Recruiting: So It’s Come To This
Posted on Friday, July 23, 2004
From Reuters, via The Agonist — “Bigger breasts offered as perk to U.S. soldiers“:
The U.S. Army has long lured recruits with the slogan “Be All You Can Be,” but now soldiers and their families can receive plastic surgery, including breast enlargements, on the taxpayers’ dime.
The New Yorker magazine reports in its July 26th edition that members of all four branches of the U.S. military can get face-lifts, breast enlargements, liposuction and nose jobs for free — something the military says helps surgeons practice their skills.
“Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible,” Dr. Bob Lyons, chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio told the magazine, which said soldiers needed the approval of their commanding officers to get the time off.
Yes, because nothing helps battlefield surgeons keep their skills sharp like doing boob jobs. Are we invading Beverly Hills sometime soon?
Sound Off, Loudmouth!
The New Yorker’s complete article addresses that:
“The Army’s rationale is that, as a spokeswoman said, “the surgeons have to have someone to practice on.” “The benefit of offering elective cosmetic surgery to soldiers is more for the surgeon than for the patient,” Lyons said. “If there’s a happy soldier or sailor at the end of that operation, that’s an added benefit, but that’s not the reason we do it. We do it to maintain our skills” — skills that are critical, he added, when it comes to doing reconstructive surgery on soldiers who have been wounded.
Some plastic surgeons question this logic. Dr. Shaun Parson, a prominent cosmetic surgeon in Arizona, says that cosmetic surgery and reconstructive surgery are two separate specialties. “If the Army is doing breast augmentations, it’s doing it to practice breast augmentations, period.” ”
Complete article here: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040726ta_talk_schaler
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I rather think they are practicing for reconstructing people after combat wounds–I’m no doctor, but I suspect practice is practice, and experience makes for good surgeons.
Would you rather your face be reconstructed by a noob, or somebody who’d done some boobs?
This barely twinges on the ire-o-meter, but then again I’m a bit relaxed generally at the moment.