Background:

Promotion of plastic surgery services and other medical and cosmetic services is not well perceived by the mainstream medical community and by professional medical bodies. Third party health insurers are also weary of the practice and many have established special premium rates for new cosmetic implant users. Yet promotional activity by segments of the surgical community is taking place with increasing intensity. This has been an historical trend since the sixties and reached a crescendo in the late-eighties. With widespread adverse publicity from problems reported in the late eighties, promotion became less credible and implantations diminished. The breast implant debacle of the early-nineties further reduced the number of such procedures.

Following a comparatively quiescent period, public media-based promotion of plastic surgery, in particular breast augmentation, is once again in fashion with major promotional initiatives clearly visible in printed and electronics media. Much of it is of borderline ethics. Another part is disguised as 'medical news'.

Current Trends:

Since about 1994, promotional activity has been on the increase. As a result, implantation of new subjects has risen dramatically and, as expected, adverse reactions have followed. Paradoxically, products sold for breast augmentation have not improved. Some have actually diminished in quality. There is also a large segment of illegal importation of low quality products mainly from Brazil and Europe.

The promotion of breast augmentation is essential to the survival of the business, insofar as profitability increases rapidly with number of clients. Serialized surgery of the type which had taken place in the early and the mid-eighties, constitute some kind of an apex in the technology of rapid, low cost, short duration surgery for cosmetic purposes.

Media advertisements promote the activity with claims of nearly instantaneous results and minimal risk. Saline implants and other devices filled with assorted substances which failed in the past are once again promoted as innovations of great merit. Programs and articles disguised as medical research news are also increasing and have served to disguise the promotion under a cover of research.

There is no research in breast augmentation. Such work has not been carried out since the seventies. Devices being promoted currently as innovations are virtually unchanged from the seventies.