The owner of the French breast implant maker at the centre of a safety scare has been arrested in the south of France, police sources have said. How come the PIP implants made with industrial silicon, (more effective in mattresses) have been banned in France since 2010 and it’s only just in the last few months that we have been made aware of the scandal in the UK? 45,000 women in the UK have had the implants and up to 450,000 women worldwide.
Apparently the owner has been getting away with this for 13 years – he said that women are only coming forward in droves now because they want the compensation money. How cold and calculating can he be? Putting all those women at risk. The NHS have said that they will only replace them in exceptional circumstances.
I don’t understand how our society and the image of beauty can have come to this. We have all known the risks of surgery – infection, breakage, necrosis, death and yet from an early age we have created, through media images like Katie Price, a generation of young women who are brought up thinking that surgery is a normal part of the perfect body image that they would only give a little more thought to than buying a pair of shoes. How appalling. We need to get it back into the medical arena that it is and find a way to ensure that our daughters have enough confidence in themselves to want to stay as they are. Apparently 25% of women have surgery to please the opposite sex. Well, I have done my own mini survey and apart from the obvious jokes about large breasts very few men I know like fake breasts and they are positively horrified about the trout pouts.
If there is one good thing to have come out of this scandal it is that it has opened up a discussion about the health risks involved and made us ask not only how it could happen but what is it that motivates women to do this to themselves in the first place. Breast implants have only been around for 50 years. “Boob jobs” are surely SO 80′s/90′s – SO last decade.
I hope my daughter will take note and be massively put off the whole industry.
Pure madness.
Thu, Jan 26, 2012
BLOG, HEALTH