More than 10 million Americans undergo elective cosmetic procedures each year. Dr. Jon LaPook reports on what every patient should know about anesthesia with Dr. Panchali Dhar, author of “Before the Scalpel.”
Last year — despite the recession — there were about 10 million cosmetic procedures in the United States. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, over 90 percent were in women and about 1.5 million were surgical.
The top five surgical procedures were breast augmentation (311,957), liposuction (283,735), eyelid surgery (149,943), rhinoplasty (138,258), and abdominoplasty (127.923). As you awaken on the morning of your elective surgery, there’s no way you haven’t yet met the surgeon who will be performing the procedure. But odds are you still haven’t met the person who will be most responsible for keeping you alive: the anesthesiologist. Read more »
Recently a Staten Island woman was awarded $3.5 million after developing a double-bubble breast deformity after a breast augmentation/mastopexy surgery — commonly known as breast implants.
I don’t know if the award was warranted, but I do know that the deformity is a known risk of breast augmentation surgery. I try very hard to tell patients about possible risks of surgery, but none of us go into surgery thinking we will be the half or one or two percent. Read more »
A new study on fat grafting for breast augmentation was presented at last week’s American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) Plastic Surgery 2009 conference which I wasn’t able to attend. The ASPS News Brief section gave an update on the presentation with a pdf of the abstract.
The main study author, Roger Khouri, MD, FACS, is featured in a video explaining the study and technique. He feels that his study of 50 women is enough to settle the question of safety and effectiveness of fat injections for cosmetic breast augmentation. Even though his results are good, I remain a skeptic.
It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…
I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…
I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…
When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…
I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…
