Lack of oversight and increasing reports of infection are causing physicians to sound alarm bells about risks related to medical spas.
These spas often promise injections of vitamins, hangover cure concoctions, and fat-melting drugs, but instead patients frequently end up with infections at the site of the injections, NBC News reported Jan. 1.
A 24-year-old patient of a California medical spa who recently received injections of vitamins B12 and C, and a supposed fat-melting compound called deoxycholic acid. However, the sites of injection all across her body became inflamed, painful and infected with Mycobacterium abscessus — bacteria commonly found in water and dust. The infection caused her to be hospitalized, the outlet reported.
Claire Brown, MD, an infectious disease expert at UCLA's Santa Monica (Calif.) Nephrology and Infectious Diseases, and one of the physicians who treated the 24-year-old patient told the outlet that treatment of the infection was "difficult" due to the fact that "there are not a lot of great choices to treat this class of bacteria."
Since there is lack of oversight for medical spas, procedural errors such as possibly failing to prepare skin and sterilize tools before inserting an IV can be linked to some of the infections.
Many of the promised procedures are also not "actually medically proven to be true,” Richina Bicette-McCain, MD, an emergency medicine physician at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston also told NBC.
A December 2023 FDA warning also underscores the risk, noting that in many cases that the agency "has received reports about consumers who experienced adverse reactions such as permanent scars, serious infections, skin deformities, cysts, and deep, painful knots after receiving unapproved fat-dissolving injections. Some consumers received the injections at clinics or med spas by personnel who might not have been properly licensed to give the injections."
Without federal oversight of medical spas, adverse events are not required to be reported, so the exact count of cases linked to incidents at these facilities is unknown.