Your Own Blood Is Not Automatically Safe

In 2024 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published an investigation in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report describing presumptive HIV transmission among clients who had received PRP microneedling facials at an unlicensed spa.

The material in every one of those procedures was the client's own blood. What failed was infection control.

We raise this not to frighten anyone away from a treatment we offer and believe in, and not to suggest anything about any other practice. We raise it because the reassurance the whole industry leans on is incomplete, and a patient who understands what actually makes this safe can evaluate any practice they walk into, including ours.

A licensed facility. Drawing blood and re-injecting it is a medical procedure performed under medical licensure and oversight, with a physician responsible for the protocol. Ask who that physician is by name.

Closed-system processing. Your blood should move from the draw to the preparation to the treatment without being exposed to open air, open containers, or shared equipment. Ask to have the path described to you.

Sterile, single-use supplies. Needles, tubes, syringes and cannulas used once and discarded. Nothing reused, nothing shared, nothing decanted.

Blood that never leaves the room. Your sample is drawn, prepared and used in the same visit, in the same room. It is not stored, not shipped, not pooled, and not held for a later appointment.

A protocol rather than an improvisation. Preparation parameters, treatment depth, volume and placement should be set in advance and consistent from visit to visit rather than decided in the moment.

You do not need to know anything about centrifuges to protect yourself. One question does most of the work:

"Can you walk me through where my blood goes from the moment it is drawn to the moment it is put back?"

A practice that has thought seriously about this will answer immediately and in detail. A practice that has not will give you a version of the sentence at the top of this article.

At Palm Beach Cosmetic Medicine your blood is drawn in our Wellington office, processed at the point of care in a closed system, and used in the same visit. Every regenerative protocol is designed and supervised by Dr. Anna Frisch, MD, PhD, a board-certified endocrinologist, and delivered by our credentialed care team. You will be told which preparation is being used for your treatment and why.

If you are considering PRP or PRF anywhere, we would rather you ask hard questions everywhere, including here.

Individual results vary. Neither PRP nor PRF is FDA-approved as a treatment; the devices used to prepare them are FDA-cleared as medical devices. Aesthetic use is off-label under the practice of medicine, which is lawful and standard.