I wanted to do an update on Stephanie Kuleba’s death. It is highlighted at the link below -

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/services/newspaper/printedition/local/sfl-flpkuleba0530sbmay30,0,4133462.story

Her autopsy confirmed that she died from Malignant hyperthermia, a rare genetic disease that can be triggered by anesthesia. I thought this was an interesting statement - “The intense attention on Kuleba’s case brought more awareness about risks of anesthesia, though it’s generally considered safe. ” Hello!? I think the intense attention should have brought more awareness about risks of plastic surgery in general and what people should know they are really risking when they go under the knife for cosmetic reasons. I too, had the inverted nipple correction and breast symmetry corrections Stephanie was in for. Why don’t they say that by “breast symmetry” she was getting implants? Because they don’t want to cause a spark with the surgeons or FDA? I don’t know - but my implants are out now, in order to save my life and I do have the inverted nipple correction, but after going through all the hell of being sick that I went through and knowing about Stephanie’s hidden condition, I would never go back and do it again. It wasn’t worth it & I would much rather be happy with what I was born with vs. risking my life to look more “normal.”

Lorelai Kluever works at Our Bodies, Ourselves.

The recent announcement of Kelly Rowland’s breast augmentation can be understood as another prime example of the media’s failure to properly address the issue of breast implant safety. Though I do not watch MTV or any of the plastic surgery reality TV shows that seem to attract substantial audiences these days, I would assume that CNN would provide a more objective perspective on this subject. This recent five minute CNN segment invited E! TV host Ashlan Gorse, as well as self-esteem expert Jessica Weiner, to lead the conversation. Although Jessica Weiner mentions that breast implant surgery can be deadly, she fails to ask Weiner to elaborate on safety issues, or to discuss whether or not Kelly Rowland was adequately informed of the health risks prior to her surgery. Instead, she turns the conversation back to Kelly’s personal reasoning for breast implants (to fill out a top) and the influence that Kelly Rowland’s surgery has on young girls in general.

Though I see the importance of analyzing the impact of celebrities’ plastic surgery choices on young women, I think that it’s also necessary to go beyond the harm of imposing unrealistic beauty standards. Breast implant surgery poses substantial threats to physical health and well-being, and the failure of many plastic surgeons to fully inform women of these risks only underscores the need for more responsible media coverage of this topic. The absence of adequate discussion of breast implant safety in the media and elsewhere has resulted in many poorly-informed college-age women. After speaking with several friends and college students who had the opportunity to see Carol Ciancutti-Leyva’s amazing documentary, Absolutely Safe, I was struck by their similar reactions: utter astonishment at how little they had heard previously about these safety concerns.

I recently developed and distributed an informal survey that was filled out by 18 college students, the majority of whom are students at UMass Boston. The first section asked students where they have seen ads for breast implants, whether the ads gave them any sense of the risks involved in the surgery, and if they know anyone who had breast implant surgery. The majority of students (13 out of 18) had seen ads for breast implants, most often in magazines/ newspapers, on television, and on billboards. Two students mentioned seeing ads in their doctor’s office. Not a single student who had seen these ads for implants felt that they offered some sense of the risks involved with this surgery. Four students said that they knew a friend who has implants, and two wrote further that their friends were happy with them and haven’t experienced any problems yet. (Many health problems associated with breast implants can develop further down the road.)

For the second half of the survey, students checked off which risks they were aware of from a list of 13 potential breast implant surgery complications. Only three students were aware of more than half of these risks, and the majority were aware of only a few. The most frequently reported were: capsular contraction, infection, rupture, migration, problems with breastfeeding, and loss of sensitivity.This informal survey suggests that unbalanced and sensationalized media coverage of breast implant surgery as well as irresponsible breast implant advertising will encourage many women to make choices that could seriously affect their well-being.

“My friends have done it and rave about it.”

“My friends look great, and it looks so easy.”

“Everyone is doing it, so it MUST BE SAFE.”

“I’m going to get it done too…”

This is the thinking process for so many people when it comes to cosmetic surgery. It leaves a lot of room for terrible things to happen. Case in point is Priscilla Presley, who ended up with with industrial-grade silicone in her face.

Priscilla, like so many of her social set, was taken in by Daniel Serrano, a handsome Argentinian who had somehow plugged into the Hollywood elite. Serrano, who turns out wasn’t even licensed to practice medicine in the US, provided what he claimed were miracle injections that worked better than Botox. According to TMZ,

Serrano was injecting industrial, low-grade silicone similar to what’s used to lubricate auto parts in Argentina into the faces of these women. Several women, including Shawn King, Larry’s wife, and Diane Richie, Lionel’s wife at the time, held injection parties in their homes, with Serrano needling them with the non-FDA approved drug that he had smuggled in to the U.S. He charged between $300 and $500 a pop.

The injections caused lumps, paralysis and even holes in the face. Serrano, subsequently dubbed “Dr. Jiffy Lube,” ended up in jail, but not before disfiguring many women.

What this story perfectly illustrates is how a herd mentality can take over when a cosmetic medical procedure that can have very serious side effects loses its social stigma. It can become widespread, and finally “fashionable and trendy.” I feel so much sympathy for Priscilla – it’s so hard to exercise your own judgment when the people around you and your social environment urge you to rush in. Under this kind of pressure, any thought of caution and due diligence very easily falls to the wayside.

That’s why the FDA’s decision to put silicone breast implants back on the market, charging women with informed consent, is such a crime. These days, if it were possible to have house parties for breast implants, believe me, they would be happening! In such an atmosphere, how many women, like Serrano’s poor victims, are falling into the herd mentality and consenting to this surgery with only their friends’ or doctors’ safety assurances? Too many, I’m afraid.

I was reading the book Peony by Lisa See and it occurred to me that culture has manipulated women to mutilate their bodies for centuries. The story is set in China in 1644. Peony is an only child and her parents arranged her marriage to a man, sight unseen. I really don’t want to get into the story of the book, I just want to reflect on the part about foot binding.

Mothers and grandmothers thought that their young girls should have their feet bound starting somewhere around age 6, sometimes earlier. Their reasoning was that the daughter could not attract a wealthy marriage if her feet were big. The ideal size was at least a 3 inches foot, called gold lotuses, and no longer than 4 inches, called silver lotuses.

Small feet were seen as perfect on a women and necessary to arrange a good marriage (read: wealthy), and this marriage could not be obtained without bound feet. Small feet made a young girl more desirable. Qing Dynasty sex manuals listed 48 different ways of playing with women’s bound feet–small feet are sexual turn on for husbands.

I started to think of other body mulitations, such as female genital mutilation and I found a list of some of the reasons it is practiced:

• Preservation of virginity
• Enhancement of fertility
• Prevention of promiscuity
• Increase of matrimonial opportunities
• Pursuance of aesthetics
• Improvement of male sexual performance and pleasure
• Promotion of social and political cohesion

Female genital mutilation is regarded in many societies as a pre-requisite for honorable marriage. I can’t understand this list. As I see it, all of the above “reasons” can be accomplished without mutilating the woman’s genitals.

Then there is the neck ring worn by women in African and Asian cultures. This practice starts on a young girl at around age five. Neck rings push the collarbone and ribs down and stretch the neck muscles several inches. If the rings are removed and the head not supported, the woman can choke on her own tongue.

There are other examples of body mutilations that can be given, but these are enough examples to have a sense of what is happening to young girls. When are women going to wake up and stop sacrificing girl babies?

These images of bound feet, stretched necks and genital mutilation may seem so foreign and unreal to American and European women. Why do these African and Asian women mutilate their daughters? Wait, maybe the women of African and Asian cultures are asking why American and European women are cutting open the chests of their girl babies and stuffing in bags of silicone to make their chests bigger, so their daughters may make better marriages and be more desirable. Ok, you may say we don’t do it to girls at age 5 or 6. But the idea is planted at that age. Does the word Barbie sound familiar? Big-breasted Barbie with the big house and car and the beautiful boyfriend Ken are real to a 5-year-old. She wants to be like Barbie.

How many of us bought the idea that big breasts equate to better jobs and a better marriage? I don’t know how to stop this madness of mutilating women’s bodies with the perceived notion that the girl will be better off in life with the mutilations. What can we do to save the daughters of the world?

There is a new television series coming on TV, more propaganda for young adults to view: Without Breasts, There is No Paradise.

These are just some observations of mine. Anyone have any thoughts on any of this?

Retired U.S. District Judge Sam C. Pointer Jr. has died. He was 73-years-old.

Many of us remember Judge Pointer because in the 1990s he presided over the complex litigation of silicone-gel breast implant lawsuits.

President Nixon named Pointer in 1970 to the bench for the Northern District of Alabama, the state’s largest federal court district. He was the youngest judge to be appointed to the Federal Bench. He served as chief judge of the district from January 1982 until November 1999.

Before he presided over the silicone implant issue, Judge Pointer issued controversial decisions as Birmingham, Alabama, desegregated its school systems in the 1970s. He ordered the children bused and received death threats which required that he have round-the-clock protection by Federal marshals.

I remember Judge Pointer well. He was intelligent, perceptive and fair. I know this because I watched him in person, month after month, at status conferences where the silicone implant case was tried. Of course, as a silicone implant claimant, I wanted Judge Pointer to rule every argument in favor of the plaintiffs. But, according to the United States laws that he was required to uphold, he could not.

He was never cavalier about his judgments. You knew that he had read and studied and thought about every brief presented in his court. He urged both sides to reach agreement before court started.

And in the end, with defendants financially secure enough that they could fight this issue forever, and plaintiffs knowing that they were correct in their accusations but limited in resources, Judge Pointer allowed a settlement to be fashioned. A settlement meant that nobody got everything they wanted, but it brought the case to a point where monies could be paid to injured women. And, it was, at the time, the largest class action settlement in the history of the United States.

There was a Fairness Hearing. I remember Judge Pointer sitting at a bridge table in front of an audience of women who came to tell him they did or didn’t think the ultimate settlement was fair. He listened for eight hours per day for three full days. He had been threatened and everyone had to go through metal detectors to be allowed in the auditorium. One woman was found to be carrying a gun.

Judge Pointer listened to each woman and helped those who could not easily express their concerns tell him and the audience about their experiences. He was patient and kind to each speaker.

I believe that Judge Pointer understood that there was not enough money in the world to restore the health and pride of the women who had been injured. I believe that he thought the settlement was the best solution to the complicated problems the case presented.

Judge Pointer gave us his heart, his energy, his intelligence and his attention. I will miss him. He taught me that a settlement requires compromise on both sides even though that compromise was hard to reach and even harder to accept.

He was a fine man.

In deference to Judge Pointer’s family, we will not take comments on this event.

Here’s Kacey making a political statement on National Public Radio’s Get My Vote campaign:

Everyone in the Beauty and the Breast community, please go to the Get My Vote campaign and “recommend” Kacey’s video so other people will know to watch it!

I love irony, and I love Stephen Colbert — he’s the son I never had. But sometimes, irony is too subtle; people don’t catch it and end up taking what they see and hear at face value, maybe even as an endorsement.

I think this is the case with a recent segment on the Colbert Report about myfreeimplants.com. That terrible website allows women to create profiles of themselves and communicate with men willing to “help them with their self-esteem” by “donating” a certain amount of money per communication to her implant fund, and apparently the more sexy pictures a woman uses, the more likely she will reach her goal.

The Colbert Report segment features the young man who founded myfreeimplants.com, his friends, and a few of the women who financed their implants through the site. To my mind, these young people — who evidently spend a lot of time in bars and subscribe to the idea that every woman needs a good pair of breasts to be socially successful and valuable — appear laughably thoughtless and superficial. Unfortunately, in an MTV and Maxim world, they are representative of how many many young people think these days, among whom the Colbert Report is very popular. Now, I know that Stephen Colbert is highly intelligent, and while it’s not likely that he’s done his research on the dangers of implants, I know in my gut that he personally doesn’t think very highly of them. But does his audience?

I wish, I wish — oh, how I wish! — the show had done just a little research and thrown in a closing zinger about painful, missile-hard breasts and/or how plastic surgeons are getting rich from re-operations!

Thank you, Feminist Peace Network, for writing about it or I would have missed it, and for calling for people to protest to Comedy Central. I urge all our friends to do so, here.

Recent pictures of Christina Aguilera, posted at Yeeeah.com, called “Christina’s Boobs Are Revolting,” are turning peoples’ heads and making us shake ours. This poor girl! Is she another to add to the long list of celebrities that have turned to implants for job security and attention?

There have been rumors of her implants all over the Web (here, here, and here, just to start) but the confirmation can be found in the pictures. Her breasts look painful and completely distorted. We wonder how a woman gets to a place where she thinks this is natural, beautiful and something to strut in a low-cut sweater.

Even bigger (no pun intended) cause to worry is that she just had a baby. Is she breast-feeding? We all know the jury is still out on breastfeeding with implants, silicone crossing into breastmilk, and certain silicones crossing the placental barrier. So many of our mom’s are sick, but our children are also sick. This makes us worry for the new life she has brought into the world. I know I didn’t think my decisions before motherhood would affect my baby, but they did. I only hope hers doesn’t affect her new one.

One would think someone or even her stylists would cover up stuff like this.

Everyone remembers the Britney scandal: Our favorite, possibly mentally ill, world famous-at-17 pop princess wasn’t big enough for her boots and got temporary breast implants, with her mother’s consent.

And even Dolly Parton has been in the news recently for her implants, postponing her tour because of back pain caused by her over-sized chest. It’s not just the younger generation that is caught up in this tragic body image dilemma. Dolly’s small frame and huge implant size show that there was a surgeon out there that wasn’t thinking of the most appropriate or even healthy look for her body.

Not only is it sad to see celebrities (who are people, by the way) making the decisions they do because of vanity or unrealistic expectations, but it’s sad to know that they are surrounded by people who are paid to say yes. Plastic surgery and Hollywood go hand-in-hand, as we already know, but Hollywood is all about illusions. Sooner or later, we have a glimpse of harsh reality.

TAGS: breast implants, celebrity plastic surgery, britney spears, dolly parton, christina aguilera