> On Sat, 26 Jul 2003 21:45:27 -0700 (PDT), mike larkin
> <mike_larkin2001 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > "A boob job is certainly safer than eating arsenic or
> > removing ribs, things earlier generations of women did
> > for beauty......Feminists always wanted women to
> > control their own bodies. Doesn't this count?"
> >
> > http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/clevey/?id=110003782
>
> Here's a story y'all might get a kick out of. I did an article a few years
> back about the problems in communicating science in the news media--
> touching on things like concentrated ownership, the role of public
> relations companies, techniques like video-news releases and "astroturf"
> organizations. I also talked about how even peer-reviewed medical journals
> weren't immune to these things. While I discussed some cases of medical
> research fraud, one topic I _didn't_ discuss was the then-current
> controversy over breast implants. That would've required a whole article in
> and of itself.
>
> Well, after the article appeared, I got this angry letter from a dentist in
> New York State. The guy complained about how I was "excessively tolerant of
> junk science"-- the same kind of junk science which took silicone breast
> implants off the market, depriving women such as his _own wife_ from the
> most effective treatment possible for breast cancer. This is just a
> paraphrase, but this really was his argument.
>
> So I got to write a reply. I pointed out that the most effective treatment
> for breast cancer was-- and sadly, still is-- a radical total mastectomy. I
> explained that, while most women who undergo mastectomies use implants as
> prostheses, but the "filler" has no bearing on the treatment. And it was a
> _real_ pleasure to say that this dentist was trying to use the suffering of
> thousands of women, including his own wife, to score cheap and fallacious
> points.
one might say that its the most effective treatment for HIS suffering from his wife's breast cancer.
-gr