Mobile Medical Spa Offers Treatments to Go

With more people viewing them as a lifestyle choice as opposed to a luxury, spas are beginning to become a part of many people's everyday lives. In response, spas have been looking for new ways to make their businesses more accessible, and a spa that opened earlier this year in San Diego, California-Destinations Mobile Medical Spa-is bringing the most high-tech services directly into clients' living rooms.
Although relatively low-tech treatments, such as massage, facials, and skin care, have been offered by mobile day spas for a few years, Destinations is the first spa in California to provide state-of-the-art medical services outside of an office setting. The spa, run by former emergency room physician Donna Richardson, M.D., offers nearloy every cosmetic medical procedure found in a traditional medical spa: laser hair removal, Botox and other chemical injections, chemical peels, photo genesis, and vibradermabrasion. The only procedures employees can't perform are those requiring surgery or anesthesia.

Destinations also offers massage therapy; in fact, it makes up roughly 20 percent of its overall business. The spa employes two massage therapists, who travel to clients' homes and perform a range of bodywork, including therapeutic, neck-and shoulder, Swedish and sports massage. Because Richardson is also and award-winning equestrian, many of her clients are fellow equestrians and sports enthusiasts looking to stay conditioned or recover from an injury."We seem to get a lot of athletes," Destinations' Chief Operating Officer Skyler Evans. "There's equestrians, runners, swimmers-people living that Southern California lifesyle who are just too busy to visit a spa during workday."

To accommodate people's hectic schedules, Destinations operates well into the evening, closing at 9:30 p.m. The spa has visited homes as far away as Beverly Hills, and with business booming, Evans believes the company will start another spa farther north in about a year.

-Chris Towery