Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Sad, Shallow Values

Before
Ear Surgery (<span class=Otoplasty
Ear Surgery (<span class= After Picture
There we are, photographs of a sweet-looking fourteen-year-old girl. Smiling broadly in the "before" photograph, looking gravely ahead in the "after" photograph. The cosmetic surgeon who performed the surgery on this child is no doubt smiling too, feeling she had done her utmost to make someone happy. And, of course, collecting the fee for services rendered.

Cosmetic surgery is certainly not healing medicine, although it has its place in reconstructive surgery when physical deformation has taken place due to disease or injury. On the other hand, there are no end of individuals who are dissatisfied with the features they have been equipped with by birth and by dint of their genetic inheritance.

People have "gone under the knife", for a variety of cosmetic concerns and dissatisfactions, to achieve smaller noses, lift and tuck chins, erase aging lines, suck away unwanted fat deposits, firm up buttocks, and augment breasts. In South America young girls popularly look forward to graduation gifts like breast augmentation from fond parents.

And in North America, where the entire society seems to subscribe to the general dissatisfaction with the vicissitudes of DNA and genetic inheritance in favour of striving for perfection, children as young as five are expected by their doting parents to undergo surgery to make them appear, they believe, more attractive.

"The idea behind doing it at an early age ... is we want them to enjoy the advantages", explained Dr. Tom Buonassi, a Vancouver facial plastic-surgery specialist. "If they have a very, very prominent feature ... it helps them emotionally at an early age." As it happens, about 60 - 70% of cosmetic ear operations this surgeon performs are done on children under ten years of age.

Cosmetic surgeons at clinics across Canada are busy performing cosmetic operations to amend nature's errors in equipping children with 'protruding' ears on youngsters barely out of Kindergarten. Are parents aware, one enquires of oneself, that any operation undertaken with anaesthetic carries risks?

Are we so shallow as a society that we wholesale subscribe to the notion that we must be as aesthetically perfect and beautiful as surgical intervention can make us? Do we see nothing awry in endowing our children such such sad values?

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