Television show “20/20” does an investigation on the do-it-yourself cosmetic injection craze and discount medspa.com in particular, and talks to some self-injectors who unfortunately had bad outcomes, who created difficult problems for themselves. Problems that are hard for any surgeon to fix…. (Link to video here) Watching the video, it’s shocking and quite scary to […]
Robert Satcher Jr, MD, PhD, made history last Tuesday when he lifted off in the space shuttle Atlantis, headed to the International Space Station. Dr. Satcher will be the first orthopaedic surgeon to orbit the earth and is one of only 23 US physicians who have become astronauts. Dr. Satcher is serving as the flight crew medical […]
As part of the 2000 page Senate proposal for health care reform released today, Senate Democrats are proposing a 5% tax on cosmetic surgery. More details can be read in the New York Times report (here). The way this proposal is worded, non-surgical cosmetic procedures such as Botox, Restylane and Juvederm, laser treatments and pretty […]
This week, an influential government panel known as the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), whose recommendations influences coverage of screening tests by Medicare and many insurance companies, has come out with new guidelines for mammography, particularly when testing should start, and how often it should be performed. Their article is published in the latest issue of Annals […]
Johnson & Johnson has announced this week that it has decided to stop making and selling Evolence, an injectable soft-tissue filler.Although Evolence has a good track record of safety and effectiveness, product sales apparently did not meet corporate expectations. The facial filler gained approval from the FDA in June 2008, but its market introduction coincided […]
PSB- the Plastic Surgery Blog has been nominated as a top quality blog by the readers of the Orlando Sentinel. The Sentinel is running a contest, known as the “Orbbie awards”, to determine the best blogs in town in various categories. This blog is in the miscellaneous category, called “Out of this World”. If you like […]
Sugar Helps Reduce Nausea Before Surgery Yes, it helps the medicine go down, according to the old song. But it turns out that a little sugar – or more properly dextrose in the intravenous fluid – may help to reduce the chance of perioperative nausea and vomiting in surgery patients, and reduces the need for […]
Sometimes marketing hype gets way ahead of the science. That’s certainly the way it seems to have been with the current generation of laser-assisted liposuction devices. Promises of skin tightening have been made by most of the manufacturers of these devices (SmartLipo and others) – with very little science to back up the claims. I […]
About a year or two ago, a new type of LED device started appearing at the various plastic surgery meetings. It was suggested that certain frequencies (colors) of light could have beneficial properties on the skin, through a theory known as photomodulation. There was no heat, no pain, no downtime, no complications… Sitting under a bank […]
A patient asked me the other day about whether MRI scans could be used instead of mammograms, as a more high-tech way to screen for breast cancer. By happenstance, there is a major review article on breast cancer imaging and treatment in the latest issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. Here are […]
