Weak Cosmetic Regulation Makes Guinea Pigs Out Of Brits, UK

Weak Cosmetic Regulation Makes Guinea

Pigs Out Of Brits, UK

America's stringent rules on cosmetic fillers1 - injectable substances used to reduce wrinkles - mean companies are turning to Britain to test out new products2. As reported in this month's Which? magazine, there are just seven cosmetic fillers that contain hyaluronic acid - found naturally in the skin - approved for use in the US, compared to around 65 in Britain3. Every year 415,000 people undergo non-surgical cosmetic treatments such as fillers4.

This boom has led Which? to call on the Government to strengthen the weak regulatory system that may allow potentially useless or even dangerous products through the net. Isolagen - an example of weak regulation in practiceDespite Isolagen (a treatment that used patients' own cells to smooth out skin) being withdrawn in the US in 1999, it was still introduced to Britain in 2002. The company has since used information gathered in Britain to support its pending licence application in America.

Isolagen was not covered by any regulation in Britain at all meaning that, before it was withdrawn in 2006, the company was able to: -- Describe the product as 'natural' despite patients' cells being stored in foetal calf serum. -- Claim it had been cleared by the health regulator, even though Isolagen didn't fall under any British regulation. -- Use experiences of British patients in its American literature, stating that 'retrospective study, clinical trials and treatment of patients in the UK' would improve the manufacturing process for America. Jenny Driscoll, health campaigner, Which?, says: "At the moment Britain is effectively a testing ground for cosmetic treatments.

Consumers here do not benefit from the effective and stringent regulation systems that Americans have. New products are coming onto the market all the time and the regulation needs to keep up with the science. "If the Department of Health doesn't step up and recognise the flaws in the system, it is leaving Brits potentially at risk." Which? has been involved with an online support chat room, the Isolagen Action Group, where people affected by Isolagen can share experiences and problems.

Other people affected can leave their story at www.which.co.uk/cosmetic and Which? can put them in contact with this action group if requested. Further information-- Most cosmetic fillers in the UK are covered by EU medical devices legislation. -- This legislation is incredibly weak - allowing companies to self-certify or use independent testing laboratories. -- Isolagen was not even covered by this regulation as using the skin's own cells meant that it was not a medical device. -- Isolagen has now closed its European operation and has withdrawn from the British market leaving hundreds of people without the treatment they paid for.

1. Cosmetic fillers - also known as dermal fillers. Dermal fillers plump up the skin when injected in and therefore are used to smooth lines and make the skin appear younger.

2. American companies need test results as without evidence of a filler's effectiveness and safety they cannot apply for a licence from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its use in America.

3. An estimate of the number of fillers containing hyaluronic acid (found naturally in the skin) by a consultant dermatologist who has clinics based in the UK and the US (taken from Which? magazine, August 2007).

4. Cosmetic Surgery Market Intelligence study from June 2006 published by Mintel International Group Limited.

http://www.which.co.uk

U.S. gynecology group slams cosmetic vaginal surgery

U.S. gynecology group slams cosmetic vaginal surgery

Credit from http://health.yahoo.com/news

Cosmetic procedures billed as "vaginal rejuvenation," "designer vaginoplasty" or even "revirgination" are not medically necessary and are not guaranteed to be safe, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists cautioned on Friday.

The group, which educates and accredits doctors who treat women and deliver babies, said it is deceptive to give the impression that any of these procedures are accepted or routine.

In guidance published in the September issue of its journal, Obstetrics & Gynecology, the group, known as ACOG, said the procedures can cause complications such as infection, altered sensation, pain and scarring.

The procedures include changing the shape or size of the labia, "restoring" the hymen, and tightening the vagina.

Dr. Abbey Berenson, who helped write the guidelines, said some women may be fooled by deceptive marketing practices into thinking they need the surgery because they are somehow abnormal."Many women don't realize that the appearance of external genitals varies significantly from woman to woman," Berenson said in a statement.

ACOG noted that a growing number of doctors are offering the procedures.
"Some of these procedures, such as 'vaginal rejuvenation,' appear to be modifications of traditional vaginal surgical procedures for genuine medical conditions," ACOG said in a statement.

True medical conditions that merit the surgery include pelvic prolapse, the reversal or repair of female genital cutting, sometimes known as female circumcision, and the reversal of abnormalities caused by hormone imbalances.
"There are always risks associated with a surgical procedure," Berenson said. "It's important that women understand the potential risks of these procedures and that there is no scientific evidence regarding their benefits."

More Men Seek Plastic Surgery

More Men Seek Plastic Surgery But Need Different Procedures and Techniques

800,000 men had plastic surgery procedures last year, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic surgery, and the number is growing.

Lloyd M. Krieger, M.D., founder and Medical Director of Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery in Beverly Hills notes that the bodies, goals and temperament of men are different from those of women -- so men need special procedures and techniques.(PRWEB) May 17, 2005 -- 800,000 men had plastic surgery procedures last year, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic surgery, and the number is growing.

Lloyd M. Krieger, M.D., founder and Medical Director of Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery in Beverly Hills, now supplies Sports Illustrated along with Vogue in the waiting room. But the bodies, goals and temperament of men are different from those of women. Men are impatient with long recovery periods, and often seek plastic surgery to remain professionally competitive.

Facelift and rhinoplasty procedures that work well on women tend to feminize men, who need techniques that will ensure a masculine look with less recovery time.8 Things Men Should Know About Plastic Surgery

1. Liposuction can remove love-handles that even gym rats can’t shed; it is also excellent for removing fatty breast tissue and giving men back the abs they had in college.

2. Liposuction can remove localized fat deposits that the gym can’t touch. Dr. Krieger’s male patients refer to his liposuction machine as a “mechanical personal trainer”

.3. Results from liposuction will be best if men continue regular workouts at the gym after the procedure.

4. Facelifts tend to feminize men. Men tend to have fewer problems with jowls and do better with chin liposuction, neck lifts and forehead lifts. These three smaller procedures can often be combined and provide a better result than the larger facelift. The recovery time is shorter, so the male impatience factor is not overly tested.

5. When men do go for facelifts, their thicker skin means they need a unique procedure -- less pulling of the skin itself, which tends to become overly thin when pulled, and more work tightening the deeper tissues of the face.

6. Men often have more resilient skin than women, so it tends to shrink better following the procedure. This allows for more fat removal in some men during liposuction.

7. Calf implants and pectoral implants tend to migrate with time and have other problems. Better to use liposuction to sculpt the surrounding areas, and make the pecs and calves appear more distinct.

8. A chemical peel, which can be done without general anesthetic, is not a "facial" and can get rid of fine lines and blotchiness that make sportsmen look older than their years.

http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/5/emw240781.htm
http://surgerynews.net

Grow your own nipples

Grow your own nipples

ABC Science Online

Researchers have devised a way of growing nipple-coloured skin in the lab, which may one day help surgeons to more accurately reconstruct breasts after a mastectomy.The researchers believe they are the first to grow pigmented skin this way specifically for nipple reconstruction and say they have found a way of making sure the skin colour doesn't fade.

Australian scientists report their research in the March issue of the British Journal of Plastic Surgery.
There are currently two main ways of recreating nipples for women who have lost a breast, or breasts, to cancer.One way involves tattooing a nipple on the reconstructed breast mound.The other is to take pigmented skin from another part of the body, such as the groin crease or a spiral of skin from a remaining areola, the dark area surrounding the nipple, and transplant it.But the colour of the new nipple fades with time, one of the biggest problems facing reconstructive surgeons.

Associate head of health sciences at South Australia's Flinders Medical Centre, Professor Tim Neild, says while the new nipple may look good at first, the results of transplants tend to be short-lived."We don't really know why but the number of pigmented cells recedes and the amount of pigment in each cell fades," he says.This usually occurs between 12 months and two years of surgery.Neild says fading is believed to occur because the transplanted skin suddenly finds itself in a foreign place where it is lacking the cellular signals needed to maintain its colour."Any cell ... in the body is constantly bombarded by hormones and chemicals leaking from nearby cells that are all signals telling the cell how to behave," he says."If you put cells in a different environment it acts differently because it's getting different signals."Melanocytes to the rescueThe study's main author and Neild's colleague Dr Nicola Dean says she has grown a "pigmented skin construct" in a petri dish.

She mixed together normal keratinocytes, cells that produce the skin protein keratin, and melanocytes, cells that produce the pigment melanin, from the patient's own body."We took a biopsy of normal skin and artificially changed the ratio of melanocytes and keratinocytes," she says.She did this by separating the cells from the skin's dermis, or connective tissue, growing separate skin cell cultures from both types of cell and then introducing them back onto the stored dermis.In this way she changed the ratio of pigmented to non-pigmented cells from one-to-twelve to one-to-three.

Dean stresses that the technique is yet to be tried on a patient and says there are concerns that the growth factors used to encourage cell growth in vitro could also cause the transplanted cells to become cancerous.But she says it highlights the complexities of breast reconstruction for women who have had a mastectomy.

By Judy Skatssoon

http://abc.net.au/science/news/tech/InnovationRepublish_1328801.htm

Men Seek A Chest to Treasure

Men Seek A Chest to Treasure
Breast reduction surgery increases among males.

By JESSE HARLAN ALDERMANColumbia News ServiceIn junior high school, Merle Yost sagged to the bottom of the class in physical education. In the hallways, girls bounced insults off him and offered him their bras.At 5 feet tall and weighing just 80 pounds, Yost had breasts -- a size B-cup, to be exact.

The shy eighth-grader developed strategies to conceal them, to no avail."I did many things to disguise it," Yost said. "I was quite famous for wearing a lot of Hawaiian shirts, big floppy Hawaiian shirts during the disco era. I was a nerd."More than two decades later, Yost finally had to get something off his chest.
In 1993, the Oakland, Calif., psychotherapist had breast reduction surgery. In doing so he opted for an increasingly common procedure for men.

Last year, nearly 14,000 men across the country enlisted plastic surgeons to use liposuction to vacuum out excess fat and then sculpt and lift breast tissue to form a "toned" look. Some even fold skin over the areola to decrease the size of the nipple area.Breast enhancement in the form of silicone or saline implant surgery has long been a popular option for women in search of a larger, firmer chest.
Last year, nearly 400,000 women in America had cosmetic surgery on their breasts, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.

Now, surgeons say that more men than ever are going under the knife in search of the perfect breast. As reality television programs celebrate makeovers, cosmetic surgery -- for those who can afford it -- has become a viable option for men in search of self-improvement.Obviously, the notion that "bigger is better" doesn't hold true for men with bouncy breasts. But men don't necessarily want to go too small, either. Getting a man's chest just right to bare with pride at the beach or in the locker room turns out to be a tricky business.

The perfect male breast will have some definition, explained Dr. Miguel Delgado, a San Francisco plastic surgeon."Ideally, a man's breast above the areola is full," he said. "It will have some small contour and as you come down to the areola it comes down to an actual fold and starts flattening towards the chest, which is perfectly flat." In other words, something akin to famously chiseled actor Brad Pitt's buff and oft-exposed pectorals in the movie "Fight Club."To correct the "wall with two bullet holes" look, many men have sought pectoral implants to give their breasts the ideal, contoured look. But far more frequent are reductions of so-called "man boobs."

Last year, 13,963 men had breast reductions, making the procedure the fifth most common plastic surgery for males, behind nose jobs, liposuction, hair transplants and eyelid surgery. Many of those men also had their "silver dollars reduced to quarters" in nipple-reduction surgeries.Not surprisingly, there's a medical term for the large breast affliction: gynecomastia, defined by Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary as excessive development of the male breasts. The word derives from the Greek word for "women-like breasts."Fat tissue typically increases in the breasts of overweight men, but chests can also swell in physically fit men.

For men who suffer from the condition, breasts usually grow abnormally large at the onset of puberty when the body produces large amounts of testosterone. The liver then converts the excess hormone into estrogen, which causes growth of breast tissue. A similar hormonal imbalance occurs with men who abuse anabolic steroids.But insurance companies don't consider gynecomastia a genuine illness. Rarely will a policy cover male breast reductions; doctors say that insurers deem the surgery purely cosmetic.

Men who have surgically decreased the size of their breasts say the procedure has improved their self-confidence. Some suggest that it lifted them from depression caused by their embarrassing physical appearance."Let's put it this way, I used to have sex with my shirt on," said Kevin Braga, a 24-year-old New York resident. "Now there's a huge difference.

Everything is much better."Delgado, who performs 80 to 90 breast reductions a year, said the issue remains taboo for many sufferers."Men do not talk about it like women who like to talk about this and that or `I got my lips done,' " Delgado said. "This is so embarrassing for men. It's a feminizing thing that men cannot stand to talk about."For Yost, who administers the Web site www.gynecomastia.org and counsels male patients with enlarged breasts, the surgery was unsuccessful. His oversized breasts returned in the years following his surgery."It's just impossible to get rid of all that breast tissue," he said. "It grows aggressively." Although, he added, "There are a lot of flat-chested women who might disagree with that."

http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050503/NEWS/505030303/1021

http://surgerynews.net

Plastic surgery 'is trivialised'

Plastic surgery 'is trivialised'

Mr Khoo believes plastic surgery is being trivialisedThe obsession with cosmetic surgery is obscuring the real work plastic surgeons do treating cancer patients and burn victims, leading doctors say.

They said the demand for cosmetic surgery fuelled by the media's coverage of celebrities and TV programmes was having a negative effect.
The British Association of Plastic Surgeons even said some people saw them in a similar vein as hairdressers.

Instead, the surgeons said they were doctors who were there to heal people.
To stress their point, they gave examples at a London press briefing of people who had benefited from their work.

In one case, a club bouncer who had had his nose cut off in a sword attack was given a new nose through nasal reconstruction.

Understanding
A man who developed tongue cancer had part of his tongue removed and rebuilt, hardly impairing his speech.
And two children, born with cleft palates, were almost indistinguishable from their peers by the age of two.

Association chairman Chris Khoo said: "One of the things that comes across in the TV programmes is that there is a quick fix for anything, but sometimes we have to say no to treatment and people don't understand.
"This obsession tends to trivialise what the speciality can do.
"Our members treat cancer patients, burn victims and babies with cleft palates.
No other area of medicine has to put up with such misconceptions
Brendan Eley, of the Healing Foundation

Surgery saved my life
"They enable people to live full and active lives, but this does not always come across.
"We are not saying cosmetic surgery is not important, because it is and many of us do it, but just that we are getting things out of perspective."
Martin Kelly, a consultant plastic surgeon at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital who specialises in facial reconstruction, warned the obsession with cosmetic surgery meant that some unsuitable surgeons were carrying out work, leaving the NHS to pick up the tab for repairing the damage.

Scarring
And he added: "We are primarily doctors and not just further along the spectrum from hairdressers.
"We are here to heal and help people."

Another of the effects of the obsession was that the benefits of stem cell research and tissue regeneration, which could lead to the avoidance of scarring, was also being missed.
Patrick Mallucci, a consultant plastic surgeon at London's Royal Free Hospital, said: "Great advances are being made. It is not going to happen this week or next week, it is something for the future.
"But all we hear is cosmetic surgery."
Brendan Eley, chief executive of the Healing Foundation, a charity for people with disfigurements, said: "I have a lot of sympathy for plastic surgeons.
"No other area of medicine has to put up with such misconceptions.
"They are unsung heroes whose work can transform the lives of their patients."

Credit from BBC News

Men increasingly going under the cosmetic surgeon's knife

Men increasingly going under the cosmetic surgeon's knife

Men are increasingly willing to undergo cosmetic surgery such as Botox injections, rhinoplasty, and liposuction. According to a recent poll, 74 percent of men said they approved of cosmetic surgery, either for themselves or for another man. More than one million American men had some kind of cosmetic procedure in 2004.

Ads for Botox and other cosmetic procedures fill the pages of many women's magazines. But more and more men's publications are now talking about cosmetic surgery, as the number of men getting nipped and tucked continues to rise.Simeon Illive is getting a procedure you might not expect for a 28-year-old man. He's having his varicose veins removed."They just kept spreading and spreading and spreading and it got to the point where it gets ugly, he noted.For seven years, Albert Haje has been getting Botox on a regular basis.

The business owner has also had some tightening surgery done on his neck and face."I think it's much more acceptable for men now than it was in past years," said Haje.Not long ago, most men wouldn't even consider having Botox or any other cosmetic procedure done, but a recent survey shows just how much the times have changed.

Seventy-four percent of men polled said they approved of cosmetic plastic surgery for themselves or someone else. In 2004, well over one million men had some kind of cosmetic work done.Plastic surgeon Michael Kane expects the numbers to only go up."Men's magazines that actually write about plastic surgery, Restalyne, Botox, so they are much more aware of what's out there," explained Kane.Some surgeons are even catering to men.

With special goggles, Simeon is able to watch a "Sopranos" DVD during his surgery.And Doctor Luis Navarro says the procedure has become more popular with men now that it's faster and the recovery time is shorter."It lasts about 45 minutes and you can return to work the same day," he said.But Haje says something else has changed over the years."I think we're more vain."

According to the Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, the most popular cosmetic surgeries for men are liposuction, eyelid surgery and rhinoplasty.

http://surgerynews.net