Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 00:08:59 -0700

From gigi/Karen S. Lawrence

Another must read ladies!

Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.

Chicago Sun-Times

May 05, 2000, FRIDAY, Late Sports Final Edition

SECTION: EDT; Pg. 45

HEADLINE: Implants keeping a nation breast-fed

BYLINE: Cate Plys

BODY:

To all those women out there still getting breast implants -- and there were 191,583 of you last year alone -- it's time someone talked to you bluntly. Here goes: You are foolish. You're shortsighted. You make the rest of us look bad, and not because you have bigger breasts.

Sun-Times health reporter Jim Ritter covered the breast implant bonanza last Friday, noting that implants are up 89 percent from 1997. It seems you're all but scuffling over fake breasts, as if they're in a sale bin with no rain-checks allowed.

Why? The obvious answer is that men like big breasts, and you're willing to undergo a gruesome surgical procedure to get them. Unfortunately, your logic is woefully flawed. Men like any and all breasts, and they'll take what they can get. They also like beer, but that isn't a compelling reason to surgically attach a six-pack to your chest.

It's true that you breast implant fans have been horribly misguided by a sick pop culture that endlessly glorifies female bodies so perfect they don't exist in nature. The airbrushed and computer-enhanced pictures blanketing the media are less common in the real world than the exotic subatomic entities created for a few milliseconds in Fermilab's particle accelerator.

Consider this month's Playboy, which I forced myself to buy in order to accurately report on the recent Hugh Hefner street sign debacle. The many breasts in that issue absolutely defied gravity. In fact, you'd think NASA would slap a "Top Secret" label on these women and hustle them off for classified research. One of the nudie spreads featured Placido Domingo's granddaughter, whose breasts are startlingly larger than her head.

But regardless of the silly messages battering us from magazines and TV, we all have to intellectually overcome the irrational desire to be simultaneously 20 pounds underweight and several cup sizes larger than our genes dictate. This process is sometimes called "growing up." After all, you're not a teenager anymore. (Unless, of course, you are a teenager, since nearly 2,000 adolescents had parents insane enough to pay for their implants in 1998, the most recent statistics available from the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. If so, put this column on your refrigerator and read it again in five years, or when your mind has cleared, whichever comes first.)

If you think today's saline-filled implants are a sure thing compared with the silicone implants banned by the Food and Drug Administration in 1992, you've done a marvelous job of ignoring reality. You're putting something in your body the FDA hasn't approved, because there still aren't studies to show saline implants are safe.

One implant manufacturer's study shows up to 27 percent of the implants had to be removed within three years because of ruptures, infections and painful scar tissue. That sounds attractive. And this is the kind of documentation that persuaded an expert FDA panel in March to recommend letting two manufacturers continue selling the implants for now. The FDA is expected to rule on that soon.

It is appalling that the FDA has let this go on at all, but after everything we've learned from the controversy over silicone implants, I also find it hard to feel sorry for you. I wouldn't put something like that in my basement, much less inches away from my heart, liver and kidneys.

Women's determination to get implants, even knowing the risks, "suggests just how deeply the benefits are felt," Dr. Fritz Barton, president of the Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Society, told Ritter last week. Actually, it suggests a crushing need for more therapists.

If the health risks mean nothing to you, let's end with this thought: Of all the cosmetic surgeries so popular these days, breast enlargement is the only one that proclaims to the world that you desperately wish more people wanted to have sex with you. You may be able to make up other reasons for the next family picnic, but no one will believe you.