1 week Ago By The Age's View
“Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” On one level, the fairytale of Snow White – back in the cinemas since last week – is the story of an insecure woman constantly measuring herself against a younger, prettier rival. For people of all ages in today’s society, the magic mirror is replaced by a deluge of social media posts and selfies, most of them absorbed through a technology that allows the user to generate an ideal for their own appearance. Veya Seekis, a Griffith University body image expert, told our reporters : “People take shots of themselves, filter that shot, and then feel terrible about themselves because they don’t live up to the filtered image that they’ve created.
” In this environment, it is easy enough to see how demand for cosmetic procedures is generated. But as our reporters Henrietta Cook and Clay Lucas have shown , there are serious question marks over the industry which has sprung up to meet this demand, with people now receiving appearance-altering injections in their local shopping mall. It is this “intersection of medicine and commerce”, as one of the businesses we investigated put it, that is of pressing concern.
In the pursuit of an aesthetic goal, members of the public are taking real medical risks. Our investigation of this sector begins with a 52-second telehealth consultation between a doctor and a patient. The brevity of this encounter may be troubling from a regulatory perspective, but it, too, is a reflection of the age we live in.
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