Rush to Beauty
Urologists doing laser hair removal. Dentists giving Botox. All over the city, doctors are leaving their old practices for the promised land of cosmetic medicine.
BY BETH LANDMAN KEIL
Lynn Dormer is a 42-year-old doctor board-certified to practice pulmonary medicine, internal medicine, and critical-care medicine. A slight brunette whose accent betrays her North Carolina upbringing, she was chief of pulmonary critical care at Brooklyn’s VA New York Harbor hospital, performing open-heart massages on gunshot victims, inserting tubes into collapsed lungs, and lasering tumors. Now she’s the chief attraction at the Dormer-Lourence Medical Spa on 72nd Street off Madison Avenue, and the massages her office gives are strictly external. The suite of rooms, appointed with marble, gilded mirrors, and antiques and billed in its brochure as “New York’s most exclusive spa,” offers a range of services, from massage to collagen and cosmetic laser treatments. The practice has grown so quickly that Dormer’s husband, Arnold, left his Wall Street job to be its business manager. “My family was somewhat upset,” she says pensively. “My mother said, ‘Doesn’t it bother you that you’re not helping people anymore?’ I have three medical board certifications, and they felt like I had wasted fifteen years. But, you know, it was very stressful. I would get Christmas gifts from patients, and by the time I received them, they had died. On top of that, hospital politics drove me crazy. I decided to do something lighter.” Dormer, who has been giving Botox to her patients for just over two years, was selected by Allergan, the manufacturers of the toxin, to help train others in the wrinkle-removing technique. The training takes about a day, she says. Read more
