LAYTON — Acne. Loose skin. Rosacea. Sun damage. Wrinkles. Cellulite. Stretch marks. Spider and varicose veins.
Many of those conditions require surgery, but Surface Medical Spas' specialty is handling those and other problems without a major operation.
"What we do is very specific but very broad at the same time," said Dr. Jeff Barson, managing partner in the spa along with his uncle, medical director Dr. Aaron Barson. "If it is nonsurgical and it's medical — we don't do mud wraps — and if it's effective, we seriously look at offering it. It's a very broad scope of practice, but it's all nonsurgical cosmetic."
The company has three Utah locations: 250 W. Antelope Drive in Layton, 10965 S. State in Sandy and 6531 N. Landmark Drive in Park City. It also just opened in Charleston, W.Va.
But the scope of the work has caught the attention of clients and physicians from all over.
"What we do is specialize in nonsurgical cosmetic medicine. We're using technology, including a number of technologies we've developed that are unique to us. We get a fair amount of interest from other physicians from basically around the world. I've talked to physicians as far away as Dubai, Sweden and Asia who are interested in what we're doing. And we get patients from around the country — Detroit, Tennessee, Chicago, L.A. — who fly in."
Three physicians and a dozen or so staffers handle a clientele that is 93 percent women.
"Our most common patient is a woman who is either looking to address a problem or doesn't want to address a problem ever," Barson said. "We're evenly split between people who have wrinkles and want to get rid of them, and people who don't have them now and never want them.
"One of things we're able to do through use of technology is prevent stuff as well as correct it, which is not the case with, for example, surgical solutions. Surgery is a corrective procedure, but there's no prevention there. You can't have a preventive face lift, for example."
Among Surface Medical Spas' specialties is the Pointe Lift, a nonsurgical alternative to a face lift. Barson said the patient can go out to dinner that night — "there's no laying in bed three weeks wrapped up in bandages" — and the procedure costs $1,800 to $3,200, which he said is far less than the surgical option.
"We're the only physicians in the country that do it. Think of it in terms of what a knee replacement would have been like in 1980. They'd pretty much take your whole knee apart. But nowadays, the technology has developed to where you have just two incisions, you put in a scope and you're done. We move stuff around in the same way an invasive face lift does except it's performance through tiny needle holes," he said.
Another claim to fame is Liposolve, a physician-administered injection that dissolves fat cells in areas as small as skin pads or under the eyes to as large as abdomens.
"It's not as dramatic as liposuction, but if you have some love handles you want to get rid of, it works quite well for those types of things," Barson said.
Surface Medical Spas started in the Layton location and has grown from there, experiencing about 100 percent year-over-year growth recently.
"We're a little bit different animal," Barson said. "Most of our competitors are individual physicians who get some piece of technology and just add it to their existing practice. We look at the entire gamut. We don't do skin care and hair removal, just one rather large area — cosmetic medicine — but only in nonsurgical solutions. Medicine is moving to a technology base, and that's really what our physicians specialize in."
Surface Medical Spas conducts lots of free seminars, does not charge for consultations and strives to educate patients. Its Web site, www.surface-med.com, features information about the various procedures, plus a few customer testimonials that detail how the company has helped change people's lives.
"In some ways, we're kind of in the vanity business. Our physicians are typically not patting people on the chest and breathing life back into their lungs, but if you're a 16-year-old girl with terrible cystic acne and you're able to get rid of it, that's a life-changing experience for her. It's just incredibly rewarding when you're able to help somebody out that way with something that's very important to them personally. We're not doing heart/lung transplant, but for them it's incredibly important," Barson said.
He believes big money will move into the industry, resulting in "a tremendous amount" of consolidation. In a decade, there likely will be six regional to national companies. The changes will result from the technology's ability to make the business both scalable and replicable, he said.
"It's a growth market," he said. "If you look at the baby boomers and everything we compete in, from skin care to all the cosmetic medicine, you're looking at a $50 billion-a-year market in the U.S.
"What attracted me is building something new. We operate differently from other medical practices. It's much more a business structure. But it's personally rewarding, creating something new that didn't exist before."
E-mail: bwallace@desnews.com