Lifestyle lift: Medical Breakthrough or Marketing Breakthrough?

Today we had in a patient who had previously looked into a "Lifestyle lift". This is not the first patient that we have seen who has gone this route. If you look at the Lifestyle lift web site the terms "revolutionary and groundbreaking" are used. Through careful wording the terms are used to apply to the procedure, but the implication is that these terms apply to the Lifestyle lift, which is somehow unique.

In fact, the Lifestyle lift is the S-lift, which was developed by Dr. P. Ansari of Germany over 30 years ago. It was popularized by Dr. Z. Saylan, also of Germany, who modified the technique. There have been numerous modifications of the technique over the years, and the current state of the art is, in my opinion, the MACS-lift, developed by Dr. Patrick Tonnard and his colleagues from Belgium. All of the modern variants of the S-lift have value, but no one nor any corporation has something unique that is unavailable elsewhere.
When a patient signs up for a Lifestyle lift, they are signing with a corporation, not with an individual physician. The corporation has established its position through an extensive marketing campaign, not by its reputation in the community. The physician who performs the Lifestyle lift in a market one year may not be the same person who is doing the surgery the  next year. The continuity of the name does not necessarily mean the continuity of performance, good or bad.
When you choose to have surgery performed by a corporation, you are in essence choosing to have a procedure performed by an unknown. Good marketing does not always equate with good results.
The company claims it has "incredible doctors", a term that is vague and impossible to substantiate. What is clear is that the company is quite skilled at hype. If you look closely at their photos on their web site, you can see that many of the before and after photos are not well matched. There are differences in head position and lighting that can make the results look more impressive. Their prices appear to be low, but these procedures are not the sort of thing that people have done on a frequent basis. It's best, in my opinion, to pay a little more and to deal with an established physician who is a known quantity.

Gerald N. Bock MD
California Skin & Laser Center
Stockton & Lodi, CA