The Athens Medical Association (ISA) has issued just 50 penalties over the past eight years against clinics and beauty salons that lacked the required operating license or offered medical services they were not permitted to provide. Beauty salons marketed as clinics routinely offer invasive cosmetic procedures beyond their license, and pathology or dermatology practices often provide treatments outside their scope. The pattern is found nationwide but is most pronounced in Attica. Even colonoscopies are sometimes carried out by gastroenterologists in clinics that do not meet the facility standards the procedure requires.
Where beauty salons cross into medicine
A common tactic explains much of this, according to association officials. A number of beauty salons bring on a doctor as scientific director, a step that allows them to offer medical procedures of an aesthetic nature and present themselves, in practice, as dermatology clinics. Some dermatology clinics, in turn, reportedly carry out procedures that fall under plastic surgery.
One of the issues with the current framework, is that it remains unclear in a significant number of cases which procedures a given clinic may legally perform, and which medical specialties are qualified to perform them. That ambiguity prompted Greece’s Central Board of Health (KESY), to decide during a meeting on September 11 to form a committee tasked with setting precise standards for the treatments that private clinics can offer. The committee is expected to be seated within the week. Its first priority will be establishing a clear regulatory framework for longevity treatments, regenerative medicine and related procedures, a sector that has grown quickly in Greece without dedicated rules.
How the complaints system works
The association’s relevant departments carry out both random inspections and checks prompted by complaints. Complaints fall into two categories. The first concerns individual doctors accused of violating the Code of Medical Ethics, typically because they mistreated a patient or because an act of theirs contributed to an injury or a death. The second concerns clinics or multi specialty practices where inspectors find problems with how the facility itself is being run. Within that second category, according to people familiar with the issues at hand, fall beauty salons which perform medical procedures of an aesthetic nature, effectively functioning as a dermatological practice.
Fifty cases in eight years
Of the inspections carried out since 2018, whether triggered by complaints or conducted at random, 50 turned up a genuine problem with a clinic’s operating conditions, the association says. Penalties in many of those cases amounted to a temporary suspension of the unit, though sanctions can extend as far as revocation of the clinic’s operating license. These inspections are, in effect, the first step in a process that can expose wrongdoing, impose an immediate fine, close a facility temporarily and set in motion a legal proceeding that may ultimately end in the permanent loss of a license.
That outcome, however, is uncommon. The permanent revocation of a doctor’s license to practice medicine is extremely rare in Greece and almost always requires a final, non appealable criminal conviction, a bar high enough that few of the cases the association substantiates result in a doctor being barred from practice altogether.
