See you at one of the six clinics, private, of course, that the Pedro Jaén Group has in Madrid. A minimalist building in a very fine neighborhood, without any sign that reveals what activity it does. In the very white reception, elegant women enter and leave, even if they are in plush tracksuits, with their faces shining because they are so smooth, or red because they have been so scrubbed, and their eyes camouflaged behind huge sunglasses, even if it is very cloudy outside. The doctor receives in his immaculate office overlooking the skyline from Madrid. He is a very pleasant conversationalist, and you can see everything, everything, everything in his blue eyes. Another thing is that he says it. Confidentiality is in the title and in the DNA.
Is such discretion to protect the anonymity of your clients?
I have never had a sign in the office, nor advertised. Patients come to see us recommended by other patients. They know where we are and what we do. There is no need to proclaim it.
Patients or clients? Are wrinkles a health issue?
Patients, always. Before you only went to the dermatologist because something hurt, itched or stung. Sometimes too late, because the skin's worst enemy is not the sun, but ignorance. Now, in addition, they come to look better. Aesthetic medicine is also medicine. Skin diseases affect aesthetics. And aesthetics, to health. A child with alopecia, or a teenager with acne, can suffer from depression, even commit suicide. More than 50% of our patients come for health reasons. And also because of the wrinkles, of course.
Why today so many young doctors want to be dermatologists?
Because it is a beautiful, interesting and complex specialty, which allows you to do many things, facilitates family conciliation more than others with more calls and emergencies and, also, let's be frank, because it is very economically interesting in private healthcare.
In other words, they want to be one to cover youand.
Six years of study, an exam, another five years of specialty: believe me, there are other, easier ways to get paid. Medicine requires sacrifice and vocation.
They are the ones with the best grades in the MIR.
They are. My first-year residents at the Ramón y Cajal hospital were among the top 80 in the last MIR exam, with 11,600 places. They are extraordinary. Spanish dermatologists are the best in Europe and perhaps in the world.
Isn't it a 'waste' of brains for other specialties?
Well, we still need more dermatologists: that is why there is such a waiting list for a consultation in public healthcare and also in private healthcare. My hope is that, with clinical practice, those who begin will divide themselves between dermatology, let's say, combat, and aesthetics.
And you, why is it 'derma'?
I wanted to study internal medicine, but I realized that the skin is a way of being an internist, because the skin is the mirror of the body, to the point that, in France, the dermatologist is the gateway to the health system. Plus, I've always suffered from psoriasis, and when a doctor relieved my symptoms when I was young, I wanted to be like him.
How is psoriasis coping today?
Much better, thank you. In the 40 years that I have been active there have been great advances in treatment. I myself have been patient zero in a clinical trial in times when, not that it was dangerous, but a certain risk was assumed. We are, like so many autoimmune patients, chronic patients.
At 62 years old, does he still prick and cut?
Spiked more than short. I do inject Botox and fillers in my clinics. Cutting, understood as operating, I operate less: I have doctors on my team who operate better than me. I operate, above all, in Tanzania, where, through my foundation, we treat albino children at high risk of dying very young from skin cancer. In Tanzania we don't DJ.
Paradox. In the first world, today, is having wrinkles poor?
Well let's say you keep young Aesthetically it costs money, but, as long as you can pay, you can achieve an aesthetic improvement with a reasonable investment. And, sometimes, very bad results are achieved by spending fortunes.
Why do all airbrushed people end up looking alike?
It has to do with the fillings. The substances are never completely reabsorbed, they leave a mark that is difficult to reverse. Especially when the volumes are suddenly altered. Now many young women ask for it. And it creates addiction. Also, let's not forget that each filling vial has a price, and the more filling, the more vials.
Doesn't this happen to your patients?
Sometimes you have to know how to say no to what they ask of you. When a patient comes, I don't think about her face today, but about her face in 20 or 30 years. And I am acting accordingly. An aesthetic patient is a chronic patient: you know that you will see her periodically. I have patients for decades: some are centenarians. I have treated the grandmother, the mother and the daughter.
You said “a” patient. Are women still the majority?
Yes, although more and more men are coming for aesthetic, hair and facial treatments. They tend to be public-facing professionals who want to convey a dynamic and cheerful image in their work.
And look more 'handsome'.
I suppose so too, but women win by far in that regard.
How are we going with a clinical eye?
The skin tells me your story.
And what does mine tell you?
That you have very fine and sensitive skin, that you tolerate the sun poorly, that you once got burned when you were young and you have to be very careful.
Do you estimate age by eye?
Yes. It's 40 years of seeing faces.
How old am I? I have never punctured or retouched myself.
57.
Bingo! Why not 56 or 58?
I've taken a gamble, I usually have a margin of error of one year
And there are no disappointments?
Somehow, the other day, a patient confused me. I gave her a 70, I looked at the record and she was 85. This is achieved with good genetics, constant care and sun protection and good professionals.
Do dermatologists also have patients die?
Every time less. We cure more and more skin cancer, even metastatic. But if. Some of them have died. I remember, with face, name and surname, a young girl with metastatic melanoma who died when I was doing the specialty. [se emociona]. A hematologist friend who treats childhood leukemia and literally cures and saves lives told me that if one of the children he had cured ever died, he would quit medicine. The doctors are admirable.
You say it as if you were, I don't know, a plumber.
I am a doctor and I consider myself a doctor, but I do not consider myself a great doctor. I greatly admire my colleagues at Ramón y Cajal, great teachers, who save lives every day. Dermatologists are the infantry of medicine: we see, we shoot and, almost always, we are right. We have more and more weapons, more complex and more effective. There are several specialties within dermatology. One is good in cancer, another in autoimmune diseases, another in trichology, the branch that studies hair…
Speaking of which, and with all due respect: at the dermatologist's house, alopecic skull.
Well yes: I was late to the trichological treatments, which today are very effective, and prevent baldness.
You can always reforest the area, I mean transplant hair.
Yes, I could, but then I would be someone else. I'm 62 years old, I wouldn't recognize myself in the mirror.
THE DOCTOR PATIENT
Pedro Jaén is, at the same time, a dermatologist and a dermatology patient. Psoriasis, an autoimmune disease that he has always suffered from, was one of the factors that led him to study Medicine, when he saw, as a teenager, how a doctor could relieve his symptoms. Jaén is the first doctor in his family. His father, a native of a town in La Rioja, signed up at a very young age as a merchant seaman in the Basque Country to earn a living, and later settled in Madrid as an employee of a shipping company. It was there, in the capital, where his first-born son, Pedro, studied college. President for many years of the Spanish Society of Dermatology, head of the Dermatology service at the Ramón y Cajal hospital and eminence in the treatment of dermatological diseases and skin cancer, Jaén founded the Group that bears his name more than 30 years ago. A set of dermatology, surgery and aesthetic medicine clinics frequented by celebrities whose name the doctor will take to the grave.
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