Patients are being left disfigured when cosmetic surgery goes wrong, as calls grow for a royal commission into the lucrative, poorly regulated sector. Graphic content. | INVESTIGATION by adele_ferguson
Ella Callis records it all. The bed she wakes up in, the sheets sodden with blood and fluids, how she becomes conscious mid-surgery and feels a long cannula being thrust in and out of her stomach. “It is scary,” she sobs into her phone camera.
Oversight is so lax that many experts are calling for a complete rethink of the regulatory structure and a royal commission to expose the extent of the failings in an industry out of control. While the department took more than three months to raid Cosmos Melbourne after that complaint, it was much quicker to raid the workplace of esteemed plastic surgeon professor Mark Ashton’s Epworth Freemasons practice shortly after getting an anonymous tip following a promotion for a“The raid on my rooms shows that anyone who tries to take this industry on, be ready, they’re going to come after you.
“Once you have failed to adhere to your principles of priority, number one, patient welfare, I think that’s a fatal error,” he says. One of AHPRA’s responsibilities is policing social media to ensure doctors don’t breach advertising rules or cross the line when it comes to marketing. Johnstone and Fraser, who have been effectively doing AHPRA’s job over the past two years in policing more than 100 cosmetic surgeons’ social media posts, are devastated by the move.
“It protects patients, in particular vulnerable patients, from false and misleading advertising,” Dr Khorshid says.investigation has trawled thousands of leaked WhatsApp messages between doctors and nurses at the Daniel Lanzer network of cosmetic clinics, as well as social media accounts, many of which were deleted, and found more damning behaviour.
In an audio message to staff, posted after a pharmacist calls to say she received a number of questionable scripts and was told “the nurses write the scripts”, Aronov says: “Do you guys realise that’s fraud. You are putting your own licence at risk.from performing all types of cosmetic surgery and ordered him to remove any social media posts that related to surgery after this masthead’s investigation in October.
On June 30, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal agreed with Aronov and wound back his restrictions. It means he no longer needs to be directly observed by a supervisor during patient consultations as a GP. In May 2021– six months before Aronov operated on Lombardo – Jackie lodged a complaint with AHPRA asking the regulator to investigate. It has still not reported back.
States have different rules. In Victoria, it is illegal to take more than 250ml of fat in liposuction in an unregistered facility. In NSW and Queensland, it is up to 2.5 litres. “If that does not constitute professional misconduct, I don’t know what does. He’s slicing someone’s abdomen open in an office.”
One patient had a BBL and liposuction with Ahmadi in late April and ended up in hospital with sepsis. Ahmadi drove her to the hospital when she continued to lose blood. On arrival, she was given multiple blood transfusions and had a lengthy stay. Professor Ashton reported Ahmadi to AHPRA in December 2021 in relation to his treatment of Keisha Amoah, including his failure to call an ambulance when she was crying out for one after he liposucked her liver.
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