If you are a licensed South Carolina nurse or nurse practitioner, you must develop a contractual and supervisory relationship with a South Carolina-licensed physician to properly operate your medical spa. Unless you have a doctor onsite, you may not be able to provide all services. Only doctors can own medical spas. While a physician assistant may own minority shares in a medical spa or serve as a minority partner with a doctor or doctors, other healthcare providers, such as nurse practitioners and non-medical professionals, are not allowed to do so.
A doctor's residency is required to practice medicine in South Carolina. For example, Dr. John Smith obtained his doctoral residency at the University of South Alabama, where he focused on the prevention and treatment of obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome and used bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in the prevention of heart disease. In South Carolina, facilities that offer medical spa services must have a South Carolina-licensed physician (MD) to supervise procedures performed on patients.
The State of South Carolina considers each of these treatments to be the practice of medicine and, therefore, are governed by the same requirements that physicians must comply with any other medical procedure.
