By Michael Meyer

Since the beginning of 2024, it seems like medical aesthetics has taken one hit after another in the court of public opinion. Much of this is due to several negative news stories that, taken together, paint a picture of medical aesthetics as a lawless Wild West where patients are just as likely to suffer a gruesome injury as they are to have a treatment with which they’re satisfied.

Of course, medical aesthetics professionals know this is not true, and that the vast, vast majority of visits to medical spas result in positive outcomes and happy patients. Unfortunately, “Patients Happy with Treatment,” is not an attention-grabbing headline, so the fact that medical spas are safe is not the sort of thing people are interested in reading. However, there are a few ways to tell that most medical spa outcomes are positive.

Happy patients come back

One of the best ways to tell if a patient interaction is positive is to see if the patient returns. It stands to reason that if a patient is dissatisfied with a treatment or feels that the medical spa where they got the treatment is unsafe, they will not return. Given the tenor of the recent coverage of medical aesthetics, you probably wouldn’t expect the number of repeat customers to be particularly high.

However, you would be wrong. According to the American Med Spa Association’s (AmSpa’s) 2024 Medical Spa State of the Industry Report (which you can purchase or download here), 73% of medical spa patients are repeat patients. This means that not only are they satisfied with the treatment or treatments they received, but they are happy to return to get something else done. This is an impressive number, and even more impressive is the fact that it is up significantly from the 2022 Medical Spa State of the Industry Report, when the number of repeat patients was 65%. If anything, this suggests that the industry is becoming significantly safer, as opposed to being the shady, ungoverned field that some would suggest it is.

And while that number is increasing, so is the size of the industry—as of 2023, there are approximately 10,488 medical spas in the U.S., according to the report, and they have an average of 245 patient visits per month. This comes out to more than 30 million treatments administered by medical aesthetics practices in a year. Of course, some will go wrong—any medical professional with even a little experience will tell you that nothing goes exactly as planned 100% of the time—but it is a small minority of cases. Unfortunately, these are the cases that make headlines, and they can be used when creating a narrative.

Everyone is doing their part

When AmSpa was founded more than 12 years ago, medical aesthetics was closer to the sort of outlaw industry some people envision where you’d hear about medical spa employees who weren’t qualified to practice medicine regularly doing it. Today, however, the industry is much larger and the people in it have become much more conscientious. The ways in which the industry is regulated have become much more clearly defined, and while you do occasionally—although very rarely—find bad actors, the overwhelming majority of medical spa professionals practicing today think about their patients’ safety constantly. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s just good business, as illustrated by the fact that nearly three-quarters of their patients are repeat customers.

Medical spas are safe, and AmSpa is dedicated to spreading the word.