Special Report: Rush to Beauty
Urologists doing laser hair removal. Dentists giving Botox. All over the city, doctors are leaving their old practices for the promised land of cosmetic medicine.
BY BETH LANDMAN KEIL
PHOTOS BY PATRIK ANDERSSON |
Lynn Dormer is a 42-year-old doctor board-certified to practice pulmonary medicine, internal medicine, and critical-care medicine. A slight brunette whose accent betrays her North Carolina upbringing, she was chief of pulmonary critical care at Brooklyn's VA New York Harbor hospital, performing open-heart massages on gunshot victims, inserting tubes into collapsed lungs, and lasering tumors. Now she's the chief attraction at the Dormer-Lourence Medical Spa on 72nd Street off Madison Avenue, and the massages her office gives are strictly external. The suite of rooms, appointed with marble, gilded mirrors, and antiques and billed in its brochure as "New York's most exclusive spa," offers a range of services, from massage to collagen and cosmetic laser treatments. The practice has grown so quickly that Dormer's husband, Arnold, left his Wall Street job to be its business manager.
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| Change of heart: Lynn Dormer — an ex-chief of pulmonary critical
care — at her Dormer-Lourence Medical Spa.
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"My family was somewhat upset," she says pensively. "My mother said, 'Doesn't it bother you that you're not helping people anymore?' I have three medical board certifications, and they felt like I had wasted fifteen years. But, you know, it was very stressful. I would get Christmas gifts from patients, and by the time I received them, they had died. On top of that, hospital politics drove me crazy. I decided to do something lighter."
Dormer, who has been giving Botox to her patients for just over two years, was selected by Allergan, the manufacturers of the toxin, to help train others in the wrinkle-removing technique. The training takes about a day, she says.
Across town are the equally well-appointed offices o one of the pioneers of Botox, dermatologist Pat Wexler, who has been injecting patients with the paralytic agent for almost twelve years. Wexler is best known, however, for harvesting fat from her patients' butts and injecting it into their faces to plump up wrinkles, a method that inspired an episode of Sex and the City. In a sunny office at the back of her sprawling practice, past an area where Wexler keeps the fat of dozens of New York socialites and celebrities on ice, her husband, Eugene, sits stroking his fluffy white bichon and listening to Jim Morrison wail softly on his stereo. On his desk sits a mock-up he's made of a Harper's Bazaar cover, with his wife's face superimposed on Britney Spears's body. The headline reads SEX AND POWER. A practicing urologist at Beth Israel Medical Center for fifteen years, he quit performing cancer surgery last year to work in his wife's office, treating women with unsightly veins.
"My life has changed 100 percent for the better," says Eugene, padding across the room in Sergio Rossi mules. "I was good at what I did, but when you get to the point where you get up every morning not wanting to go to work, you can't give in the same way. Now I'm doing something which, although cosmetic, is important to people. And I don't have the stresses of dealing with life and death every day."
It's not particularly surprising that, as aesthetic dentist Irwin Smigel puts it, "everyone wants to be Pat Wexler now." What's surprising is how many physicians are doing something about it. "They're all going into beauty rather than what they were trained for," Smigel says.
David Narins, who was a cardiac-surgery resident before becoming the head of urology at White Plains Hospital, has also joined his wife's dermatology practice, where he works on veins, uses anti-aging lasers on patients' faces, and does hair transplants. He and Rhoda Narins actually share a desk, and they work facing one another in their office off Fifth Avenue. He wears a dark-blue suit with a bright Hermès tie, and a pair of dark laser-protection glasses hangs around his neck — the only suggestion of a medical uniform. "It's not like doing cancer surgery," he admits. "But I'm still a doctor. I look at wrinkles as a clinical problem. And, you know, when I was doing cardiac catheterizations and invasive procedures, my patients were asleep; now they're awake. I get to have conversations with them, and they're so appreciative of what I do."
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Next page: "Why remove someone's gallbladder for $500 when he can get $500 for giving a shot of Botox?"
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| Photo by Patrik Andersson.
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| From
the May 27, 2002 issue of New York Magazine.
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