Eve's Laser Clinic

"It turned into a real business and it helped me a lot, but now when all of this is happening, I am deteriorating. I am just going to go on disability; that is the easiest thing. I will go on welfare, because I can't work."
"They came under the guise of being clients and pretended they wanted Botox and they stopped me and said 'That's illegal'. I said 'Why is it illegal?' Why didn't they do something then? I admitted to everything, I never lied about anything."
Eve Stewart, Nepean cosmetician

 Photo By Ian Clarke/CBC

This woman has been endowed with more than her share of self-confidence. How else to explain that a person with no previous experience in medicine, in surgical procedures, would proceed to applying herself to serving clients wanting face lifts, Botox treatments, even surgery. These and more were this woman's accomplishments. How to explain how this woman would apply herself to all of these services with such a degree of confidence? The drugs she administered as well as the Botox enabling her to give those treatments can only be accessed through prescription.

Ms. Stewart claimed that a physician whom she refuses to name, helped her to obtain the drugs which she alone administered at her home-based clinic in performing cosmetic treatments. "After recovering from a serious head injury" seven years earlier, she had decided to open her clinic "just for fun". No physician was ever present at her clinic to supervise the procedures that Ms. Stewart engaged with. Now, after being ordered by a court to cease and desist, she remains puzzled at the fact that municipal health officials made no move to stop her initially from injecting the Botox treatments now seen as illegal.

The court, following investigations by three levels of government into this woman's home-based business, ordered her to cease and desist. The investigations conducted by Health Canada, Ottawa Public Health and the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons all outlined that she was practising medicine illegally. Ottawa Public Health, in fact, dropped by her clinic on several occasions to train her how to properly sterilize equipment. Little wonder she was confused; why train her to properly sterilize equipment she was not authorized by law to use?

They ended up providing her with a certificate attesting that she met best practices for sterility. And that certificate was hung with pride on the wall of her clinic. Obviously, in the process, bolstering her confidence. Now, however, Ms. Stewart is banned from communicating a diagnosis, performing surgery and administering a substance by inhalation. She is banned as well from administering any substance by injection lacking permission from the College of Physicians and Surgeons.

She may no longer resort to "treating or advising a person with respect to his or health in circumstances in which it is reasonably foreseeable that serious bodily harm may result from the treatment or advice or from an omission from them". The College of Physicians and Surgeons representing the regulatory body for the Ontario medical profession was awarded costs of $1,100 to be paid by Ms. Stewart.

The college had filed an affidavit in Superior Court containing client allegations that they had received invasive medical treatments at Eve's Laser Clinic. Treatment that included the freezing, cutting and stitching of a client's nose. One client attested she was given three beers, then injected with Botox and fillers whose result was to leave her with permanent, disfiguring facial bumps. Another, receiving a mini-facelift, had her face frozen and was given herbal pills to reduce bruising.

"People who have the money to spend $15,000 or $20,000 on a procedure are not going to come here; they don't want to come here and I don't want them to come here. I get the people who can't afford that kind of money, who want to have the difference and they get the difference. And it's nice", she explained -- a year ago when her operation of an illegal clinic was first made public -- of the facelifts she offers clients for roughly one-fifth the $14,000 a cosmetic surgeon would normally charge.


That someone who had no real idea of what she was doing would have the nerve to do just that in service to her 'clients', "just for fun", and then be puzzled that she was being taken to court for performing medical-surgical procedures without training and a license to do so, is only surpassed in absurdity by the number of people who attended Eve's Laser Clinic since its opening seven years ago, who entrusted themselves to the ministrations of someone unfit to perform these procedures.

Without medical training at any level, she performed invasive laser treatments, administered Botox and fillers, performed a nose job on a client, and did mini-facelifts and additional invasive surgical procedures. Peoples' vanity overtaking common sense seducing them into the fantasy that controlled procedures such as these could be had at bargain-basement prices in someone's home. One of Ms. Stewart's clients was a nurse.

Free enterprise and gullibility produce a fateful combination.