The history of beauty is as old as mankind itself - throughout history, people have tried to improve their appearance and enhance their beauty. Combining the past, present and future of aesthetic medicine allows us to incorporate this perspective and ultimately offer better patient care. The ancient Egyptians already used animal oils, salt, alabaster and sour milk to aesthetically improve the skin.
According to the dominant thinking, today, the body does not need to be obedient and faithful to nature, it can become more "natural" and perfect than what nature itself designed. The technology developed by the scientific rationality and the values and senses produced in the social world now build a body that not even mother nature was able to do obeying what is expected in the social world.
The care with aesthetics starts to influence the care with health and with the "physical form". Work relations are also influenced by this perspective, employability becomes directly linked to physical appearance. The concern with aesthetics becomes not only a way to keep one's appearance or health, but also a way of social distinction, a guarantee to keep one's place in the labour market, in the social environment or even as a way to conquer social mobility.
The aestheticization of health and daily life allows the growth of several commercial activities linked to the industries of aesthetic medicine, cosmetics to meet a growing demand, offering services, medicines, equipment and professionals.
Currently, aesthetic medicine, the concepts of beauty, health, healthy body and beautiful body will gain other contours, other meanings. The speech about the "perfect" body will bring up this strategy of a rationality that acts in the construction of a look that builds scientifically, models, makes thebody "naturally" beautiful.
The anatomy is no longer something definitive but provisional, according to the trends of the moment. The body becomes a sketch, a draft to be perfected according to the client's wishes and financial availability.
Currently, many Aesthetic Medicine techniques are medical techniques of beauty and well-being with therapeutic implications, and are therefore performed by doctors withspecific training in this area. Aesthetic Doctors are able to practice Aesthetic Medicine, but, like any branch of medicine, they must have adequate training and keep up to date through continuous training.
Specific training enables doctors to treat all types of facial and body unaesthetics,apply techniques to improve their own image, attenuate the internal and external effects of ageing and apply the necessary means to achieve a healthy longevity. Once again, as in any branch of Medicine, the aim is to promote physical, mental and social well-being.
Aesthetic Medicine has seen a very marked development in the last two decades. Further improvement of knowledge, up to the biomolecular scale, of cutaneous physiology in the various stages of life has provided a qualitative expansion of thearsenal of topical and systemic agents available to maximise regenerative processes of the skin, giiving a boost to it as well as treating and reducingthe appearence of scars.
This growth inaesthetic procedures has led to a growing increase in their practice withoutthe necessary skills on the part of those practising these procedures.
Aesthetic Medicine draws up on:
- A corpus of medical scientific knowledge based on the anatomy, physiology, pathophysiology and pharmacology of thetarget areas of intervention on the skin and also body contours and silhouette;
- A grounded understanding of general phenomenal of pathology, biology, psychology and psychosociology of humandevelopment and maturation;
- A knowledge of the mechanisms of action and consequent mastery of evidence-based diagnosticand therapeutic techniques that allow for the correction of defects, imperfections or implement aesthetically appealing features and the ability to timely informand clarify, recognize, diagnose and treat accidents or complications.
In this context, with a view to protecting the users of these techniques, it isessential to establish rules for obtaining the knowledge for their exercise.
For the purposes of these regulations, the following terminology is adopted: Non-Surgical Aesthetic Medicine: all non-surgical medical technical act, performed with theaid of any instrument, chemical substance or device or using any form of energy, applied to the skin, muscles or mucous membranes, aimed primarily at modifying the body appearance of a patient for aesthetic purposes.
In the last two decades, driven by aggressive marketing campaigns with the main focus onresults and underestimating the risks, this area of differentiation has had an exponential growth, estimating at 20 million, the number of procedures performed worldwide each year.
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