Critics worried about latest weight-loss fad
August 8, 2004
By Maria Puente
Call it "hope in a needle." Mesotherapy, the latest fat-melting fad, is a half-century-old French technique that involves hundreds of injections and is touted as an alternative to liposuction.
"It's more than hope in a bottle," says Marion Shapiro, a retired emergency room doctor in New York who has started a new career as a "mesotherapist," injecting people with a cocktail of plant extracts, vitamins and medications (such as a drug for treating asthma). The concoction is supposed to stimulate fat cells to shed fat.
"Our results are not surgical, there are fewer complications and less downtime, and that's why mesotherapy is going to become more popular than liposuction," Shapiro predicts.
Injections go under the skin and are absorbed by the mesodermal, or middle, layer. You're supposed to shed weight the same way as with diet and exercise, excreting fat in waste.
Singer Roberta Flack is the most famous celebrity to endorse the procedure. She told ABC's "20/20" last year that she lost 40 pounds after a year of treatment, although she also dieted and exercised.
Mesotherapy was developed in France in 1952 and has long been popular with the European elite. But it never caught on in the United States, where medical skepticism about its efficacy and safety is widespread. One concern is that some of the drugs are intended to treat something entirely different.
"No one says exactly what they put into the (syringe)," says Naomi Lawrence, a derma-surgeon at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. "One drug they often use, phosphatidylcholin, is unpredictable and causes extreme inflammation and swelling where injected. It is not a benign drug."
If there were studies that proved to dermatologists that this procedure works, "we'd all be using it," she says. "If we had something that could (really) melt fat away, it'd be great."
Source: www.indystar.com
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