A US-based doctor has issued a warning against a cosmetic treatment calling it scary and a horrific side effect, which is a lot more common than people realise. Dr. Whitney Ray Di Bona, the owner of Beauty Justice, is rallying against CoolSculpting – a much-sought-after procedure that can make your body fat grow into tumours, saying it causes disfigurement which requires surgery to correct. Read on to know more.

Speaking on a podcast, Di Bona suggested people should not fall for the procedure. “CoolSculpting is this machine that is supposed to freeze your fat,” she explained.

Approved by the FDA in 2010, CoolSculpting is a fat-freezing method that aims to get rid of stubborn bulges in certain areas of your body, including your stomach, arms, thighs, and chin. Also known as cryolipolysis, the method works by creating cold-induced apoptosis, or fat cell death, in specific areas.

Scientists came up with the idea for cryolipolysis by studying what happens to fat during frostbite when fat freezes at a higher temperature than skin. The cryolipolysis device cools your fat to a temperature that destroys it while leaving your skin and other tissues unharmed.

While the right CoolSculpting treatment helps kill fat cells and melt them, sometimes things go wrong. “It has a horrific side effect called paradoxical adipose hyperplasia, where instead of the fat cells shrinking, they actually expand and grow into a tumour,” Di Bona said.

Those noncancerous tumours are made of big, hardened fat that sometimes grows in the shape of the CoolSculpting applicator. The disfigurement can develop almost immediately or up to six months after treatment and requires surgery to correct.

Dr. Di Bona said she had done CoolSculpting herself a decade ago but had no idea what could go wrong then. “Nobody told me that that was a possibility, and so many people that have had that happen say the same thing, like, ‘Nobody warned me that this was a side effect; nobody told me that this could happen,'” she recalled. What’s more, she said, the company behind CoolSculpting was “kind of fudging the numbers” on how common the side effect is. Allergan Aesthetics claimed that PAH occurred in only 0.033 per cent of treatments, or about 1 in 3,000.

Since cryolipolysis is not a surgery, the device holds the part of your body your doctor wants to target between two paddles, which cool quickly, and your doctor leaves them in place for about 35 minutes to 1 hour. The process then destroys around 20-25 per cent of the fat cells in the area that have been targeted.

The final results may not show up for a few months, but you may start to see some changes within a few weeks. According to doctors, your immune system would clear out the dead fat cells slowly over time.

Apart from non-cancerous tumours, you may also notice a few other non-serious side effects that go away on their own, like:

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