Black-market cosmetic surgeries hospitalize six N.J. women

By Rohan Mascarenhas/The Star-Ledger

March 07, 2010, 9:46PM

NEWARK -- Six women from the Essex County area who wanted fuller bottoms ended up in hospitals after receiving buttocks-enhancement injections containing the same material contractors use to caulk bathtubs, officials said.

The women checked into hospitals in the county after their procedures, apparently administered by unlicensed providers, went horribly wrong, state health officials said. The women underwent surgery and were given antibiotics. No arrests have been made.

Different from medical-grade silicone, the substance used in the botched procedures was believed to be a diluted version of nonmedical-grade silicone.

"The same stuff you use to put caulk around the bathtub," said Steven M. Marcus, executive and medical director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System, who learned about the bizarre procedures through a committee he sits on that monitors outbreaks in the metropolitan area.

"What a tragedy," said Gregory Borah, chief of plastic surgery at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick.

Using over-the-counter silicone can cause abscesses that he said resemble "a big zit."

Borah, also president of the New Jersey Society of Plastic Surgeons, said the botched procedures underscore the need for patients who seek augmentation to have it administered by a licensed professional in a sterile setting.

A plastic surgeon doing buttocks augmentation would make an incision to develop a pocket underneath the muscle and shape the buttocks with inert medical-grade silicone, Borah said. He noted it is a relatively uncommon procedure in most practices and that he has done only two in his 24-year career.

By the time he tells patients of the potential risks — from anesthesia, scarring and silicone shifting when patients sit down — they often change their minds.

Breast and cheek augmentations are the most common procedures, he noted. Borah said buttock augmentation is more popular in some cultures than others.

The state Department of Health and Senior Services did not identify the women or release any details about their ethnicity. It also did not say where the "unlicensed medical provider or providers" performed their procedures.

"Fortunately, these women are being treated and are recovering," said Tina Tan, the state epidemiologist. "But there is the potential for more serious complications if these infections are not treated early and properly."

Investigators have not determined if the six cases, which began to be reported in mid-February, are related, but they have stoked concern among officials that such injuries are more common than previously thought.

Health officials issued an alert to state hospitals and doctors about the cases and the potential for more victims.

Marcus said there have been other incidents over the past couple years of providers providing implants of nonmedical-grade silicone, then getting put out of business — only for other shady providers to surface.

"Caveat emptor: Buyer beware," Marcus said. "If it looks too cheap, there’s probably a reason it’s too cheap."

By Rohan Mascarenhas and Mike Frassinelli/The Star-Ledger

A pharmacist refused to issue contraceptive pills prescribed by a doctor because it was against her religion.

Published: 10:13AM GMT 09 Mar 2010

Janine Deeley, 38, thought the woman was joking when she took her on one side and said : "I don't give out contraceptive pills because of my religion."

The mother of two teenage daughters, from Wybourn , Sheffield, said : "I couldn't believe the arrogance of the woman . Who is she to refuse to give me properly prescribed legal drugs?

"The irony is that one reason why I am prescribed the pill is because I suffer from endometriosis which causes painful periods.

"But that's not the point I don't see why I need to be treated like a child and explain myself to her. I am a responsible adult.

"She had no right to refuse to dispense my prescription except if the drugs weren't in stock or if she thought the dosage was incorrect.

"The pharmacy is adjoining the doctor's surgery and I have been using it for years without a problem. But this time I went in gave the assistant the prescription but then the pharmacist came out, took me to one side and said she had the painkillers I had been prescribed but not the contraceptive pill.

"I asked 'oh why not?' and she said 'I don't give them out because of my religion.' I honestly thought she was joking and I said 'Pardon?'.

"She repeated it and I said ' You're not giving ME the pills because of YOUR religion? and she replied 'yes'.

"I was absolutely stunned. She said I could go to another chemist or return the next day when someone else was on duty. I was fuming and just stormed out."

She added : "I had no idea what religion the woman was and I don't remember if she has served me before. The other staff looked very embarrassed but obviously it was the pharmacist's decision.

"There's a lot of things in society you might not like or agree with, but you can't do anything about them.This type of thing shouldn't be happening, it's not right."

A spokeswoman for Lloyds pharmacy said an investigation had been launched: "We are very sorry Ms Deeley was refused supply of her prescribed contraceptive pill at our Duke Street pharmacy."

"We have launched an investigation into the incident and been in contact with her to apologise for any distress and inconvenience caused."

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) said pharmacists were obliged to serve the interests of patients first.

A spokesperson explained:"While the Code of Ethics and Standards does not require a pharmacist to provide a service that is contrary to their religious or moral beliefs, any attempt by a pharmacist to impose their beliefs on a member of the public seeking their professional guidance, or a failure to have systems in place to advise of alternative sources for the service required, would be of great concern to the RPSGB and could form the basis of a complaint of professional misconduct."

If I were religious and my religion prevented me from doing my job, I think I'd be able to work out that I was in the wrong job...

Posted on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 3:24 PM PT

By Diane Mapes, contributor

Marie Raymond sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, freaked out by the sound of her name being shouted loud and clear. Other times she’ll be awakened by the sound of a huge crash, as if someone has broken a window or knocked over a set of dishes. 

“The sound is terrifying — super loud, like someone has broken in,” says Raymond, a 38-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. “But when I get up to look around, nothing’s amiss and everything’s quiet.” After dealing with it off and on for the last several months, Raymond believes she may have exploding head syndrome. She hasn’t seen a doctor about it, but has done some research online.

As strange as the name sounds, exploding head syndrome is actually a rare and relatively undocumented sleep phenomenon. While sleeping or dozing, a person with the condition hears a terrifically loud sound in their head, such as a bomb exploding, a clash of cymbals or a gun going off.

“It’s usually described as a loud bang or pop that occurs in the first third of the night,” says Dr. Neil Kline, sleep physician and representative of the American Sleep Association in Wilmington, Del. “It’s a sensory phenomenon. The individual senses that some type of explosion has occurred nearby, but ultimately realizes it’s in their head. It’s not associated with pain or with any disorder that we know of and there are no physiological medical consequences that are associated with it.”

Thought to be brought on by anxiety or extreme fatigue and occurring in clusters during stressful periods, exploding head syndrome is not dangerous, according to the American Sleep Association Web site.

It can be disconcerting, though, stirring up images of a David Cronenberg movie. “Individuals can develop an aversion to falling asleep,” says Kline. “They’ll develop insomnia because they’re concerned by these occurrences. But they’re usually rare. I’ve never heard of it occurring regularly.”

First described in 1920 as a “snapping of the brain,” there is little to be found on the phenomenon in medical literature. Some patients experience a bright flash of light along with the loud explosion or crash, according to a 1989 study in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry that looked at 50 patients suffering from the syndrome. In almost every case there are physical aftereffects, such as “a sense of alarm, together with a cold sweat, labored breathing and tachycardia” (a rapid heart rate).

Or as Raymond puts it, you suddenly wake up “feeling like a character out of Poe.”

As for the explosions themselves, patients have described them as a shotgun blast, a thunderclap, a loud metallic noise, the clash of cymbals, a lightning strike or the sound of every door in the house slamming. Luckily, the crash, bang, or boom lasts only a few seconds and disappears as soon as the person awakens. Episodes, which are usually clustered over the course of a few days, will then disappear for months — or years — on end.

It’s unclear why stress would bring on a crashing sound in your head, although some have speculated that it may be the result of a movement of the middle ear component or of the eustachian tube.

J.M.S. Pearce, the British neurologist who coined the term, calls it a “mystery” requiring further study. He also felt the phenomenon was not as rare as some believe, perhaps due to people’s hesitancy to discuss it. “Many [patients] said they had been ashamed to mention it to their doctors or that their complaint had been greeted with incredulity if not frank disbelief,” he wrote in his 1989 study “Clinical features of the exploding head syndrome.”  “It is entirely benign, and I suspect quite common, but underreported.”

Exploding head syndrome is said to happen more often after the age of 50 (although there have been reports of it happening in children) and believed to be more common among women. Due to the rarity of the syndrome, though, it’s hard to establish any kind of parameters, says Kline.

“I’m not convinced there’s good data that describes the demographic of this phenomenon,” he says. “I’ve only had a few patients during my career who have described it and no one has ever asked to be treated for it.”

Since the phenomenon is often linked to stress, sleep experts suggest relaxation techniques  like exercise, reading before bedtime or yoga to help alleviate the episodes. According to studies, a few patients have also found relief by taking certain types of antidepressants. A 2001 study in the journal Current Pain and Headache Reports found “most sufferers require only reassurance that the spells are benign in nature.” 

But hearing a sudden loud banging in the middle of the night can be very frightening. “So if an individual is experiencing this and it’s disrupting their sleep or causing them anxiety, they should talk to their doctor about it,” Kline advises.

Despite the sensational name, there’s no danger that your head will actually blow apart.
“When most people hear of it, they visualize an individual’s head exploding,” says Kline That’s not what happens.”

Man admits 16 charges of incompetence and asks to be removed from register

• Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 February 2010 17.12 GMT
• Article history

An expert in prosthetics who gave an elderly patient two left feet by fitting the wrong artificial limb has been struck off after he admitted a series of misconduct allegations.

Malcolm Griffiths fitted a left-footed lower limb instead of a new right leg to Patrick Morrison, 76, an amputee from Bathgate in West Lothian, and then failed to spot the mistake during two subsequent check-ups.

Griffiths voluntarily agreed today to be struck off at a hearing of the Health Professions Council in Edinburgh, where he formally admitted 16 charges of incompetence against him. He was not present at the hearing, and had already been sacked by NHS Lothian in 2008.

The charges heard by the council's conduct and competence committee focused on his treatment of 11 patients over three years in a rehabilitation clinic at the Astley Ainslie hospital in Edinburgh.

Morrison was given a prosthetic foot in November 2006 after an amputated toe on his right foot became infected with MRSA following hospital treatment. Griffiths then fitted the wrong lower limb and failed to give adequate follow-up care, which then meant the limb's socket needed to be remade.

Griffiths also admitted other charges of failing to keep proper notes, failing to deal with new patients on time, persistently missing deadlines, and failing to carry out repairs and leaving a patient in pain.

The committee heard that Griffiths was under close scrutiny by his supervisors from 2007 due to "ongoing concerns regarding [his] poor performance". But Griffiths failed to act on the recommendations made.

The committee said that he had "demonstrated continual poor performance in several areas of … work, failing to meet the standard expected of a qualified prosthetist".

Colin Allies, the committee's chairman, said Griffiths's admissions and his request to be struck off meant they could avoid a costly full hearing. "The panel is satisfied that it is appropriate and proportionate to make the consent order as requested," he said.

A simple case of miraculous conception

By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 1:45 PM February 1, 2010

Never bring your uterus to a knife fight. I think that's how the old adage goes, or perhaps, how it should go.

NCBI ROFL reports on the strange story of a woman with no vagina, who nevertheless managed to end up "with child", apparently thanks to giving a blow job, followed by receiving a stab wound. Trust me, you'll want to read the full summary. The case report is real and comes from a 1988 issue of the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Posted by Ivica Miskovic | Wednesday, February 03, 2010

 

A shocking story took place in China. A nine-year-old girl gave birth to a healthy baby in Changchun Hospital in China’s northeastern province of Jilin. Doctors performed Cesarean section on the little mother after she started having contractions.

The baby-boy was born weighing 2.75 kg. Medics said that both the mother and child were “fine,” China’s City Evening News portal said.

The medics of the hospital did not give any other comments to reporters. No wonder, because the subject of early pregnancy is tabooed in the communist country.

A correspondent of a local newspaper penetrated into the hospital twice in an attempt to see the young mother, but his efforts returned no result. He only managed to find out that the girl looked older for her nine years. Nothing is known about the details of the child’s pregnancy.

The police are trying to find the father of the girl’s child – they have already questioned the members of the young mother’s family. A sexual relationship with females under 14 years of age is considered a severe sex crime in China.

Statistics says that Chinese girls get pregnant and subsequently try to make an abortion a lot more frequently than it is believed. Chinese schoolgirls make about 30 percent of all abortions performed in the country. Female college students add another 20 percent to this number.

In 1910, a Chinese boy aged 9 and a Chinese girl aged 8 became the nation’s youngest parents ever. The youngest mother in the USSR was a six-year-old girl, who gave birth to a dead child in 1930. The little girl had been raped by her own grandfather.

In April of 2000, a Russian girl from the Rostov region gave birth to her child when she was eight. The child’s father was a 13-year-old boy.

The world record for ‘youngest mother’ belongs to Peru, where Lina Medina, aged only five, delivered a baby in 1939.

Ekspres Gazeta

Matthieu Ricard: Meditate yourself better

• 03 February 2010 by Curtis Abraham

How did you become involved in the science of meditation?

The Dalai Lama often describes Buddhism as being, above all, a science of the mind. That is not surprising, because the Buddhist texts put particular emphasis on the fact that all spiritual practices - whether mental, physical or oral - are directly or indirectly intended to transform the mind.

So it wasn't surprising that when a meeting was held in 2000 with some of the leading specialists in human emotions - psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers - they spent an entire week in discussion with the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala, India. Later we agreed to launch a research programme on the short and long-term effects of mind training - "meditation" in other words.

What have we discovered about meditation and the human brain?

Experiments have indicated that the region of the brain associated with emotions such as compassion shows considerably higher activity in those with long-term meditative experience. These discoveries suggest that basic human qualities can be deliberately cultivated through mental training. The study of the influence of mental states on health, which was once considered fanciful, is now an increasing part of the scientific research agenda.

Do you have to be highly skilled to experience the benefits of meditation?

No, one does not have to be a highly trained: 20 minutes of daily practice can contribute significantly to a reduction of anxiety and stress, the tendency to become angry and the risk of relapse in cases of severe depression. Thirty minutes a day over the course of eight weeks results in a considerable strengthening of the immune system and of one's capacity for concentration. It also speeds up the healing of psoriasis and decreases arterial tension in people suffering from hypertension.

Tell us about your new book, The Art of Meditation.

The book tackles the question: why should we bother to meditate? The answer is that we all have the potential for positive change, which largely remains untapped. That's a great pity, because we know the virtue of training and learning. We spend years going to school and training in things like sports, but for some strange reason we don't think that the same need applies to developing and optimising our human qualities.

Tell us about the Mind and Life meeting that will discuss compassion in economic systems.

At the conference - in Zurich in April - will be some bold economists who can demonstrate that altruists are able to influence global markets. In the past, such studies were often refuted by sceptical financial analysts. However, someone like Ernst Fehr, the famous Swiss economist, will show that if altruists make the rules and it is in the interests of selfish people to cooperate, then society can function in a more cooperative way.

Profile

Matthieu Ricard is a French Buddhist monk with a PhD in molecular biology. He has participated in numerous experiments into the effects of meditation on the human brain

Worldwide Day of Prayer to Heal Trig Palin: pray4trig.com

"Science has no way to undo this condition, which is the result of an extra chromosome; but God can. When Trig Palin is found to be miraculously healed, everyone but the most hardened atheist will have to acknowledge God's Majesty!" Pray 4 Trig, the "Worldwide Day of Prayer to Heal Trig Palin." (via Steven Leckart)