Meet Dr. Ivy Lawson, MD

A decade under imaging, before a syringe

Dr. Ivy Lawson has practiced medicine in South Florida since 2013. For more than a decade of that, her work was image-guided and minimally invasive: procedures performed in hospital settings, through small access points, with ultrasound or fluoroscopy showing her exactly where the needle was and exactly what was around it.

That is what a vascular and interventional radiologist does. It is a specialty built entirely on two disciplines — reading anatomy from an image, and then working inside that anatomy with millimeter precision. She is double board-certified in it.

Why she moved into aesthetics

Aesthetic medicine is, mechanically, the same problem. A needle is placed into tissue that contains arteries, veins and nerves that vary from person to person. The consequences of getting it wrong are vascular. The difference is that in a hospital nobody would dream of doing it blind, and in most aesthetic practices everybody does.

Dr. Lawson opened this practice in Cooper City in 2021 to work the way she had been trained to work — assess first, image where imaging changes the answer, then treat.

What that changes in the treatment room

It changes the order of events. Before a filler appointment, facial vasculature can be mapped on ultrasound rather than assumed from surface landmarks. If a patient has had filler before — here or anywhere else — it can be found and identified rather than guessed at. If it needs to come out, dissolving can be guided to it instead of flooded across the area. And if a vascular complication ever occurs, the physician assessing it is one who has spent a career assessing vessels.

It also changes what the practice can offer at all. Leg veins are not a cosmetic add-on here — they are Dr. Lawson's clinical specialty, which is why spider vein treatment and sclerotherapy sit alongside the injectables rather than being referred out.

What she treats

Dr. Lawson plans and performs the practice's injectable and regenerative treatments — neurotoxins, dermal fillers and full facial balancing, Sculptra, PDO threads and PRP — as well as the practice's vein treatments and its wellness programs, including medical weight loss, hormone optimization and peptide therapy. Every new patient is assessed by her before a plan is made.

Teaching what she uses

Through the Ivy Ultrasound Academy, Dr. Lawson teaches diagnostic ultrasound to other aesthetic injectors — probe fundamentals, facial vascular mapping, and ultrasound-guided procedures and complication assessment. Teaching it is the clearest statement she can make about how central it is to her own practice.

Practicing in Cooper City

The practice is on South Flamingo Road in Cooper City, and patients travel to it from Davie, Weston, Pembroke Pines, Southwest Ranches and across Broward County — including patients who had filler somewhere else and could not find anyone locally able to image it.