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30 November 2006 featu For Calayan couple, the team is the thing Practice builds on the principle that everyone has the right to be beautiful Foresight is behind the success of the young but competent Cosmetiderm team. Headed by husband and wife Manny and Pie Calayan (below), the 11-year-old cosmetic surgery and dermatology clinic has steadily built a solid reputation in the medical field that is grounded in an efficient partnership. It did this college sweethearts well to decide on separate but complementary specializations in medical aesthetics. After tying the knot and graduating from the UERM College of Medicine, Pie Calayan developed a keen interest in dermatology, which in turn motivated her husband to pursue a related field in cosmetic surgery. “We agreed our choices would be advantageous in our future practice,” says Pie. “Manny would perform the operation and I’d take care of the finishing touches like treating the incisions to make sure they wouldn’t scar.” Clearly, the Calayans arrived at the perfect formula. For soon after they finished their respective residencies, the marriage of dermatology and cosmetic surgery drew patients to their clinic. Trust was easy to build because their qualifications were clear and specific. Treatments concerning the skin and hair were the domain of Pie, while any procedure involving incisions, big or small, were the “ It’s not just the confidence of being in good hands with these doctors. It’s the certainty of being in the right hands for a particular procedure PATIENT On the Calayan pratice responsibility of Manny. “It’s not just the confidence of being in good hands with these doctors,” said a lady patient at the Cosmetiderm waiting room in the Medical Plaza clinics. “It’s the certainty of being in the right hands for a particular procedure.” It has always been this way with the Calayans since 1995, when they first established a simple skin and cosmetic surgery clinic at the Healthkard Building on Herrera St, Makati. Then called Cosmetiderm Skin Center and Aesthetic Surgery, the practice initially offered the more “traditional” dermatological and aesthetic procedures; the simple treatment of acne, allergies and other skin conditions, and straightforward enhancement procedures like rhinoplasty, facelift, and eye bag removal. “Lasers and other technologies were just being developed then,” says Manny. “But of course my wife and I kept ourselves updated on different developments, and we were quick to avail of the various training programs in Thailand and Singapore so we could administer the procedures here.” Keeping abreast of breakthroughs comes easy to Manny being a fellow of the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery, the Asia-Pacific Academy of Cosmetic Surgery, and the International Society of Cosmetic Laser Surgeons, among other affiliations. The same goes with Pie, who is a member of the Philippine Academy of Clinical and Cosmetic Dermatology. By 1996, the advent of laser treatments, Cosmetiderm acquired its first carbon-based laser system and laser wart removal machine. More training and equipment acquisitions followed, most recently a hair removal machine and a high-powered lipoplasty equipment. “Everyone wants to be beautiful, and everyone has the right to be beautiful,” Manny says. “That’s why in our clinics, you would see everyone – from the rich to the masa – coming for treatments.” Seeing that the Calayans are an approachable tandem, GMA 7 has offered them a segment on the early morning program Unang Hirit. On television, as in their practice, husband and wife complement each other. Ganda! PHILIPPINES TARGETS US$3 TRILL Medical tourism is being targeted as the next frontier for the Philippines in a bid to cash in on a market worth US$3 trillion a year. “It’s one of the solid niches for our country,” President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said. Arroyo pushed the initiative in a meeting with her economic advisers, saying Filipino professionals “can serve the world right here at home, as we provide more jobs downstream”. The Philippines ranks fifth among Asia’s top healthcare centers after Thailand, India, Malaysia and Singapore. “Medical tourism is a rapidly growing trend where citizens of developed nations travel to other countries to avail
es filipino globe 31 Ganda! Beauty-conscious Filipinos are turning the cosmetology industry on its head. Tessa Mauricio profiles the country’s leading professionals in the business of looking and feeling good ION MEDICAL TOURISM MARKET themselves of quality but affordable medical and healthcare services, along with rest and recreation,” Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said. Duque said Filipino doctors are on par with their western counterparts, with most medical specialists in the country having undergone training overseas, Services offered in the country include cardiology, pulmonary and cervical care, and nephrology. Statistics show that blepharoplasty, a procedure to widen the contour of the eyes, popular among the Koreans and Japanese , costs P150,000, but costs roughly US$10,000 or P500,000 in their countries. RAUL ACEDRE She only wanted to be “your best friend in beauty”. But now, Victoria Belo is a famed “doctor to the stars,” and more significantly, one of the most successful businesswomen the country has ever had. She is the founder of Belo Medical Group, a 16-year-old enterprise that boldly paved the way for cosmetic surgery to be widely accepted in Philippine society and turned the one-time taboo into a profitable industry. “It took me a long time to admit that we’re a business,” Belo tells Filipino Globe. “I was like many doctors who thought I shouldn’t mix medicine with business.” With six booming centers, including a newly opened practice in Glorietta, the group has joined the big league in the medical industry. But where business ends and medicine begins is well defined. “The lines are clearly drawn,” she says. “Our main objective is still based on what I’ve always wanted to do: make everybody equal if they want it. My dream has always been for people to have confidence and selfesteem, no matter how they look. If that could just happen, it would be great, right? But I know that those who are born with the better genes usually get the breaks.” As a young student in a girls’ school, Belo noticed that the prettier ones were always the ones who made it big on campus. They were the popular girls, the teacher’s pets who also got all the dates. “I was right smack in the middle – I wasn’t really ugly or pretty,” she says. “All the same, I hated inequality or discrimination of any sort. It bothers me when people are judged for how they look.” When she developed a severe acne problem that went well into her 30s, she picked up mannerisms to hide her insecurity. She would either tilt her head low or repeatedly smooth the sides of her hair over her face. And so, after her father – a noted lawyer in his time – convinced unica hija Vicki to live his dream of being a doctor, a specialization of choice was obvious for the University of Sto Tomas medical graduate. In the late 1980s, she headed for Thailand, where she studied with a progressive team of doctors for a diploma in dermatology. “Even when I came home to start my practice in 1990, I still had bad skin,” Belo says. “My patients who’ve been with me for the past 14 years had always told people, ‘Her skin was so bad, I wanted to turn around when I saw her!’” Her own condition made her go into dermatology, believing she was in a better position practice it. It was from her frustration as an acne patient that Belo came upon the concept of her present practice, a brand of dermatology that others had thought to be too untraditional in the beginning, but one that many duplicated almost immediately. While Belo, the patient, as more than familiar with the “alcohol-prick-inject” routine from years of visiting top dermatologists, she wished that her doctors had more time to get rid of her pet peeves: The white heads and black heads on her t-zone. “I knew that no dermatologist would bother to clean your face really well, so in between consultations, I’d go scout the best facialists but still I’d break out.” When she set up her first clinic at The Medical Towers in Makati, she made sure that she devoted an entire wing to facials, minus the concoctions of commercial creams. Her routine was that after she treated the patient’s acne or allergy, she would send them to her trained assistants for a final, thorough cleaning. The patients would then go home with the right kind of medicine for their skin condition, and with a bit of luck, all will be well. Belo’s interest in liposuction was also the result of a personal condition: weight problem. “The reason I went into liposuction to begin with “ The whole point is to be beautiful without people knowing what you have done VICTORIA BELO On quick and painless procedure was because I was a fatso,” she says. “That’s also why I went into teaching aerobics because I really needed to work out,” she adds, touching lightly on a widely publicised controversy involving Rosanna Roces. The feisty actor recently sued Belo for her weight gain, five years after her last liposuction; the word “five” being the operative word in the case. “My being an aerobics instructor was really a big help,” Belo continues. “It was then that I saw that no matter how hard my students worked out, their stomachs would still bulge, even if their muscles were so hard. It was then that Belo built on the wonders of liposuction, thereafter pioneering the procedure in the country. She trained with Dr Jeffrey Kline in Capistrano, California. The man is responsible for developing the safest and most effective form of surgical body sculpting, known as ultrasound tumescent liposuction. Even when colleagues came down hard on her for carrying out such alien procedures as liposuction, laser and Obagi treatment in the country, she persisted in research, training, and treatment. Belo looked straight ahead, and in the process helped change many lives for the better. “The whole point of undergoing cosmetic surgery is to improve a person’s looks, but unfortunately, the traditional methods entail a lot of pain, bleeding, and swelling and bruising during recovery. But with these new developments, cosmetic surgery becomes less toxic, and more importantly, safer for everyone.” She also says that downtime is cut significantly by more than half, which perfectly fits today’s active lifestyles. “The whole point is to be beautiful without people knowing what you have done.”
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