Health officials are seeing an increase in the number of unsafe Botox procedures being done. The hot new cosmetic trend that is known to erase fine lines and wrinkles, is safe when administered by a trained health professional, but more and more people are offering Botox injections with little to no medical knowledge.

Straight silicone injections

Recently a Detroit woman wound up in the hospital after injecting silicon into her buttocks to enhance its appearance.  Five days earlier she had gone to a “pumping party” where several women got the injections.  The silicon traveled to her lungs and gotten stuck in the airways, resulting in “silicone embolism syndrome,” or clots, in this case, in the smaller vessels in her lungs.  While this woman did survive, others have died from this.

An increasing problem

These parties are becoming popular according to medical experts.  With a sluggish economy more people are looking for bargains and that includes finding deals on cosmetic procedures.

“We’ve been hearing about this,” said Dr. Malcolm Z. Roth, president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. “There are ‘pumping parties,’ involving high-volume injections to fill up the face, lips, cheekbones, chin or breast. Often it’s buttock enhancement and often it’s not sterile.”

Unsafe conditions

“You don’t do medical procedures in a hotel room or garage. This procedure is illegal,” he said. “Patients need to do their homework and check the credentials of the professional they’re considering for their cosmetic procedure.”

In other cases, the procedures were done by people posing as physicians or in other countries where health codes are less stringent.  “In some cases the patient knows very well it’s not a physician but, feeling they can’t afford to go to a legitimate board-certified plastic surgeon, they find a short cut.”

“This is something that is not done by doctors,” Roth added. “It’s completely out of the realm of what any physician would do.”