Health care column: Stay home, get tucked
| Saturday, Aug 29 2009 01:00 PM
Last Updated Saturday, Aug 29 2009 01:00 PM
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John Cox
Dr. Brent Moelleken
Jenn Ireland / The Californian Carla Watts tans in a EuroBed at EuroTan in northeast Bakersfield one recent morning.
If Bakersfield to Beverly Hills seems like a long way to schlep for a tummy tuck, you probably have as tenuous a grasp on plastic surgery as we do.
Shoot, just the other day Dr. Darshan Shah sat down with a patient who had traveled from Oregon to Bakersfield to see him about a procedure. “People come from all over,” the plastic surgeon said, including Las Vegas, Fresno and San Diego.
That’s what Bakersfield’s health-care industry likes to hear: Fewer people bypassing Bakersfield on the way to a doctor’s office in Los Angeles.
Now get ready for this: L.A. plastic surgeons are coming to Bakersfield, too.
Enter Dr. Brent Moelleken, ranked by Vogue Magazine as one of the Top 10 Plastic Surgeons in America. Based in Beverly Hills with an office in Santa Barbara, Moelleken was planning to set up shop this summer at his brother’s medical office on San Dimas Street. He recently closed escrow on a building in town that he intends to turn into an outpatient center.
Dr. Farzin Kerendian expanded into Bakersfield from his base in Beverly Hills six years ago, and now sees patients in both cities. Shah did it the other way around, opening a Malibu office in January after keeping a Beverly Hills address for four years.
Moelleken said his move was a simple matter of convenience for his patients. About three a month make the trip from Bakersfield to his office in Beverly Hills. He said giving them a local option “lowers the bar a little bit in order to have the surgery.”
Kerendian sees an added benefit: “A lot of times the schedule is more available” for surgeries done in Bakersfield, he said.
But let’s not forget the “halo factor” that big-city practitioners sometimes bring with them to smaller communities, said Dr. Mark Jewell, an Oregon plastic surgeon and past president of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.
“Everyone is trying to find additional marketshare,” he said, “and this is one way to do this.”
Burn avoidance
Good luck getting an interview with anybody in the tanning salon business, The Associated Press. That story you did in late July about tanning beds being newly classified as a top cancer risk really burned the industry.
Oh, there was probably nothing inaccurate about the report, though perhaps it did fail to point out differences among tanning technologies, as well as risks associated with lengths of exposure and such. We’ll call it a source oversight, since the report was based on an International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon analysis published online in the Lancet Oncology medical journal.
After staring at one too many chart comparing ultraviolet wavelength filters, we’re not about to set the record straight here. But maybe a little more perspective will help.
“All of this is a bunch of hype and sensationalism,” said Vicki Peterson, vice president of sales and marketing for Euro Pro Inc., a Bakersfield-based operator of eight tanning salons. She added that no research shows that non-burning tanning causes cancer.
Some Euro Pro locations use a system that the company says filters out dangerous parts of the light spectrum (the part below 340 nanometers) responsible for burning and aging skin.
A press release put out by the company July 30 proclaims its EuroBed system to be “the World’s only non-carcinogenic bed!”
Such claims can be hard to verify, said Dr. Ravi Patel, a Bakersfield oncologist and founder of the Comprehensive Blood and Cancer Center.
“They (nontraditional tanning salons) are right in a way, and it’s difficult to disprove them,” Patel said. “But that does not mean that it’s going to be absolutely safe.”
The real issue, according to the Indoor Tanning Association, is avoiding overexposure and abuse of tanning beds.
The trade group went to the expense of buying a full-page ad in the New York Post July 30 stating, in large type, “Indoor Tanning put in Same Category as Sunshine. Public Response: Duh.”
