This isn't true. There's an incredibly famous Brazilian plastic surgeon who usually does facelifts for the wealthy. Every year, donates his expertise to reconstructing the bodies and faces of poor Brazilians. There _is_ a connection and a guy who's had his chest blown apart will be glad that the surgeon practiced on enhancement surgery. As the PS my son saw said, most of his work is for reconstructing people with various deformities. It wasn't some ritzy facelift factory, though he did those on occ. too.
That said, that is also why I said what I said in close, "the gov't has always been about producing commodities". You bet those soldiers are going to do whatever they can so they have a highly marketable skill when they get out of the service. You have a problem with them working the system for their own benefit?
I know 10 guys who were in the military, and you bet your ass they wish they'd been able to make sure they got some marketable skills. But the military needs people to do stuff for which there is seldom a marketable equivalent in civilian life and they usually don't give a rat's ass about helping these people make the transition. They also give them a load of hoo hah about what they can do with their training and usually find themselves stuck in some track that pretty much allows for no flexibility.
As I said, the gist of your story lies elsewhere. But, I wouldn't be so sure that someone learning how to do a liposuction isn't also learning how to draw fat from the body which can then be used in a reconstructive surgery.
Kelley
At 03:52 PM 7/23/2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>DeborahSRogers debburz at yahoo.com, Fri Jul 23 11:13:41 PDT 2004:
>
>>>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
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