Sometimes, and the answer depends entirely on who’s holding the scalpel and where. Colombia’s health authorities have documented deaths and shut down hundreds of illegal clinics in the last two years. Colombia’s own plastic surgeons’ society has been direct about it. The risk isn’t plastic surgery itself. It’s plastic surgery performed by someone without the training or license to do it, in a facility that was never authorized for surgery in the first place.
The same country with this problem also has checkable systems: a national medical license registry, a facility authorization registry, and a specialty society that confirms who actually trained as a plastic surgeon. Elena checks all three for you. Here’s what the data says, and how to run the check yourself.
What the data actually shows
Antioquia, the department that includes Medellín, reported 17 deaths and 379 documented complications linked to cosmetic procedures over the two years before May 2026, according to the department’s Secretary of Health. Eighty inspections over that period closed 64 illegal facilities.
Bogotá ran a separate crackdown over the same two years. The city’s Secretary of Health reported closing 379 illegal aesthetic establishments, following cases including the death of a patient after an unauthorized laser lipolysis procedure at an unlicensed facility. Two different cities, two different sets of figures, both current and officially reported.
This isn’t new
In 2016, Medellín newspapers tallied 9 deaths from cosmetic procedures performed outside licensed medical settings, what’s locally called a clínica de garaje, or garage clinic. Prosecutors logged 60 manslaughter cases tied to cosmetic surgery in Medellín between 2006 and 2017. One city councilman estimated at the time that 20 to 30 percent of the city’s cosmetic procedures were performed by people without surgical training, an estimate from a local official, not an official government statistic, but pointing at the same problem underneath all of it: no license check, no facility check.
What actually went wrong in these cases
Every documented pattern traces back to one of two failures: the person performing the procedure wasn’t a licensed, trained surgeon, or the facility itself was never authorized to perform surgery. Neither failure is hard to check for in advance. Both just require someone to actually look before the fact, not after.
What Colombia’s own plastic surgeons recommend
Facing these numbers directly, the Sociedad Colombiana de Cirugía Plástica (SCCP), the country’s professional society for plastic surgeons, published its own recommendations for patients: confirm the surgeon is registered in RETHUS and trained specifically in the procedure being performed, confirm the facility is authorized by health authorities rather than a home or improvised space, complete a full medical evaluation before deciding, and distrust any advertising that promises a pain-free surgery, no recovery time, or immediate results, since every procedure carries risk.
How to check a surgeon and a facility yourself
Colombia has two public registries a patient can search directly. RETHUS confirms a surgeon’s medical license is active. REPS, governed by Resolución 3100 de 2019, confirms whether a specific facility is authorized for surgery. For plastic surgery specifically, SCCP’s own directory confirms a surgeon actually completed a plastic surgery residency, a separate and more specific credential than a general medical license. The full walkthrough for checking any doctor, including how Elena runs these checks for you, is at how Elena verifies doctors. For plastic surgery, the SCCP check is the one extra step that matters most.
What Elena does
Elena checks a plastic surgeon’s ReTHUS license, SCCP membership, and the facility’s REPS registration for free, and tells you what it found, including anything it couldn’t confirm. Verification does not guarantee how your surgery will go. It means you’re deciding with the same facts a Colombian plastic surgeon would use to check a colleague.
Key takeaways
- Colombia has documented real cosmetic-surgery deaths, overwhelmingly tied to unlicensed operators.
- Colombia's own plastic surgeons say it plainly: check SCCP membership, not Instagram.
- A ReTHUS license, a REPS-registered facility, and profiles that trace to that license are the minimum.
- Elena verifies all of it for free, before you commit to anyone.
