Medical Affairs: The Missing Conversation in Aesthetics

Published 13 September 2026

Author(s): Dr Mariyah Yazdani-Duggan

It is Friday afternoon and a patient has come back with a nodule following dermal filler you injected. Before you decide anything, ask yourself an uncomfortable question: who in that dermal filler manufacturer's organisation could tell you whether this has been seen before, what do the published cases describe, and what evidence bears on the treatment approach you are considering? If the only name that comes to mind is the representative who sold you the product, that is the gap we need to address.

For most injectors, the first point of contact is a sales representative who usually has no medical background, and whose role was never designed for complex scientific or safety questions. In pharmaceutical land, clinicians have other routes as companies employ physicians, pharmacists and MSLs within Medical Affairs teams that support scientific exchange and access to product-specific evidence. Separate Pharmacovigilance functions oversee adverse event reporting, and Quality teams investigate suspected product defects. Many larger aesthetic manufacturers have equivalent functions.

Yet most UK aesthetic practitioners I speak to either do not know these teams exist or are unsure how to reach them.