How to check a dermatologist or aesthetic practitioner’s credentials, experience and suitability before booking treatment.
By Dr Anjali Mahto, Consultant Dermatologist (FRCP), Founder and Medical Director of Self London
Key Takeaways
- Use the relevant regulator’s register to confirm a practitioner’s registration, licence to practise and specialist qualifications.
- Terms such as “skin expert” or “aesthetic doctor” do not automatically demonstrate recognised specialist training.
- Ask about training, practical experience and familiarity with your specific treatment, skin type and concerns.
- A good practitioner should assess your needs, explain the risks and alternatives, and be willing to recommend against treatment when appropriate.
- Understand who is treating you: Confirm who will perform the procedure, what clinical oversight is available and how complications and follow-up are managed.
- AI recommendations can help you find practitioners, but their qualifications and experience should always be independently verified.
It has become increasingly common for patients to use artificial intelligence to research skin treatments and find practitioners before attending an appointment. Rather than spending hours searching individual clinic websites, they can ask ChatGPT or another AI assistant to recommend the best dermatologist, laser specialist or aesthetic doctor for their particular concern.
I can understand the appeal to do this. AI can assimilate an enormous amount of information very quickly, but there is an important limitation that patients may not appreciate. The qualifications attributed to a practitioner in an AI-generated recommendation may never have been independently verified.
In 2016, I wrote an article for HuffPost entitled What Makes a Skin Expert?. At the time, I was frustrated by the number of people being quoted in the national press as dermatologists or skin specialists when their qualifications did not necessarily support those descriptions. I could not understand why media were so willing to accept professional titles without checking them. The General Medical Council (GMC) register was publicly available, free to access and searchable in minutes.
Ten years later, the problem persists, but the way medical authority is communicated has changed. Practitioners can establish substantial online reputations through conference appearances, social media, paid industry awards, manufacturer endorsements and press coverage. Their biographies may appear across numerous websites, often repeating the same descriptions of their expertise.
Search engines index this information, and AI systems can subsequently reproduce it in recommendations that appear impartial and authoritative. Yet several websites describing someone as a leading dermatologist do not necessarily represent several independent confirmations of their qualifications. They may all be repeating the same original, unverified claim.
Patients are entitled to know who is treating them, what qualifications that person genuinely holds and whether their experience is relevant to the treatment being offered. Much of this information can be checked independently, and I would encourage anyone considering medical or aesthetic treatment to take the time to do so.
First, understand what the qualifications actually mean
One of the peculiarities of aesthetic medicine is how little distinction is often made between different levels of medical training. A recently qualified doctor who has completed a short course in cosmetic injectables, a GP with twenty years of clinical experience and a consultant dermatologist who has completed years of additional specialist training can all be described online as an ‘aesthetic doctor’. Their clinical backgrounds, quite clearly, may be very different.
Medical school provides the foundations of medical knowledge, but a considerable amount of clinical education takes place after graduation. Doctors working in hospitals and general practice encounter large numbers of patients with different diseases, medical histories, expectations and psychological needs. They become more experienced at recognising patterns of illness, considering alternative diagnoses and identifying situations in which something doesn’t fit.
There is also the education that takes place beyond individual consultations. Presenting patients to senior colleagues, attending multidisciplinary meetings, participating in journal clubs, critically appraising published studies and reviewing complications all contribute to the development of clinical judgement. There is simply no short-cut to this process.
This is particularly relevant in aesthetic medicine, where there is no clearly defined training pathway in the UK. Treatments may be promoted using small studies, short follow-up periods or impressive before-and-after photographs. A clinician needs to understand whether the evidence demonstrates a meaningful benefit, how reliable the findings are and whether they apply to the patient being treated.
Years of patient contact also develop communication skills that are difficult to acquire from a short procedural course. Experienced clinicians become better at recognising what patients are not explicitly telling them, identifying unrealistic expectations and understanding when a requested treatment may not address the underlying concern.
Someone may arrive convinced that a particular facial feature needs correcting because they have seen the same treatment promoted repeatedly online. Another patient may be seeking intervention following a difficult life event or experiencing distress about their appearance that warrants further exploration. The ability to recognise these circumstances, discuss them sensitively and sometimes advise against treatment is part of good clinical care. Even cosmetic treatments should be treated as “medicine” not “beauty”.
A doctor who moves into aesthetic practice soon after qualification, without completing a recognised postgraduate training programme, may have had fewer opportunities to develop this breadth of experience through sustained, supervised clinical work.
That doesn’t mean they cannot subsequently become a competent practitioner. However, completing a medical degree followed by a short cosmetic course represents a different educational background from competition and completion of a postgraduate programme involving years of clinical experience, supervision and formal assessment.
General practice in the UK, for example, normally requires at least three years of postgraduate specialty training. Other medical specialties have their own training programmes, examinations and requirements for demonstrating competence.
Neither a qualification nor the number of years spent practising can guarantee clinical excellence. However, the depth, relevance and quality of a practitioner’s training should be part of any sensible assessment of their expertise.
Is the person recommended as a dermatologist actually a dermatologist?
This is one of the easiest claims to investigate, yet it is surprisingly often overlooked. In the UK, the General Medical Council maintains a medical register, a GP Register and a Specialist Register. They record different aspects of a doctor’s professional status.
The medical register allows you to confirm whether someone is registered as a doctor and whether they hold a licence to practise in the UK. The GP Register identifies doctors with recognised registration in general practice. The Specialist Register records the medical specialties in which a doctor has been formally recognised.
If somebody is described as a UK consultant dermatologist, check whether Dermatology appears on their GMC Specialist Register entry. You can search using their name or GMC registration number. Being GMC-registered is not the same as being on the Specialist Register. Similarly, registration as a GP does not establish recognised specialist status in dermatology. If you search under my name you will see my GMC registration date is 2004 (when I qualified as a doctor) and specialist registration date is 2013 (when I became a consultant dermatologist).
There are different routes to specialist registration, including approved UK training and assessment of relevant qualifications or experience through other recognised pathways. The register establishes recognised specialist status, although it does not independently confirm a current consultant appointment or the quality of someone’s practical skills.
Aesthetic medicine itself is not a separate recognised GMC specialty. Doctors from different medical backgrounds can legitimately develop expertise in cosmetic procedures. There is nothing wrong with being an experienced GP who practises aesthetic medicine, for example, provided the individual works within their competence and accurately describes their qualifications. The problem arises when professional experience is presented in a way that implies a specialist qualification somebody does not possess.
Descriptions such as ‘international skin expert’, ‘global aesthetic specialist’, ‘key opinion leader’ or ‘celebrity doctor’ may reflect particular professional activities or experience. They are not recognised GMC medical specialties. Doctors who trained overseas may have qualifications that require further explanation, particularly when different countries use professional titles differently. An apparent inconsistency should therefore prompt questions rather than an automatic assumption of dishonesty. However, if someone knowingly claims to hold specialist credentials they do not possess, I would consider that a significant warning sign.
The GMC’s guidance on cosmetic interventions requires doctors to be honest about their qualifications, experience, skills and professional status. It also states that doctors must not knowingly allow others to misrepresent them.
This includes inaccurate descriptions appearing in conference programmes, professional directories or other promotional material. Genuine mistakes happen, but professional honesty should extend to correcting misleading claims when they become apparent.
Patients make decisions based partly on the qualifications and experience they believe a practitioner possesses. If someone cannot accurately represent their own professional background, it is reasonable to question the reliability of the other claims they make about treatment.
Does their experience actually relate to the treatment you want?
Verifying a professional qualification is only the beginning. The next question is whether the practitioner has appropriate experience in the procedure you are considering.
For example, a doctor whose principal specialty is gynaecology may have substantial experience in anatomy, surgery and procedural medicine of the female reproductive tract. Those skills are valuable, but they do not automatically establish competence in facial laser resurfacing or injecting polynucleotides around the eyes.
If that doctor has subsequently undertaken appropriate training in facial aesthetics, gained supervised experience and developed competence in those procedures, their original specialty should not prevent them from practising within that area. Patients should nevertheless understand what additional training has been completed and how that experience was acquired.
The same scrutiny applies to dermatologists. A consultant dermatologist may have extensive experience managing inflammatory skin disease but relatively little practical experience with ablative laser resurfacing. Expertise can be very domain-specific. Conversely, a properly trained laser therapist may have performed a particular procedure hundreds or thousands of times and developed considerable technical proficiency.
Someone who has practised medicine for twenty years may have been performing facial injectables for only six months. Equally, a practitioner describing fifteen years of laser experience may have spent most of that time using one device for a narrow range of indications.
Patients should ask about experience with the actual treatment, the condition being addressed and, where relevant, their skin type. They should also be able to establish how the practitioner maintains their skills and manages complications.
There is a further distinction between knowing how to perform a procedure and being able to decide whether it is appropriate. Both require expertise, but they may involve different responsibilities within a clinical team.
How do you recognise good clinical judgement?
An impressive treatment portfolio or a large collection of before-and-after photographs can show what a practitioner is capable of achieving. They reveal much less about how patients were selected, which alternatives were considered or how frequently complications occur. A technically well-performed procedure may still have been the wrong treatment.
Acne provides a useful example. Management may involve topical medication, oral therapies, hormonal treatments, isotretinoin or selected light and laser-based interventions. The appropriate choice depends on the nature and severity of the acne, medical history, previous treatment and risk of scarring.
I have seen patients who have spent considerable sums on repeated chemical peels and other cosmetic procedures while their inflammatory acne has continued to progress. Some have been discouraged from considering oral medication because of possible adverse effects, without receiving a balanced discussion of the benefits, risks and monitoring requirements. The cosmetic procedures may have been performed competently. The problem was that the underlying disease had not been adequately controlled.
Similar considerations apply to pigmentation and laser resurfacing. Melasma, post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation and solar lentigines can look superficially alike, but they do not necessarily respond to the same treatments. A device that improves one condition may aggravate another, particularly in skin prone to post-inflammatory pigmentation.
There can be more serious consequences when diagnosis is overlooked. The British Association of Dermatologists advises against removing melanocytic moles with laser because the tissue cannot subsequently be examined histologically. A suspicious pigmented lesion may need removal and microscopic examination to exclude malignancy. An appropriately trained clinician should understand the underlying problem, discuss the reasonable alternatives and recognise when further investigation, referral or no treatment is preferable.
It is also worth considering commercial influences. Practitioners may be paid to teach, speak for manufacturers or promote particular products and devices. These relationships are not necessarily inappropriate, but commercial endorsements should not be confused with independent assessments of clinical evidence. A practitioner should be able to explain the limitations of a treatment, the quality of the research supporting it and why it is suitable for you, even when they have a professional relationship with its manufacturer.
Patients should also be cautious about impressive success rates or claims of exceptionally low complication rates. Meaningful comparisons require information about the number of procedures performed, the types of complications recorded, the patients being treated and the duration of follow-up.
The House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee’s February 2026 report on cosmetic procedures highlighted continuing gaps in training standards, regulation and safety information across the aesthetics sector. Reliable national complication data remain limited, making confident comparisons between different practitioner groups difficult. A clinic should be willing to discuss how it monitors its outcomes and manages adverse events, rather than relying entirely on testimonials or impressive statistics.
What does this look like at Self London?
At Self London, we distinguish between the professional qualifications of our clinicians, their procedural experience and the responsibilities they undertake.
I am a consultant dermatologist on the GMC Specialist Register in Dermatology, with more than a decade of experience in laser and energy-based treatments. My clinical work includes acne, acne scarring, pigmentation, skin ageing, rosacea and laser resurfacing.
Dr Charlotte Keigwin is an experienced GP with more than twenty years of medical experience and additional surgical qualifications, including MRCS, which demonstrates her procedural skill. She has undertaken laser training with me and brings her wider medical experience to her work at the clinic. Our lead laser therapist, Katie Dawson, has extensive practical experience using energy-based devices and works alongside the clinical team under their guidance and protocols.
We describe these different professional backgrounds accurately. Not every procedure needs to be performed by a consultant dermatologist, provided the treating practitioner has the appropriate training, works within their competence and has access to suitable clinical oversight.
We also have access to a range of laser technologies, which allows us to consider different approaches according to the patient’s diagnosis, skin type, previous treatments and expected recovery.
Someone attending with acne scarring, for example, may need active acne controlled before any cosmetic intervention. The scars themselves may require subcision, fractional resurfacing, a more substantial ablative procedure or a combination of treatments undertaken in stages. Simply selecting a laser because it is popular or widely advertised would be an inadequate way to make that decision.
Our initial consultations are used to assess the problem and establish an appropriate plan. We do not perform treatments on the same day as a new patient’s initial consultation, allowing time to consider the recommendations, likely benefits, limitations and possible complications.
Where procedures are carried out by our laser therapists, they work within defined clinical protocols and arrangements for medical oversight. Clinical assessment, treatment planning and follow-up form part of the service, with arrangements for escalation when further medical input is required.
None of this eliminates risk or guarantees a particular result. It does, however, demonstrate the clinical processes and professional responsibilities that patients should feel comfortable asking about wherever they seek treatment.
Don’t outsource every decision to AI
AI can be a useful starting point when researching treatments or finding practitioners, and I would not discourage patients from using it. However, there is an important difference between gathering information and independently verifying that information.
An AI system may describe somebody as a renowned consultant dermatologist because that wording appears repeatedly across websites. It may confuse two practitioners with similar names, rely on outdated information or attribute experience in a particular procedure without establishing whether the claim is accurate.
Even asking AI to verify professional credentials does not guarantee that it has successfully accessed the relevant register. It may be relying on information from another website that has itself reproduced an incorrect description.
My advice is to use AI to help identify possibilities, but check the professional information yourself.
For UK doctors, the GMC register is freely accessible. Search using the practitioner’s name or registration number, check that you have found the correct person, and confirm their registration status, licence to practise and any currently published restrictions. If they claim to be a consultant dermatologist, check the Specialist Register for Dermatology.
Dentists and nurses can be checked through their respective statutory regulators. An important qualification is that publicly available professional records do not necessarily provide a complete lifetime history of complaints, investigations or sanctions. Allegations are not equivalent to proven findings, and historical restrictions should not be confused with someone’s current entitlement to practise. Nor can a professional register tell you how skilfully someone performs a particular procedure. That requires further questions about their relevant training, experience and clinical arrangements.
The register is nevertheless an excellent starting point. It is free, accessible and considerably more reliable for verifying formal credentials than a promotional biography or AI-generated recommendation.
Five checks before booking a dermatologist or aesthetic practitioner
Before making an appointment on the strength of an online recommendation, I would encourage patients to spend a few minutes working through the following checks.
- Verify their professional registration yourself
Find the practitioner’s full name and, where applicable, their professional registration number.
For doctors, use the GMC register. For dentists, use the General Dental Council, and for nurses, the Nursing and Midwifery Council.
Confirm that you have identified the correct individual, check their registration and current licence or practice status where applicable, and look for any published restrictions. Remember that not all aesthetic practitioners belong to a statutory professional register.
- Check whether their specialist title is genuine
If someone is described as a UK consultant dermatologist, look for Dermatology on their GMC Specialist Register entry. Do not assume that being a registered doctor, GP, aesthetic doctor or international trainer establishes specialist recognition in dermatology. If they trained overseas, ask what qualification they hold and how their professional status is recognised. An apparent discrepancy may have a reasonable explanation. However, if someone cannot explain the qualifications they claim to possess, consider that a warning sign.
- Establish whether they have relevant experience
Ask about the practitioner’s training in the actual procedure you are considering, how frequently they perform it and whether they regularly treat people with your skin type or concern. A long medical career, specialist qualification or professional award does not automatically establish competence in an unrelated aesthetic treatment. Ask about practical training, supervised experience and how they maintain their skills.
- Assess the quality of the consultation
Does the practitioner consider your medical history and explain why the proposed treatment is appropriate? Do they discuss alternatives, including the possibility that no treatment is necessary? They should be able to explain realistic outcomes, material risks, recovery and the evidence supporting their recommendation. Be cautious if the consultation is primarily concerned with selling a procedure, or if the practitioner appears unwilling to discuss its limitations.
- Find out who will treat you and who is responsible afterwards
The practitioner recommended by AI may not be the person who actually performs your treatment. Ask who will assess you, who will deliver the procedure, what qualifications they hold and how clinical supervision works. Establish what follow-up is available, who will manage complications and whether the treating practitioner has appropriate professional indemnity.
These are reasonable questions to ask before agreeing to treatment. A clinic should be able to answer them clearly, without making you feel uncomfortable for asking. Choosing somebody to treat your skin involves placing considerable trust in their qualifications, judgement and practical skills. AI recommendations, media appearances and professional awards may help you discover a practitioner, but they cannot establish all of those things on your behalf.
A few minutes spent checking someone’s credentials and asking about their experience is a worthwhile investment before allowing them to treat your face or skin.
