It is best to find a physician board certified in dermatology, and/or, for surgical procedures, in plastic surgery. Board certification is not a guarantee of good results or absolute safety. However, as a rule, board certified specialists tend to have more years of relevant schooling, training and experience. They are more likely to deliver consistent results and less likely to make trivial mistakes. Click here to search our database of board certified doctors specializing in skin rejuvenation treatments.

Relevant experience

The longer a competent physician has performed a particular procedure, the better and more consistent the results tend to be. Board certification alone is not enough. Look for a specialist who has been performing the procedure(s) you are interested in regularly for at least a couple of years (or longer for complicated procedures like facelift). Long, regularly refreshed experience is the best.

Choosing the right treatment

Finding a good doctor is not enough. The treatment you undergo should be the optimal remedy for your problem. Oftentimes, several different types of procedures are available. For example, wrinkles can be treated by injections of Botox, injections of dermal fillers, laser resurfacing, chemical peels and so forth. The choice depends on the type, location and depth of wrinkles, skin type, cost and so forth. To make the right choice, research treatments for your problem as thoroughly as possible. Read relevant articles on this and other reputable websites; get more than one doctor's opinion; talk to people who underwent the procedure you are considering; read online reviews and so forth.

Keep in mind that some doctors are biased towards the procedures they perform and, among those, towards the ones generating more income. Some online reviews are promotional fakes. (At smartskincare.com, we try to screen out fake reviews, but bad apples might occasionally get through.) Be cautions in your judgments, try to rely on multiple unrelated sources of information.

Comparison shopping

After the initial screening based on certification, relevant experience and so forth, have a consultation with at least two different doctors. If your problem can be treated with different procedures, try to make sure that the expertise of the physicians you consult includes all of these options.

Independent feedback

Independent patient feedback about the quality of a doctor's services is both potentially useful and difficult to obtain. Try to get in touch with the doctor's patients who underwent the procedure you are considering. One way to go about this is to simply ask for the former patients' contact information at the doctor's office. Unfortunately, such requests are often refused or granted very selectively (i.e. you are only given the names of the "happy customers"). Experiences of friends and relatives (i.e. the people you trust) may be more useful but only if they had the same treatment and/or doctor as the ones you are considering.

Online reviews may help too but should be taken with a grain of salt for a number of reasons. As opposed to a popular skin care brand, a skin rejuvenation physician, even a popular one, covers only a small fraction of the market. Hence, you may either find no reviews at all or too few to make a sound judgment. Even the best doctor may have occasional disgruntled patient and the worst one an occasional big success. When the reviews are scarce, such atypical cases may end up disproportionately represented. And that's not even counting fake reviews.

Bottom line

Finding the optimal provider for your skin rejuvenation treatments is not a trivial task. It requires obtaining and analyzing information from different sources and using judgment based on chances rather than certainties. Yet, as with most other big and complex decisions, due diligence generally pays off.

Database of board certified skin rejuvenation doctors