Doctors will have to make patients seeking liposuction wait 15 days to make sure they want to undergo the fat-removal surgery, under draft regulations published yesterday.
Liposuctions are the first aesthetic procedure to come under the scrutiny of Singapore’s Health Ministry.
The complicated procedure has resulted in deaths, even in Europe, where it has been practiced for a long time, the Straits Times said. The only other medical procedure requiring a cooling-off period in the city-state is abortion.
“We think this period is useful,” Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan was quoted as saying. “Otherwise, some operators might hard sell and force the customer to go and lie down and do it immediately.”
Risks of cosmetic treatments have focused on general practitioners carrying out cosmetic surgery and other aesthetic procedures.
Khaw cited a case in Malaysia where a 40-year-old patient was left comatose following a tummy tuck performed by an orthopedic surgeon and botched operations in Singapore that required follow-up surgeries to fix mistakes.
Under the new rules, the Health Ministry wants operations removing more than 1 liter of fat to be done in a hospital or surgery center. Any amount less can be removed in approved premises.
Plastic surgeons said it is more common to remove between 3 liters and 7 liters of fat.
Physicians must have spent at least one year in surgery and acquired training in liposuctions to qualify for a license to perform the cosmetic procedure.
The Singapore Association of Plastic Surgeons criticized the piecemeal approach to the regulations, which mocked the “comprehensive way bona fide plastic surgeons are trained.”
Doctors said the number of liposuction procedures performed in Singapore runs into the thousands annually.
Doctors will have to keep track of their liposuction treatments when the rules take effect in a few months, the report said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS