You may not be able to find a doctor to help save your life, but you can get one in a heartbeat to make your lips more kissable.

This is wrong, because the public spends a huge amount training doctors who should be where they are most needed - treating the sick.

The issue has not been addressed so far in an investigation the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is conducting, with a nudge from the province, into doctors performing cosmetic procedures.

The College is concerned primarily with protecting patients' health, particularly after a woman died after being given a liposuction, which draws fat out of the body.

Plastic and other surgeons, and increasingly family doctors, are conducting a wide range of cosmetic procedures and the College is concerned these include some for which they are not qualified.

But the bigger issue, which never seems to get raised, is why so many doctors are spending their working hours getting rid of wrinkles and re-shaping noses, when they could be better used treating illness.

The number of doctors making people look prettier is booming and newspapers here, particularly community newspapers, are packed with their advertisements.

They typically offer surgical weight loss, breast augmentation, reduction and reconstruction, skin and facial rejuvenation, face, breast, brow and eyelid lifts and nose re-shaping.

Some of these procedures are totally justified, because people born with deformities or disfigured in accidents deserve to have them remedied so they can live normal lives. But most are just to make normal people look better.

Ads are designed to catch such people, promising to make them "look 10 years younger" and asking, "are you tired of always looking tired?" which has some meaning for most of us.

Some are almost poetic. A doctor who describes herself as "a cosmetic physician and artist who will transform each canvas into the masterpiece waiting within" adds more mundanely that she alters faces by using the latest in fillers.

Ads often suggest they are endorsed by today's ultimate arbiters, TV celebrities. One doctor boasts his skin-tightening method has been "endorsed by Dr. Phil's wife and featured on Oprah Winfrey."

They can be sharply competitive. One plastic surgeon warns that while he provides painless facelifts, many other surgeons continue to use techniques that subject patients to a lot of pain, bruising and swelling - not a great testimonial to his profession.

Another plastic surgeon may do patients a disservice, because he advertises that people who aren't losing weight in the gym should get one of his tummy tucks, which may lure some away from exercise from which they could benefit.

Plastic surgeons, like some other professionals, are not necessarily literate. One promises plastic and cosmetic surgery "in a discrete atmosphere," but probably means discreet, because doctors offering facelifts usually promise total privacy.

Making people look better is profitable. Doctors do not make public their individual incomes, but a plastic surgeon in court recently for failing to support his ex-wife and children was said to have earned between $656,000 and $915,000 annually.

Plastic surgeons often are reported among those living a particularly high lifestyle. Family doctors are at the bottom of the pay scale.

The doctors cost the public an average $500,000 each to train and family doctors are in such short supply in Ontario many, including 130,000 children, cannot get one.

Ontario also feels it needs it needs doctors so desperately that it lures them from third-world countries that need them more. The World Health Organization complained last year that Canada and other wealthy countries entice doctors from poor countries such as Angola, Nigeria and Ethiopia. Libya protested Ontario was recruiting its doctors right out of medical school.

Ontario and some of the world's poorest countries are being deprived of doctors they need partly because they are being used here trying to make everyone look 20 again - this is the health problem that the province and its doctors should be curing.