In response to The Times’ story about facial aesthetics which in our view had the effect of demonising dental professionals (Girls risk their lives with cheap lip injections), Dr Simon Hocken has written a letter asking for right of reply for dentists. Here’s what we sent…
Dear The Times,
Your reporter Danielle Sheridan’s article on Saturday 26th September raised urgent issues about young people accessing cheap, unregulated facial aesthetics in the UK but we are concerned this finding has been used to represent UK dentistry as a whole.
As a dental consultancy we have dealt with more than 500 practices, helping many introduce facial aesthetics treatments for the first time, and our experience is dentists are responsible for precisely the opposite phenomenon than what Ms Sheridan contends: they are actually driving up the quality of facial aesthetics. It is a market they have only really started to enter significantly in the past two years and they are the best people bar none for the job, being medically trained to hospital standards and spending their entire careers working on the face and administering facial injections.
Dentists in out experience are the solution, not the problem here. We would agree there needs to be standards required nationally and would suggest dermal and lip fillers become prescription only medications like Botox. Until then, we would sincerely like to get the message out to the general public that dental practices are the safest places to get facial aesthetics, much, much safer than beauticians. We would be much obliged if you could give the profession this right of reply in a follow up piece, with comment we’d be happy to provide.
Yours sincerely
Dr Simon Hocken, Breathe Business
simon.hocken@breathebusiness.co.uk
07770 430576