Trish

Hello, listeners. This is Trish Hammond here from the Transforming Bodies podcast. And today, I’m joined with the delightful Dr Nina Wines. Now Dr Nina Wines is a Laser Dermatologist and she’s the co-founder of Northern Sydney Dermatology & Laser, of course, in Northern Sydney me. And today, we’re gonna have a like, I’ve met Nina at a couple of the conferences, and she’s like an absolute dynamo in business in her treatments and so today, we’re gonna have to chat with her about her clinic and how she started a little bit about what she does. So welcome Dr Wines.

 

Dr Wines

Hi Trish. Thank you for having me. 

 

Trish

That’s my pleasure. So tell me, you like, first of all, how did you even start in the industry of going into dermatology? Like, tell us from the very beginning.

 

Dr Wines

Sure, well, it really goes back to being a young girl with acne. My face was covered in acne and I was very inhibited by my acne for years and years and years. My father was a pharmacist, and he was not so keen for me to take Roaccutane so I lived my entire teenage life in my early twenties with acne. So I saw I knew the impact on me, and so I guess it was a personal mission to do. But to be honest, when I first graduated from medicine, I also had an interest in Obstetrics, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be an Obstetrician or a Dermatologist. So I thought I’ll try delivering babies first so I went to Lismore and did some obstetrics for a while, but then I went now. I come back to Derm and I’m a visual person. I love treating skin. I love changing people’s confidence and I can safely say that I graduated from medicine 30 years ago and practised dermatology for 20, and I love it more and more. Like, I love, I’ve got I’m so passionate about it. I still love doing it so I’m very lucky. It’s a really fun job.

 

Trish

Isn’t it funny because I didn’t even understand, I didn’t even know what a dermatologist was like, I just thought you went to a dermatologist if you had a skin measure on your body or anything. I’d never ever thought of a dermatologist as issues with your face or anything like that which is really weird and I think a lot of people are like me, although it’s changing now, of course.

 

Dr Wines

Yeah. Look, you’re not alone, Trish. I have said even some people in our profession don’t appreciate what’s required to become a dermatologist. It literally means you’ve got to do a medical degree and then because it’s a really popular specialty, because it’s a great Korea and it’s really hard to get into back in the day when I started doing. There were only two or three jobs back then in New South Wales, and about a thousand people wanting those two or three jobs.

It felt like, anyway, so it’s a very small sub specialty, it’s growing, but it’s extremely popular when a lot of doctors wanna do it. So, I think that people don’t understand the complexity because when you go for a skin check with the dermatologists, they’re not just checking you for skin cancer. We are physicians of the skin, so we are trained as physicians to carefully examine you from top to toe because so many diseases are present in the skin. Right? So even leukaemia has skin signs so when you’re doing a skin check with the derm. We’re looking for leukaemia. We’re looking for lupus. We’re looking for all sorts of internal diseases. I remember, there’s times when I’ve diagnosed stomach cancer because stomach cancer presents as a little, funny little dot around your abdomen so there’s so much to Derm. It’s really fascinating that as a specialty, there’s, I don’t know if you’ve done know that.

 

Trish

I’m not totally, I’ll definitely want to know. And even now, I think the more I meet dermatologists to go to conferences and see what they can do and all that, the more I realise that they actually do- do as well.

 

Dr Wines

So, yeah. It’s a very fascinating build.

 

Trish

And you’ve tended, so you started your business twenty years ago?

 

Dr Wines

So together with Elizabeth Dawse-Higgs, we started Northern City Dermatology 16 years ago. We have grown it now to have 13 dermatologists, Dr Shreya Andric, is now a business code director as well. So Liz, Shreya, and I have built this business. It’s now one of Australia’s largest Derm clinics and certainly the largest laser and medical derm clinic in Australia. So it’s been a lot of hard work. It’s like everything. It always looks simple on the outside, but it’s a use and use of slog for lots of hard work, but I can honestly say, I’m very proud of it. I’m very proud of the quality of our care and how we’ve grown it. 

 

Trish

Well, I mean, you’re in the perfect location as well, being in Australia and being on Northern beaches. But what I was gonna ask you is, with this specialty of dermatology, because like I speak to more consumers all the time, we have a little Facebook group and they’re always asking questions and people don’t say, oh, I’ve got this on my skin. I’m gonna go and see a doctor and I don’t understand why people don’t automatically think, well, why wouldn’t you go to a dermatologist for that? But do you just do that, do you need a referral from a doctor to see a dermatologist, or can I just rock up and see you?

 

Dr Wines

Yeah. Well, obviously, the dermatologist can be a little bit booked out and hard to get into and if it’s a simple problem that GP can manage, then that’s much better for a patient and also the GPs job is to field what needs to go to a specialist and what doesn’t so you can help to initially do, obviously, to see a good GP, and they will assess the skin and sort of tell you whether it’s worthwhile to go and see a specialist but some problems don’t require a referral. For instance, if you wanted to improve your skin quality and you just wanted a laser. We don’t charge a Medicare rebate for that, so it doesn’t require a referral. But as if you’re having skin cancer, if you’ve got skin cancer, you’re worried about, of course, getting a referral because you will be entitled to a Medicare rebate so if that makes sense. If you don’t want the Medicare rebate, like, then you can go straight to a dermatologist, but you will miss out on that. 

 

Trish

Your clinic, your real specialty or one of your specialties is, like, you’re really passionate about lasering. I love listening to you talking about it. So tell us, first of all, what got you in because I never really even knew about lasers. I mean, I had a hair laser rub off my hairy Italian neck when I was about 18 but that was no exposure to lasers. But now that I’ve seen, like, lasers are freaking amazing what they can do. How did you get into it and, like, what do you do?

 

Dr Wines

Yeah. Sure. Well, I’m very passionate about improving patients’ outcomes and improving the way the results of combining medicine with lasers and also just basically just improving patient’s quality of life. So for instance, I can just give you one example. So if you know, the men that get those big noses, rhinophyma, so we can fix that with a laser. Totally. And that transforms people’s lives, but also but just getting back to acne and rosacea, the impact of that on people’s lives we can use lasers to get long term results and to improve people’s medical treatment and to get long term results for patients but I have to be realistic, not every clinic can have lasers attached to them, but it just happens to be my sub specialty. But I just genuinely love the befores and afters. Nothing better than showing your patient, this is you before and this is you now. And I love seeing them happy in their skin. And I mean, guess the other thing that we do is, like, as dermatologists, it broadly improves the full skin quality and health of the skin, so restore the full health of the skin because Australian sun is very harsh and can create precancer and also skin cancers and also skin disease. So you can’t use a cookie cutter approach. You have to individualise people’s skin and look at their skin and go, okay, this is your problem. You’ve got a little skin cancer here. You’ve got this age spot here, you’ve got a red vessel here. Let’s just renovate the whole skin specific to you. You know what I mean? And that’s I guess what’s really difficult is sometimes the industry isn’t regulated and people go to any sort of clinic and they just have a cookie cutter approach and one laser fits all if you like. Whereas it needs to be done in a way, so there’s no medical problem. Let’s treat any medical disease, improve the skin quality, and yeah. 

 

Trish

I’ve just seen those pictures you’re talking about where people go because people think, oh, just go and have a laser and so they just go and either look for the Ad they see or the cheapest thing they might find. They think I’ll just have a laser, but there’s laser and there’s laser and there’s there’s practitioners and there’s practitioners. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

 

Dr Wines

Yeah. For sure. Like, just because you see that there might be like a brand of lasers so let’s just say there’s a brand of  laser, well, it’s more about who’s using or driving the car, if you like and their understanding of what they’re doing with that device is very variable and I think that that’s the difference. And also the knowledge of the skin, just having understanding of the skin, the skin types, medical diseases that affect the skin so many people have acne and rosacea, and get given sort of the wrong advice about how to treat that so I guess that’s the benefit of seeing a medical practitioner when you’re having treatment. 

 

Trish

Yeah. That’s true and with people coming to see you for certain skin ailments or whatever. Over the time of all the things that I’ve seen, I think it’s not just one or are you better off, like, is a dermatologist someone that you should actually just see on a regular basis for skin health? Like, that I think it is, but is it? 

 

Dr Wines

Yeah. Well, obviously, it’s my profession and I see the benefits of that investment because it is an investment to see a specialist. So, yeah, I guess what the differentiating feature of a dermatologist is that we are physicians of the skin. So we are doing a broad, we are caring for you in a broad way and examining your skin for everything, as I said before. But it’s up to the person, I mean, we are professionals in skin, hair and nails, so we can manage other hair and nails as well. So it’s a fascinating field. And, yeah, it’s never boring. Every day, there’s something exciting and new that we do with, like, I don’t know if you know well, my main interest areas are acne, rosacea, scarring, post surgical scarring, and of course, obviously acne scarring. But fascinating things you see. Like, I’ve got this amazing patient who is a young man who decided that he just graduated from university and decided that he would try nitrous oxide. I didn’t know you could do that and it blew up in his face and he totally came to me with this very malformed face, but we were able to fix him using lasers and things like that so it’s really fascinating to be able to change people’s lives in that way. Something that we see a lot of, unfortunately, in this generation and two which got worse in COVID is the self harm wound. So we do a lot of dermatologists manage that and treat or sub specialised dermatologists manage and treat that. So there’s so much to this field that’s really fun and exciting.

 

Trish

It’s so funny because of that, like, because I know that for me, the thought of laser therapy for scars is a little bit freaky because you sort of think, oh, don’t you just want to like, have I got this going on for you? But then I know what it’s like when people, like, I mean, I’ve never really had bad skin, so I’m like, so I’m gonna have something going on. I’m not lying to you. But my nephew, he had really bad skin. I didn’t know what it did to him emotionally, but he went to the GP who gave him medication to take, and it never actually got better. And then I hooked him up to go and see a dermatologist and they got him on a path and that was a better thing for him. So I just think sometimes, just look beyond what people either do or do our own research and find out what the right thing is for us as well, we need to look at the other options if the first ones aren’t working. So I was gonna ask you as well, you said to specialise in the laser side of it. Like, you’ve got like a million laser machines in your clinic. Is that right? How many you’ve got?

 

Dr Wines

I think we’ve got every wavelength coverage. But not all of the dermatologists in the clinic do lasers so we need to recover all aspects of dermatology because there’s so much to it. Like, yes, psoriasis and eczema and all that but the principles mainly have specialised in delays of dermatology as well as other aspects of dermatology, just to say, yeah, that’s but, yes, we have every type of wavelength, which is important because there’s so many different problems and it’s not a one size fits all. You have to just look at the skin of the person and decide what they need. 

 

Trish

So although your clinic got 13 Dermatologists so it’s not like everyone does lasers. So you might have someone who specialises in or you probably specialise in a lot of things. 

 

Dr Wines

So everyone’s got their interest areas.

 

Trish

Okay. Great. And where to hear though? Like, how can you possibly, like because I would think that you would know everything. I still see you at conferences learning stuff.

 

Dr Wines

We all continuously learn and evolve and I find that if you don’t keep adapting and like things that’s changing, AI, right? How fascinating is that today? So we kicked off the conference because the conference is about the next generation but AI is fascinating. I find that we’ve got to adapt and love and stay with it. Don’t we? I love the concept today that they talked about seeing AI as a co-pilot just to help you do life. 

 

Trish

Yeah. Basically, totally. Yeah. I use it every day. There’s no doubt about it.

It’s like my foundation and I become me on top of it.

Dr Wines

That is such a perfect description of how we will see AI imagine.

Because it can’t be human, but it can help humans work better. 

 

Trish

Having said that, I have actually gotten angry with it. Yeah. I have actually physically got angry with it. You said not bad. It works. Yeah. Exactly. But so in your ideal like, just before we finish off, what would your day, like, what does your day look like?

 

Dr Wines

Do you want me to tell you? Okay. So I get up at 5 each morning and I go for a run or get on my Peloton and then get to the clinic and have a meeting in some form and usually solve the HR issue. 

 

Trish

You’ve got how many staff?

 

Dr Wines

Yeah. Like, forty.

 

Trish

Yeah. How forty staff building Derms. It’s surreal to me.

 

Dr Wines

Oh, it didn’t mean to happen, but it’s organically grown. I mean, it’s still a small business. Right? We’re not running dozens of years. You know what I mean? Yep. No. But there’s so we did that. And then see the list of patients. Well, there will be a variety of problems and just sort of field things throughout the day and then I am a Pilates reformer, junky and training for Kokoda at the moment so I’ll go to Pilates and I’ll go home and watch Married at First Sight. No. That’s sort of it in a nutshell.

 

Trish

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And it’s gonna be so nice to hear that you’re normal.
You can be successful and normal. It’s great. Oh, well done. Well, actually, I’m gonna ask you one more question because the reason I met you is I met you through you having Sciton devices and being an advocate and and I’m an absolute junkie for Sciton as well because I’ve never had surfacing treatments before and people say, oh, you look so good, and it’s all I do nowadays.

 

Dr Wines

And I think you’re a bit genetically blessed, Trish.

 

Trish

I like us. I got something good. But I am a bit obsessed with my skin, like, I do look after it. Yeah. Like, really well, but some of the junk that I eat sometimes, but anyway so I think it’s really important to align yourself with someone and actually to say, if you’re not happy with what you’ve got, because I see people walking around with things on their face. I think, oh my god, you could fix that. Not only could you fix it, you could possibly prevent something bad from happening. I heard you speak at one of the conferences and I wanted to ask someone. I’m gonna ask you about the research that people are doing about the Broadband light and sun spots kind of thing. Yeah. Because there’s something that it can be, like, a bit of a preventative. Can you explain it to me in normal English? Because I talk to my girlfriends about it and I don’t know if I get excited and get carried away, or say something to me.

 

Dr Wines

Okay. So if I heard the world knew that if you had a laser plan, you would do more in one laser treatment than a lifetime of skincare. So everyone’s always, I go about dinner as a dermatologist. And the first thing they say is what do you use on your skin? What’s the magic skincare? I feel like going magic is having a laser and it doesn’t have to be complex or difficult. 3 BBL treatments a year and your skin in ten years time will still look better than it does today. Yes. So it’s simple. You just have a simple laser plan and keep it but be consistent. Yeah. So it’s like anything in life. Everything in life is about consistency, and it’s just about just, it will even if you do it once a year so that amazing Spanish Dermatologist speaking today, he said it in a nutshell in Spain, they can’t afford to have three lasers a year, so that he has patients who just have one BBL a year and they look so much better than they could ever do with the lifetime skincare. So it’s just that, unfortunately, the laser companies are all separate entities, but if they were one big entity, they could just let the world know that skincare keeps the skin maintained, but it’s lasers that transform the skin so lasers and skin care together, you’ve got the magic formula so to what every woman wants or person, I shouldn’t say woman. Everyone wants just more globally uniform, healthy skin. That’s what we’re all seeking – the glow.

 

Trish

When people tell you something, your skin’s glowing like, well, it’s not yoga.
It’s not drinking lots of water. It is seriously just the thing that I have BBL HERO and HALO and MOXI. Just on that, because the one before and after because I saw with Dr Campo today, he showed his client that had one treatment a year and then he had, like, ten years history of it, and you could see it look better ten years later. I had my first laser at 44, and I swear to God, from that time, my skin just always looks better. So guys, get your laser.

 

Dr Wines

Yeah. I know. Exactly. 

 

Trish

Oh, look. Thanks so much for joining us. It’s been so interesting. How can we find you? If we wanna come and visit you as a patient, how can we find you? 

Dr Wines

Sure. I’m obviously online, Dr Nina Wines. It’s my personal website, but also just ring the clinic, Northern Sydney Dermatology & Laser, Yeah. That’s it.

 

Trish

Thank you so much for joining us.

 

Dr Wines

Pleasure. Thanks, Trish.

 

Trish

Lovely. And if you can’t find Dr Nina Wines, just flick me a DM or a message or whatever, and I’ll send you through an email as well. Thanks so much for joining us today.

 

Dr Wines

Bye bye. Take care.