"The Asthetic Medicine was born in this medical practice"

Prof. Carlo Alberto Bartoletti

In recent years the Aesthetic Medicine has had a relevant expansion that affected both demand and offer. Very often we read in the description of some medical practices sentences like "our medical practice was born at the same time of the Aesthetic Medicine". But it is impossible to read statements such as: THE ASTHETIC MEDICINE WAS BORN IN THIS MEDICAL PRACTICE. We are the only one to boast about this feature.

The "founder" of this practice is the one who, in 1975, introduced for the first time in Italy the concept of aesthetic medicine, a medical discipline born in France in 1973. Well, yes: the aesthetic medicine in Italy exists because Doctor Carlo Alberto Bartoletti, internist and cardiologist, gastroenterologist as well as geriatrician and gerontologist, had the idea to develop a new medical branch in Italy with characteristics mainly preventive.

You may read in the editorial of the Aesthetic Medicine magazine founded by him in 1977: "The Aesthetic Medicine implements a program of social, preventive, healing and rehabilitative medicine, useful to any community. Its goal is the construction and reconstruction of the psycho-physical balance". And again: "The main elements of this important field of action are: the treatment of the physical misfortunes and aesthetic constitutional alterations; the treatment of disease and traumatic incidents; the prevention of aging and the possible resulting mental and physical disability; the constant education to enable everyone a rational management of the individual biological heritage through programs of food physical and mental hygiene."

And these are the principles that still rule our daily clinical activities. In the last 30 years, we may say that the discipline improved its humanistic and internist roots, thus confirming the contents of preventive, corrective, restorative and rehabilitative medicine and its social background so that today it can be essentially considered as a preventive medicine. Today, whoever goes to the aesthetic medicine, in addition to the request of correction of the imperfection, asks for a useful prescription in improving her quality of life linked to her age and to keep an optimum physical and mental condition over the years: lifelong learning for life programme.

With these assumptions, the Aesthetic Medicine aims at the achievement and maintenance of health as an expression of a condition of physical and psychological well-being and not only the absence of disease, as some time now recommended by the World Health Organization. From what already said above, it is clear that our philosophy is to try to provide the patients who come to us with the ability to maintain individual harmony and prevent damage to skin aging and possible disharmonies of the silhouette, using corrective methods, in an absolutely natural way, to improve the individual harmony, trying to let the patients feel good with their age" Without any scope to let them look like younger, because every attempt would be pathetic. And too often we meet people who are the result of an incorrect aesthetic medicine.