Med Board: Position consistent for years

By Dana Gentry

Monday, Sept. 21, 2009 | 2:57 p.m.

Board of Medical Examiners Executive Director Louis Ling has firm positions, two in fact, on whether medical assistants should be held accountable for injecting cosmetic fillers.

When Ling is corresponding with the Attorney General’s office about cracking down on unlicensed assistants like Betty Guerra, arrested for injecting Botox at a local medical spa, he advocates prosecution under a law that restricts who may inject dangerous drugs. See the e-mail I’ve attached wherein Ling notes the board has been “consistent for years” that medical assistants can’t perform injections. But when Ling is responding to media inquiries about whether Guerra’s counterparts throughout the state should be punished, including the unlicensed assistant of medical board member Dr. Benjamin Rodriguez, Ling is willing to buy ignorance of the law as an excuse.

Ling claims Guerra was acting alone, unsupervised by a medical doctor. Dr. Robert Feingold, the former medical director where Guerra worked, told the Review-Journal that he spent four hours a day in the medical spa. He also penned a letter detailing the treatments he’d authorized Guerra to perform, including injections.

Ling, in an effort to deflect criticism for facilitating arrests for non-compliance rather than adequately informing his licensees of the law, says the media are blurring two issues. So let’s focus – two unlicensed assistants, both within reach of their nursing credentials, injecting cosmetic fillers with the knowledge and consent of their supervising physicians - one in a medical spa that competes for business with plastic surgeons and the other in the office of a plastic surgeon, a member of the medical board who has advocated that state lawmakers take action on unlicensed assistants in medical spas, but not in doctors’ offices.

Now I’ve got the clear picture.

On tonight’s program, attorney Jacob Hafter, who filed a lawsuit this morning claiming the medical board violated the open meeting law by cutting off public comment before the vote. Also on the program, plastic surgeon Lane Smith and medical spa owner Tracy Hurst discuss the impact of the emergency regulation on the industry.