Another reason to celebrate being a woman: more wrinkles?

Personally, I thought the actual reference article in this piece discussing how women have the great luck of being prone to more and deeper wrinkles than men was just fine.

But come on, Amanda Gardner, HealthDay Reporter for BusinessWeek, get it straight. When you lead off your article with "Dermatologists have discovered yet another gender inequity. . ." and proceed to quote the senior author, who is identified as a plastic surgeon in said article, it becomes clear that someone didn't do their homework.

For the last time, dermatologists are NOT the same as plastic surgeons.

Okay, I'll put the soapbox away again. Thanks for listening.

To be young and beautiful

A lookout sullied by low lying clouds two weeks ago at Fremont Older Preserve, part of the Open Space lands of the Peninsula.

This morning I had the wonderful opportunity to speak to Tracey Gunn's honors anatomy and physiology class at Santa Clara High School. I've been working with the HealthTrust of Santa Clara; part of their mission is to get high school students interested in careers in the health sciences.

I've done a handful of these little talks now, and the caliber of these students never fails to impress me. They are all so bright and beautiful, curious and clever.

In these talks, I skim over the nuts and bolts of how to become a doctor - all the classes, applications, tests, etc. These students aren't dummies - they're all college-bound (and right now, waiting anxiously for the legendary fat envelopes) - when I ask them how old you have to be to become a physician, they're pretty accurate. Usually they guess around 30, although today someone blurted out "80!" which is sometimes how old you feel at the end of the day...

I also talk a little bit about what it means to me to be a plastic surgeon, how it's not all boobs and Botox, and most importantly, why I love what I do. In this part of the talk, it gets more graphic and interactive - I put up pictures of tough cases I've confronted in my surgical career and challenge the students to "be the plastic surgeon". Their response is always impressive, perhaps revealing a few aspiring surgeons in the crowd.

So thanks again to Ms. Gunn and her students for graciously hosting me this morning. It was fun, and hopefully we all left with something more to think about.

Happy surgeons = happy patients?

Photo illustration courtesy of Veer

Perhaps you've seen this article circulating out there in the ether - it talks about how doctors who feel burnt out or depressed admit to making more medical errors.

Lucky for all of you Duet fans out there, Dr. Weintraub and I love what we do and are very happy doing it.

The Botax-man cometh

We've all heard this one was coming. Plastic surgeons and their patients make a very easy target for politicians, right? But will it really go through?

Everyone points out the disappointment of New Jersey, which levied a 6% tax on cosmetic procedures in 2004. Some speculate that the tax has actually cost the state $3.39 for every $1 collected.

So maybe the question is not, will the "botax" be passed by the Senate, but if it does, what will it actually do?

I can do *what* with my frequent flier miles?

Photo from Veer


Harrumph. Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy already, but it seems like this is another one of those really terrible ideas.

Caveat emptor

We've talked about this before, but it's still frightening.

Running the numbers

Have you ever read the Harper's Index? You've probably seen some permutation of it, usually a pithy or surprising factoid phrase, followed by a defining number. I've been a big fan of Harper's ever since high school, when my history teacher would hurl the facts and numbers at us in his amazingly deadpan voice (thanks, Mr. Brown!).

I was reading this month's Index, and it happened to have a couple professionally relevant tidbits, which I found so interesting, as the Index items always are.

Estimated length of human nose removed by U.S. plastic surgeons each year, in feet: 5,469

Factor by which this exceeds the length of George Washington's nose on Mount Rushmore: 260