Summary
The U.S. Army now offers free cosmetic surgery -- including liposuction and breast enlargements -- to new recruits as incentives for joining the military. So far, the military has performed almost 500 breast enlargement surgeries, all at taxpayer expense, of course.
Be all that you can be...
Original source:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040726ta_talk_schaler
Details
-
There has been a great deal of speculation recently that the government might reinstate the draft at some point, in order to replenish the nation's armed forces.
- "Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible," Dr. Bob Lyons, the chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center, said recently, in his office in San Antonio.
- It is true: personnel in all four branches of the military and members of their immediate families can get face-lifts, nose jobs, breast enlargements, liposuction, or any other kind of elective cosmetic alteration, at taxpayer expense.
- (For breast enlargements, patients must supply their own implants.)
- For most procedures, there's at least a ten-day recovery period, and while soldiers are recuperating they're on paid medical leave rather than vacation.
- A Defense Department spokeswoman confirmed the existence of the plastic-surgery benefit.
- According to the Army, between 2000 and 2003 its doctors performed four hundred and ninety-six breast enlargements and a thousand three hundred and sixty-one liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents.
- In the first three months of 2004, it performed sixty breast enhancements and two hundred and thirty-one liposuctions.
- "The benefit of offering elective cosmetic surgery to soldiers is more for the surgeon than for the patient," Lyons said.
- 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.
- "If the Army is doing breast augmentations, it's doing it to practice breast augmentations, period."
- There has been talk lately among soldiers that this benefit is indeed being used as a recruiting tool, but there is no mention of it in any of the recruiting literature.
About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health researcher, author and award-winning journalist with a strong interest in personal health, the environment and the power of nature to help us all heal He has authored more than 1,800 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health topics, and he has published numerous courses on preparedness and survival, including financial preparedness, emergency food supplies, urban survival and tactical self-defense. Adams is an honest, independent journalist and accepts no money or commissions on the third-party products he writes about or the companies he promotes. In 2010, Adams co-founded NaturalNews.com, a natural health video sharing site that has now grown in popularity. He's also a veteran of the software technology industry, having founded a personalized mass email software product used to deliver email newsletters to subscribers. Adams also serves as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a non-profit consumer protection group, and pursues hobbies such as martial arts, Capoeira, nature macrophotography and organic gardening. Known on the 'net as 'the Health Ranger,' Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and personal health statistics at www.HealthRanger.org
Have comments on this article? Post them here:
people have commented on this article.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Email this article to a friend
Share
this article on: 
