Only doctors who have received proper surgical training can call themselves surgeons, The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario has ruled.
A growing number of physicians are performing cosmetic procedures, such as liposuction and breast enlargement, and advertising themselves as cosmetic 'surgeons' despite having no surgical training.
The new regulation does not prevent doctors without surgical training from performing these procedures. But they cannot use the word surgeon in their title, and they cannot claim any medical specialties that they can't back up with formal accreditation.
The Ontario government still has to approve the new stipulations.
Dr. Thomas Bell, past president of the Canadian Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, told CTV's Canada AM on Friday that the new regulations don't go far enough to protect patients.
"The situation in Ontario currently, and this is a provincial situation, is that anybody can call themselves a cosmetic surgeon at this point and not be surgically trained and not be a surgeon," Bell said.
"And so what this legislation is attempting to do is address that issue to basically say, 'you can only call yourself what you are, and if you're not a surgeon you can't call yourself a surgeon.' The problem with it is it falls short in the fact that it still allows the non-surgeons to do surgery."
The hope is that patients will be able to make a more informed decision when choosing a doctor to perform a medical procedure, particularly in the murky world of cosmetic surgery. Many family doctors are getting into the lucrative cosmetic surgery market as demand for aesthetic procedures grows.
The issue made headlines last fall after 32-year-old Toronto real estate agent Krista Stryland died after having liposuction by a general practitioner.
Bell said that seeing a doctor who has had surgical training is really the key to getting the best care.
"The main thing we do when we go through our surgical training, we're learning the basic techniques of surgery and the principles of surgery," Bell said. "You can learn a specific technique but it's a matter of understanding -- avoiding problems, how to deal with problems."
But he said that it isn't difficult for a patient to know when their doctor is well-trained.
"They should know that the person has what's called the designation of FRCSC, which is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Canada," Bell said.
"Which means that they've had at least five or six years of training and have passed levels of examination all the way along and an exam at the end of their training to say that they're licensed to go out and perform this surgery. Anything less than that is a shot in the dark, basically."
