot more is the case in China, in a Western country a practitioner loses his credibility and cannot survive unless he changes career. But apparently this is not the case here," Tang said.

He told the Global Times that only a fraction of the disfigured victims chose to sue the operators. "Most of them want to handle it privately, for many cosmetic procedures are very private and they want to keep it as low-key as possible."

Usually a private settlement involves financial compensation. The girl with the deformed nose at the Shanghai Sixth People's Hospital said that she received tens of thousands of yuan from the private cosmetic surgery clinic she had used and would now spend the money at the hospital to fix her problem.