Feasibility of Self-Regulation on the Aesthetic Medical Field: A Research Based on the Practicing Medical Doctor’s Perspective

Sammanfattning: Aesthetic medicine is a unique medical arena with great economic benefits, but it is also full of controversy. Whether the doctors in the field could enjoy the same degree of autonomy as in the therapeutic medical field, and retain the self- regulating management of the medical profession, has always been the focus of debate. Although various scholars have proposed arguments on this issue from the perspective of either patients or managers, discussions from the situated view of the regulated doctors are extremely rare. In this thesis the researcher takes the regulated practitioners as the research object and propose questions from three aspects, namely the power of professional knowledge, the establishment of specific private professional organization and the habitus of aesthetic medicine, and then draw conclusions from the answers of these questions. Based on the results, the researcher found that, in Taiwan, the aesthetic medical field is different from the therapeutic medical field and should not inherit same degree of self-regulation as in the therapeutic medical field; while the doctor’s autonomy on technical level must be reserved through intensified legal interventions.