A shot at a better body

Come in on your lunch hour, have a few injections and melt away those stubborn bulges of fat. That promise has made injection lipolysis -- also called lipodissolve and mesotherapy -- one of the fastest-growing cosmetic procedures in the country, with centers sprouting up almost as fast as Starbucks stores. Nevermind that neither the procedure nor the drug cocktail used has FDA approval. Nevermind that Kansas and Nebraska are trying to ban the procedure. Nevermind that the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery do not condone the procedure. Nevermind that the procedure has been banned in Brazil, Canada and England.

People want a better body now.

Driving the demand for a fat-dissolving miracle is the insatiable quest for thinner-ness, a rise in noninvasive cosmetic procedures -- specifically injectables such as Botox and Restylane -- and doctors who want to capitalize on both. ASAPS members reported performing injection lipolysis on nearly 29,000 patients in 2006, six times more than in 2005. Members of this group represent only a small fraction of those doing the procedure, so the numbers are actually much higher. Fig, the largest national provider of lipodissolve, has performed more than 170,000 treatments on 50,000 patients since opening its first center in September 2005. The company now operates 17 body-shaping centers in eight states according to Fig chief development officer Chris Dornfeld. Its newest center, and its first in California, opened in August in Costa Mesa and is adding more than 200 patients each month, he said.

When performing the procedure, doctors -- or, more often, nurses, assistants or aestheticians -- inject PCDC, a mixture of phosphatidylcholine (a chemical found in soybeans) and sodium deoxycholate (derived from cattle bile) into the fat layer under the skin to break it down. They say it's not for the obese but, rather, for normal-weight men and women who want to resolve diet-resistant pockets of fat. Treatments involve a series of six to nine injections every few weeks to the same area, commonly the abdomen, love handles, chin and thighs. Most centers, including Fig, charge around $1,500 per treatment area.