Best Life Diet

Patients seeking out procedures on belly buttons, toes — and elsewhere : By Shaun Dreisbach

In his 18 years as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, David Alessi, M.D., has gotten a lot of strange requests: the woman who wanted a forehead implant, the one who asked for “ankle lipo” and the patient who requested he break and reshape her jaw for a bigger smile. “Nothing much shocks me anymore,” he says. But even he was taken aback by a 25-year-old who recently came in for a consultation. “When I asked what she was here to see me about, she said, ‘I want to have my belly button removed.’ Completely removed,” says Dr. Alessi.

As unusual as that may sound, more and more young women are monkeying around with their body parts. They’re shortening their toes, padding their butts with implants and downsizing their labia (yes, labia) to make them more “attractive.” These are the new extreme — or, as some docs have dubbed them, “fashion” surgeries. And while they aren’t nearly as common as, say, breast implants or nose jobs, they’re getting more popular. According to the most recent figures from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), 1,030 “vaginal rejuvenations” were done in 2006 — a 30 percent increase from just the year before. The number of butt implants rose 18 percent in that same time frame. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK - A simple saliva test may one day be used in ambulances, restaurants, neighborhood drug stores, or other places in the community to quickly tell if a person is having a heart attack.

“Proteins found in the saliva have the ability to rapidly classify potential heart attacks,” Dr. John T. McDevitt, a biochemist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Reuters Health.

McDevitt and colleagues developed a nano-bio-chip sensor that is biochemically programmed to detect sets of proteins in saliva capable of determining whether or not a person is currently having a heart attack or is at high risk of having a heart attack in the near future.

With the saliva heart attack diagnostic test, a person spits into a tube and the saliva is then transferred to credit card-sized lab card that holds the nano-bio-chip containing a standard battery of cardiac biomarkers. The loaded card is inserted like an ATM card into an analyzer that determines the patient’s heart status in as little as 15 minutes. Read the rest of this entry »