>>So, what is going on here is that they are getting practice on
>>families (and giving them bennies) so they can reconstruct the
>>faces and bodies of injured soldiers.
>
>Yep. This is not news and has been going on for at least 20 years
>that I'm aware of and probably longer.
Surgeons get "practice," for sure, but whether "practicing" liposuctions and breast augmentations hundreds of times helps them gain skills necessary for reconstructive surgery for wounded soldiers is debatable, as the same New Yorker article points out:
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." ("Chest Out, Stomach In: All That You Can Be," The New Yorker, July 26, 2004, posted online on July 19, 2004)
Yoshie