A lack of self-love doesn’t kill them. Women who die during cosmetic surgery are being killed by medical negligence and a lack of regulation in what appears to be a public health problem in Latin America.
Silvina Luna in Argentina, Arelis Cabeza in Colombia, Jacqueline Román in the Dominican Republic, Liliana Gastélum in Mexico, Liliana Sarasua in Peru – the extensive list of women who have died after cosmetic procedures would not fit in this column, not even once in the printed edition. from a newspaper. However, their cases perfectly illustrate the problem the region faces when it comes to operations.
Only in Colombia, one of the world’s top destinations for performing this type of procedure, deaths related to cosmetic surgery increased by 130% between 2015 and 2016, according to Legal Medicine. Since this date, no official data is available. This is precisely an important part of the problem: there is no clear picture of the panorama that tells governments how to design their public policies to counteract this phenomenon.
This information gap is closed by considerations that, although necessary, do not represent a public problem. “It was the lack of self-love and self-esteem,” some often emphasize when the disastrous consequences of cosmetic surgery in the hands of unethical and uncontrolled doctors go viral.
Without a doubt, women, especially Latina women, receive messages daily that condemn us to fit a curvy mold and be just another consumer product. However, we can also decide autonomously how we want to look.
In line with the above, the question arises: Is it more important to give moral high ground to those who choose to change their appearance than to put an end to secret clinics or surgeons who are questioned for their poor practices?
At the beginning of October, the Colombian justice system sentenced a group of six doctors who practiced cosmetic surgery without supposedly having the academic training to seven years in prison. The court considered that these doctors had provided false information to confirm their professional qualifications before the Ministry of National Education.
Francisco Sales Puccini, his brother Carlos Elías Sales Puccini, Juan Pablo Robles, Ronald Ricardo Ramos, Jorge Nempeque and Óscar Sandoval received their degrees in plastic surgery from the University of Veiga de Almeida in Brazil. According to the migration movement certificate issued by Migración Colombia and presented as evidence in the criminal trial, some of these doctors spent less than 30 days on personal “studies” in that country. Nevertheless, the Colombian ministry approved his studies as if it were a formal medical specialty.
The most worrying thing is that a cloak of doubt is not only covering them. Their names were revealed following a journalistic investigation that identified a list of at least 42 doctors with “express degrees” in cosmetic surgery. Of that number, only six have been convicted and another 11 are facing trial. What about the others? Why did it take the judiciary more than seven years to investigate?
Worse, these 42 are just a bunch of Chimbos, Truchos, Bamba surgeons, but behind them are even more who today go unnoticed as they operate in operating rooms with impunity, believing that justice will never reach them.
There are three issues that need to be addressed in this topic. The first reason is the lack of government control, since it is common to report the existence of secret sites to carry out medical or surgical procedures for aesthetic reasons, without taking any concrete action. They seal the premises and reopen within a week with a new name and new facade.
The second reason is the lack of legislation: today the legal gap is so great that a general practitioner can perform liposuction or buttock augmentation without being penalized, as there is no law requiring it. The third problem is that there is no self-care on the part of the patient. “He had a lot of followers on Instagram” or “An influencer recommended him” are usually common answers from victims to doctors interviewed.
However, patients are the weakest link in the chain. I am a journalist and I researched the doctor who performed my breast surgery before I went to his operating room. Nevertheless, I was deceived by a title recognized by the Colombian Ministry of Education. It’s one thing to practice self-care and prevention, and it’s quite another to expect every person who visits a healthcare provider to have the skills of a private investigator to be confident and survive a procedure. Ensuring these minimum requirements, such as certification of proper academic training for a doctor, is the responsibility of the state and not the patient.
“It’s better not to have surgery” is also not an effective answer, since we are free to change our appearance under safe conditions. This urgently requires the political will to engage in this discussion with a public health issue in mind, rather than bias or personal opinions based on the choices women make about our bodies.
Let this unprecedented verdict in Colombia be an opportunity to remember that this is a transnational phenomenon and that, while we debate whether it is a problem of self-esteem or vanity, in secret operating rooms hundreds of people are at risk.
Lorena Beltran He is a journalist and has a master’s degree in government and public policy. He is an activist for the regulation of aesthetic procedures in Colombia.
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