Last week I was privileged to be invited to attend a global experts meeting in Miami for a leading dermal filler company. Being the only UK doctor, I was quite apprehensive as the delegate list included doctors whose work I have admired and whose research has paved the way forward for the aesthetic speciality. The meeting was extremely educational on numerous levels and I felt I was able to contribute effectively on several topics.
However I was awestruck by the amount of research each of the American doctors had carried out to help advance our knowledge. The US Food & Drugs Administration (FDA) comes under a lot of criticism there, like the Care Quality Commission has done here in the UK, but what the FDA does create, is a culture to provide good evidence based medicine, more akin to NICE (National Institute of Clinical Excellence) here in the UK.
