Healthy Story: A doctor's point of view, Part 3-how one doctor is trying to escape the "trap"

So, we're wrapping up our 3-part series on one doctor's point of view. In Part 1 we learned how a guy goes from med school to high-tech and back again. In Part 2 we learned how the health care system has changed in the last decade or so, and why it's a bad deal for doctors in practice.

Today we're going to find out how Dr. Warren Magnus has decided to extricate himself from that bad deal...and coincidentally another blogger recently wrote about a doctor doing a similar thing.

So what is Dr, Warren Magnus' new plan: he is opening a new medical skin care and laser clinic called Maia Skin.

Now I remember when we had lunch some months ago he was saying that certain doctors escape much of the downside of our current system because they offer elective services. Yes, that would be plastic and cosmetic surgery, Lasik eye surgery and so on. People can save for these using their Flexible Spending accounts at work or an HSA, but they understand from the get-go that health insurance companies are not going to reimburse them, and the patients are OK with that. Hence, the doctor has a business that he can run like other businesspeople run theirs...making decisions about fees based on any number of normal criteria.

So Warren sees his new business as being just about like a start-up; he see himself as an entrepreneur, and he see his chosen discipline as an emerging technology sector.

Why does Warren think this will work out better for him than his previous medical work. Read on...

Warren thinks that first of all the skin care and cosmetic medical market is growing rapidly and it’s a good place to do business. But he also thinks the lack of such stringent outside regulatory control and pricing constraints means that for now there are a lot of charlatans and shady operators in the space, and it is very clear looking at the business that regulatory issues are going to come back to bite them. By providing the services people want from such a clinic, but with the foundation of his medical license and training, Warren hopes that he will be able to differentiate his clinic from the others out there.

All that being said, he is opening a medical skin care and laser clinic focused purely on the aesthetic aspect of care, not a dermatology office (although, there’s some overlap) nor a cosmetic surgery practice. Maia Skin is a mix of services that pulls away from the disease-based model of dermatology and the full-on surgical model of the plastic surgery office. They do offer treatments for conditions like acne and rosacea but the primary focus is on medical grade but non-surgical cosmetic services starting with things like wrinkle reduction and hair removal but offering more advanced services as well.

So I had to ask Warren how this fit into his long-term goals for his career...a career where he clearly has interest in medicine and technology, and a career where he's had the idealism to go into medicine and felt somewhat disillusioned with how that medical system works in this country.

And here's how Warren pulls it all together:

"My long-term goals from a medical standpoint are to become a bit of a leader in the office aesthetic field. It’s still a pretty new thing here in the US and frankly none of the medical colleges (certifying bodies rather than medical schools) are focused on this office aspect. There’s also a new college of anti-aging medicine that looks like they are up and comers and as time permits I hope to become more involved with them as well.

The business overlaps in interesting ways. The technical aspects of the business provide opportunities to be involved with the companies that manufacture the lasers and other tools of the aesthetics trade (new medications, procedures and the like). I also suspect that as this takes off that there is going to be demand from other physicians to show them how to get a clinic like this off the ground. The two facets, medicine and business tie together quite nicely, I think."

And why did we spend 3 days looking at Dr. Warren Magnus and background, philosophy and business plans? Well, because apparently more and more doctors are looking for ways to get off the hamster wheel, and in the long run...that can't be good for we on the patient end, can it?

Want another example?

Kevin MD posts an example of a neurosurgeon who has quite neurosurgery to do hair replacement instead...trying to escape his six-figure malpractice insurance bill. And someone in the comments mentions his wife's OB/GYN who has stopped doing OB and only does GYN. Now, many of Kevin MD's commenters are highly skeptical, while others are highly supportive, and Warren made the point to me that malpractice insurance rates seem to rise completely disproportionately to actual malpractice pay-outs. So, the solution isn't caps so much as reining in the insurance companies.

Still, the basic point is that we don't have a practitioner shortage in some areas now, it seems likely we might some day soon. The we'll all be waiting for certain kinds of procedures too, right?

As Warren would say: "fundamentally broken" huh?

Comments

[Stephanie]

I'm worried about your your friend Warren. 'Seems like a smart, forward-thinking guy. Too bad he feels the only way to salvage his medical career is with a glorified beauty salon in the company of "a lot of charlatans and shady operators."

I share his frustration: http://siegrist.blogs.com/knowyourbones/2005/06/isnt_there_more.html

[Elisa Camahort]

Well, obviously he feels that he will be the wheat eventually separated from the chaff as such services become more common.

BUt he feels like doctors in the insured system have lost control of their own destinies as it were. And he wanted his back.

[elliottg]

I wonder what the director of his residency program thinks now that Warren has decided to apply that valuable training to such an important underserved area of healthcare.

[elliottg]

Coincidentally, I ran across this link at the very next site I visited. No malpractice concerns.

http://time.blogs.com/daily_rx/2005/06/wanted_pediatri.html?cnn=yes