Glynis Ablon, MD: Winter Clinical Presentation on Evaluating the Aesthetic Patient

During her recent HCPLive interview, Glynis Ablon, MD, discussed several highlights from her recent presentation ‘Evaluating the Aesthetic Patient’ from the 2023 Winter Clinical Miami dermatology conference.

Ablon is known for her work as both an associate clinical professor at UCLA as well as for being the founder of the Ablon Skin Institute & Research Center in Manhattan Beach, California.

Ablon first described her background in the field, then getting into the steps she believes are needed to evaluate patients coming into one’s practice for aesthetic procedures.

“I think the biggest thing to understand is there are two steps to evaluating the aesthetic patient,” she explained. “The first one is to really get to know the patient themselves, and develop basically their emotional levels and, and stability. So you really want to make sure when you're dealing with an aesthetic patient, that you have someone that is emotionally stable, there can be variations on that.”

During an aesthetic consultation, Ablon explained that the nurse will typically give the basic information on a patient’s expectations.

“And step 2 becomes the actual physical evaluation,” she further explained. “...So we're talking about the skin and the skin changes, then the fat pads followed by the muscle and then the boat. And then the second step that I like to discuss is the morphology and those morphologic changes that occur with the aesthetic face.”

Ablon continued her description of the consultation process, explaining the way clinicians should help patients come to the right conclusions.

“Finally, I like to look at symmetry, which of course does get worse with age,” she said. “...I think that especially, having been doing this for 27 years, you understand that if you can deal with patients that are realistic, you're going to have very happy patients.”

Ablon added that patients with unrealistic expectations or desires to look completely different may require their physician to lead them away from these conclusions or tell them no.

To learn more about Ablon’s Winter Clinical Miami conference presentation, view the interview listed above.