Doctors at the Institute of Reconstructive Surgery in Guadalajara, Mexico, were
shocked at what they found when Maria Concepcion Lopez, a mother of four, came
to them complaining of pain following a cosmetic surgery operation. Maria was just
the first of many patients they saw who showed strange symptoms following
cosmetic surgery. What all of these unlucky women, as well as 430 others in the
Mexican city of Guadalajara, had in common was that they had all had medical
treatment from a woman called Myriam Yukie Gaona, paying her up to $ 1,000 a day for the treatment .She said shell make us look like Barbie dolls,"1 said Ms. Lopez. However, Ms. Gaona was a medically untrained ex-dancer who passed herself off as a doctor and treated hundreds of
women before she was finally arrested. She claimed to be able to perform cosmetic
surgery but instead injected dangerous chemicals into her victims, leaving many
permanently scarred, The Mexican media called her La Matabellas, the beauty killer, although her lower said CC”... but she did not kill anyone - and none of them are beautiful
anyway.
Fortunately, not all plastic surgery is as unsuccessful as that of the victims in
Guadalajara, and most doctors who perform plastic surgery are far more skilled than Ms
Gaona.There are two kinds of plastic surgery- reconstructive surgery,which is done to repair damage caused by illness or accident and cosmetic surgery, which is done to
change features of the body that a person does not like. Over the years, cosmetic surgery has become increasingly.popular in the United
States - according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (the industry
association for cosmetic surgeons), more than 12 million cosmetic surgery procedures are carried out each year.
The most commonly performed procedures are to change breast size, to remove fat, and to remove wrinldes2 on the face, all of which involve surgery However, one nonsurgical technique is rapidly increasing in popularity. It involves an injection of botulinum toxin (BotoxR), a poison which temporarily paralyzes nerves. A ten-minute treatment of Botox, injecting it into the wrinkles in the forehead, paralyzes the muscles there, and can cause wrinkles to disappear for up to four months. In the first year of this treatment, over half a million Americans tried it, and today more than 4.5 million Botox procedures are performed each year.
Many people think that cosmetic surgery is for women, and to an extent this is true - 85 percent of patients in the US are female. However, there are sail almost a million American men who have cosmetic surgery each year. Why is cosmetic surgery so popular? In the words of one man who has had several treatments: "People all think that I'm in my early thirties," he says. “... when we're talking, I like to tell them my actual age and watch their shocked reactions."