Medical Laser Blog - Fotona Straight Talk for the Physician

Are You Qualified to Run or Supervise a Medical Laser?

I’m gonna bet that you did pretty well in high school.  Then you went to college – learned the material set in front of you and got good grades.  Then you went to Medical school.  Only people with really good grades get into medical school and you were there, learning and competing with a bunch of really smart people – and you survived.  Now you’re a medical doctor and you went to some kind of specialty training (probably) and in that training, you learned more material.  

I don’t think anyone could question your ability to learn, but what about your general reasoning capacity?  Well, you’re a doctor.  You have to collect data, synthesize it, formulate a problem list, a differential diagnosis and proceed to a firm diagnosis.  This is your daily routine.   Your daily routine is problem solving and sleuthing.  There is no reason to question your ability to problem solve and critically reason.  

So what about other specialties?  Is anyone really getting laser training? Well recently – yes.  But as little as just a few years ago there was no-one learning about lasers in their primary training.  And now, most of the training people get on lasers is in its use as a cutting tool (using a CO2 as a scalpel during laparoscopic surgery for example).    It’s not as if some other specialty has a giant let up on you.   They don’t.

So what would be required for you to be competent to run or supervise the running of a medical laser?  The proper training.   You need to understand the machine.  You need to understand how it could be dangerous. The scalpel is a very dangerous tool.  The difference is that you have to be in direct contact with someone with the scalpel.  With the laser, if you haphazardly point it, you could injure someone from a distance.  And believe it or not, the more dangerous lasers are the ones that aren’t ablative (in general).    So – there are some tricks you need to know, but they’re easily learned.  Basic safety can also be easily learned and then you need to learn the applications -also easily learned and far less complex than most other areas of medicine and those areas that you already work in now.  

To become a competent laser operator or supervisor requires mastery of a fairly small domain of topics.  Once you’re a competent laser operator, you need to simply follow the protocols.  If you follow the protocols, it is possible to get expert outcomes simply by being a competent laser operator or supervisor.  

To become a true laser expert, you need experience.  And experience comes from time operating and supervising the treatments.  

If you want to get expert outcomes right away, simply select your patients properly (which is easily trained and learned), and apply the protocols properly - over and over and over…. until it’s second nature and until you can begin to refine and hone and customize.  

It’s not hard.  The skill-set is relatively simple.  The parameters are finite.  The rewards are great!

Maximizing the Aesthetic Laser Patient's Outcome (part II)

Absolute honesty is always the best policy and consulting in such a way that helps your patient to completely understand the risks and benefits, to understand what can and can’t be done and also to understand how to optimally treat their specific concern.   These are the things that you want to include in a consult.  

A lot of doctors are afraid of scaring their patients.  Yet every single one of my consults includes this phrase:  “There is the possibility of complications that could lead to disability, disfigurement or even death.”  Now, I want my patient to hear that phrase because I want them to think about risk. Risk isn’t something that we spend much time thinking about, but it’s something we’re involved in every day, all day.  Waterskiing, jumping out of an airplane, or simply choosing to drive our car – those all hold varying degrees of risk.  Sometimes my patients will say, “Well, I don’t want to take any risk” and my response to that is, “well, it’s time to go home, lock your doors and for certain, don’t go into the bathroom, which is where most home accidents happen.”  You can’t have a risk free existence.  So making these fairly aggressive statements about disability, disfigurement and death allows the patient to think about risk in perhaps a way they never have before and that way, I also tell people that the risk of something bad happening is very small, but if it happens to you, it is 100%.  

Patients need to think about this.  If they get a white spot on my face due to laser hair removal,  it is the end of the world, or would the patient rather just camouflage it with make-up than have all this unwanted hair growth? 

You need to help your patients understand what they don’t know.  That’s why when we train physicians to do laser procedures, quite frankly, the physical part is pretty easy.  It’s the preparation that’s more difficult.  We spend ½ a training day on bookwork helping the laser owner to understand the in’s and out’s of the Fotona Laser physics, the fine points of consulting the patient, and significant time is spent helping them get facile with the hand/eye coordination of actually doing the laser procedure.  This combination has been very successful for the people who’ve worked with us and they’ve since had excellent clinical experience.

Maximizing the Aesthetic Laser Patient's Outcome (hint: The Consult)

I keep harping on the patient consult in this blog because it’s continually coming up with people I talk to.  As we train our physicians on how to use their Fotona lasers, we also spend a lot of time, effort and energy on training them how to do a proper consult.  We try to have our physicians and trainees understand comprehensively all of the ramifications of each aesthetic laser treatment – both good and bad – so that they can effectively consult their patients.

Effective consultation is not only helping the patient understand the risks and benefits of any given procedure, but it is also helping the patient understand which procedures are most appropriate for them and which procedures can best be used in combination to achieve the results they desire.

The ticket to an effective consult?  You always want your consult to be patient-centered.   On the internet, you will often find practice management people (usually MBA’s) and they are absolutely revenue centric in the way that they conduct consultations.    I have materials from a couple of different management groups and they’re always talking about maximizing revenue.  I don’t believe in that!  I believe in maximizing the patient’s outcome.  If you maximize your patient’s outcome, that will optimize your revenue.  Maybe not maximize your revenue, but it will optimize it because you will be doing the right treatments for the right people for the right reasons.  And when you do that, you have profoundly grateful clients.  

The other thing you need to be willing to do is to tell people flat out, “Listen, we can’t help you, but here’s who can."  If you develop a network of people who you can refer to (and hopefully people that will refer back to you), you can have a comprehensive care plan for the patient that might include a resurfacing that you do to optimize the “canvas” so that they can go someplace else to get a surgical skin tightening procedure OR to someone else to get re-volumizing therapy if this isn’t something you provide.

Enhance Your Income With An Aesthetic Laser Practice

My team and I have been very successful in all aspects of Aesthetic Medicine and we would like to show you how.  Allow me to "talk at you" with this short video and check out this web page that will also show you some conservative aesthetic laser practice financials.

If you're interested in doing laser hair removal, collagen and skin rejuvenation, laser vein treatments, treating cystic acne, warts and more - you have the patients already.

To get started, download our free papers and then contact us.  We're here to help you jump start this new and lucrative piece of your medical practice.

 

Aesthetic Laser: The $10,000 Consult Tool That Costs Ten Bucks

I use a consult tool for my aesthetic laser patients that I call the $10,000 mirror.  We have a simple hand mirror that has no magnification on one side and 3 to 5 times magnification on the other.  I hand it to the patient with the magnified side facing them.  The interesting thing is that most people, when given the mirror, will start looking very intently at themselves and even start picking and brushing at things on their face. I then have a checklist of items I ask them about.  We go through the checklist, item by item, and discuss its impact on the overall appearance of the face.  Once this is completed, I formulate a plan of all that can be done for them that includes things I can do, but also things others may be able to do. As an example, I do not do face lifts, but if the result they are after is best served by a face-lift I put that on the plan. 

Remember, this is patient-centered not practice-centered.  This will also build trust in your patient, as it is proof to them that you have their best interests at heart (something the bean counters seem to never think about).  In addition, it is rare that we don’t do most of what they will benefit from.  Don’t just accept what the patient thinks they want in aesthetic medicine, but rather help them achieve optimal results by explaining what is achievable.  Send them home with a wish list.  Over time they will work through the list, resulting in a more optimal result for them and a better practice for you.

Laser Medicine Training - From Novice to Laser Expert

We routinely train Physicians and their staff to give expert level laser treatments in a single day.  Our initial laser medicine training may not qualify them as laser experts, that will take a little more reading, study and experience.  But the delivery of expert level treatments, that we certainly can teach in a single day.  Also in that training day, physicians and staff are given the tools to truly become an expert.  Our training is top of the line, provided by operators in clinical practice.  Generally the training is in your office.  The reasons for that are many, but the main reason is so you that are comfortable with your laser equipment, in your laser room and with your stuff.

It may seem like a tall order to have you providing expert level treatments in a single day, but it really is not.  First, how one determines a treatment parameter is really simple and logical, plus we write it down for you.  Next, we don’t start with the “settings” we start with basic laser physics.  Don’t get frightened; it is basic and common sense type stuff.  Once you understand the basics, the selection of treatment protocols will be second nature.  By the end of any training day, our trainers are sitting in the corner of the treatment room and observing while the trainees are excitedly selecting the correct treatment settings.

That is the beauty of high laser technology.  When the technology is right, it is transparent to the operator.  Our computer controlled interface is easy to operate and intuitive in design… for expert level treatments in a single day.

If ever in doubt, we provide ongoing phone support.  You are never alone with Fotona.