f13.net

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37925133/ns/health-skin_and_beauty/


:facepalm:

Just...

:facepalm:

Wrinkles are attractive. People are stupid.

Not to worry... she'll eventually end up on the internet doing ass-to-mouth. These people always do - I love the "shocked" reaction after it gets "leaked."

On a more serious note, I agree lore. What I'd like to know is: if you were to use Botox that often and for a lengthy duration, would your muscles atrophy to the point of no return?

You really needed to add her image under the quote for relevant impact and credentials on the subject.

It's already one of those odd scenarios where the bottom half of her face is in her 30s and the top half is 12.

Amusingly, my wife got told by her neurologist that the only FDA-approved treatment for --- I forget what it's called, but "twitchy eye" is what I call it -- is botox. :)

Which means my insurance covers it. And they'd do both sides. And her response is "But I don't fucking WANT botox. I just want my goddamn eye to stop twitching around whenever I'm tired".

I wonder how many people try to fake twitchy eye to get free botox? (Seriously, it looks annoying as fuck whenever she's exhausted enough for it to start twitching around like that. I'd go nuts if it was me. But I guess she's used to it.)

So this woman is going to eventually have a baby-smooth face and the rest of her is going to be wrinkly prune hell?  I've seen some people like that.. they are beyond scary looking.

I can't believe you'd even suggest such a thing.  Next you'll claim that people feign handicaps to get a parking tag or fake migraines to get access to medical marijuana.

Wait a god damn minute... weed for migraines? Son of a bitch, I moved out of California way too soon.

It's good for treating asthma too.

Who needs weed when you have Topomax? I don't get migraines (she does -- that's why she was meeting with a neurlogist!) and her reaction since finally actually getting medication for it, instead of suffering in the dark for a few hours, has been amusing. I can't recall if Topomax is the 'on-onset' one or the daily one, but whatever the 'on-onset' one is...

She says "I feel a migraine coming on", takes a pill that dissolves in 10 seconds on her tongue, and then spends two hours spazzing about how "the oncoming headache just drained away in minutes".

As awesomely fun as weed can be, it's got nothing on that. Then again, I view the rampant prescription abuse of weed just another argument for why it should be legalized. I'm hoping by the time I'm 50 I can light up without worrying about random drug tests.

Until then, I am forced to go without. Texas doesn't do medical marijuana.

I'd love to try that out, its too bad the great wizard that controls my insurance does not have that one listed on his magic potions scroll.

Looks like she got tits for her next birthday.

I didn't want to really put my opinion out there without gauging the crowd.

There is something wrong with her cleft. That's all I can see. Also, nice rack, yes.

No no no.. it's Tits at 13 when your friends are developing and you aren't. Botox at 16 when smiling and not your 40 hours of tanning bed use per week are what's causing wrinkles. A tummy tuck/ lipo at 18 & 21 because gravity's a bitch and not because you've never done a day's work/ sweated when exercising because muscles are unsightly.

I think I currently use Imitrex for my airplane migraines (my head hates descending apparently) and it really is pretty goddamn amazing how quick that shit works. I love living in THE FUTURE.

I had never heard of pot being good for asthma! IS THERE NOTHING IT CAN'T CURE

Topiramate is used as a migraine preventative (as well as many other things) while sumatriptan is used to treat acute onset of migraines.  Both are excellent medications, but differ in their use and action. 

Not to turn this into a pharmacology thread... I just was mocking the way people lie in order to manipulate the health care industry to serve their needs.  It seems to span the gambit from Botox, to pot, to morphine derivatives.  Hell, my ex is an ER doc and can go on for days about how the internet has helped narc seekers become much more savvy in their attempt to get controlled pain medications for their personal addictions as well as to sell for a profit.   Go go health care on a for profit model!

Has she seen an ophthalmologist?  I had a twitchy/spasmotic eye and it was a problem with my prescription (ironically it was too good). My eye muscle kept trying to focus my vision and got out of whack.

Stupid bodies, why can't they just work right.

They were designed by an MMO dev, what do you expect?  :why_so_serious:

Hmm, I get the twitchy eye thing, really badly sometimes. Particularly troublesome when you're a photographer and you're trying to focus a camera. Didn't even occur to me to see a doctor about it, I might mention it next time I have to go in for something less trivial-feeling!

Do we have a migraine thread? I'm sure it'd be a busy one if we do. I used to get them and they responded to rizatriptan if I took it in time, but since I gave up working for a University I haven't had a single one in 3 years. Stress-related I think! My girlfriend gets them regularly and they occasionally respond to rizatriptan, sumatriptan does nothing and the side effects of the rizatriptan hit her really badly regardless of whether or not it works. Personally I suspect stress is the main factor with her too.

Botox/cosmetic surgery at 16? Yeah great, we've created a society that alienates people from their own bodies. I'm also caught in the middle of this - the main thing people ask me to do with photos of them is retouching blemishes, wrinkles, love-handles, farmer hands and (oddly) lumpy knees. I've yet to meet a model who was happy with the way her knees looked!

gamut  :awesome_for_real:

If I still lived in CA, I'd be eligible for that sweet, sweet medical marijuana (glaucoma precursors, albeit stable and probably won't lead to glaucoma according to my doc). Stupid VT doesn't prescribe for that.

No, I'll mention it though. She's had it for two decades, through numerous eye doctors and glasses -- I doubt it's that. The neurologist was confidant it was neurological in origin, and that botox is the treatment. Her mom ALSO has it, so the odds are it's not the glasses.

Still, doesn't hurt to check.

Nebu: That's the stuff. She's still working up to her full dose of Topomax, but she's had two migraines since getting the meds and the 'onset' stuff snuffed it out before it got going. She's pretty damn thrilled to have that option. :)

I hope it works out for you, but when my wife tried Topomax she turned into such a 24/7 raving bitch from hell that she had to stop. She was also mentally sluggish and didn't like that.

What the heck's going on in this thread ?

Only thing about Imitrex with me is: it makes me feel worse than the migraine but once it wears off, the blistering headache remains. Relpax as well, complete crap. Bring on the joint.

Marijuana is not far from being an anti-aging agent as well...as it makes time fly by without you recognizing its effects.

This discussion of drugs and medical procedures makes me wonder if there is a huge cultural difference between the UK and US in medical treatment or if I've got some great fun to look forward to after 30.

There is and yes you do.   :grin:

She's been warned of the potential side effects.

I had a similar reaction on dilantin --- of course, that was back in the ancient days when your choices of anti-seizure drugs were 'tegretol -- we're probably destroying your liver' and 'dilantin' and under dilantin I made the stoners look alert and well-focused.

I went with 'liver destruction' (luckily, mine handled it fine until something better came along) and now I use a minimal dose of Keppra which doesn't seem to have any side effects.

But yeah, I'd have taken the seizures over the way I felt on dilantin. Mentally sluggish doesn't really convey the feel. It's like that stage of sleep where you're just awake enough to be more than a passive agent in your dreams, but not awake enough to be sure it's a dream or act coherently. Except it's all the time, and you're awake.

Americans are INSANELY over-medicated.  We have drugs for everything, and almost everyone is on something.  I'd wager that half of the posts here are either invented issues or highly exaggerated, though of course I can't prove it.  The point is, we are largely full of shit.  Happily, there's a drug for that, too.

Sorry for the rant, but this subject bothers me.  I'm sure none of you are abusers.   :awesome_for_real:

I agree, and can safely say I am not on any regular medication. I also question the diagnosis of my migraines - could be severe stress headaches or cluster headaches, but my PCP seems to gravitate to migraine.

Drugs for everything is precisely what the companies want. A medically addicted society is pure profit - esp with drugs you can not stop taking or drug cocktails that you have to take all of in order to "fix" one problem due to the target medication's side effects that also have to be treated. It really is fascinating when you think about it.

The average American will have 10 prescriptions per year (not necessarily concurrently).  Yes, we are over medicated. A good portion of my research centers on Drug-induced disease states.

Americans abuse their bodies for their lifetime and then demand a magic bullet cure in their final hours.  It's a primary reason why our health care system is so fucked.  Since we're service oriented, we pander to the self-abuse from our population because it's more profitable than prevention. 

/rant off
 

How does one exagerate migraines or seizures? Maybe I just had a really strong shiver mis-diagonsed?

01101010: I wouldn't trust your PCP with a migraine diagnosis. See a neurologist. It's pretty easy to differentiate between migraine and cluster headaches (they present totally differently), for one -- and stress headaches are rarely confused with migraines by someone with an actual knowledge of both. A good neurologist will take the time to make sure, unless you come in with symptoms that are so classic you might as well be the poster-child for it. (Auras and well-defined triggers, to name two).

Nebu: 10 isn't much, man. If you have migraines, that's 2 right there. Any infection or bacterial illness will add one or two per episode. If you took 10 prescription pills a day, that would be one thing. Getting 10 filled scripts per year? Not really.

Would love to, but need a referral from the PCP for my insurance to accept it. I love working for a health care institution that has my balls in a vice for any medical that I may need. Definitely will prod the doc soon enough.

10? Is that at the end of life? Because I'm lucky to have one or two to deal with something, but for the most part I've spent most of my life unmedicated. Hell, I reject psychiatric solutions to my problems most of the time, which has proven to be smart as life factors were a major cause rather than some chemical imbalance -- life reasons which, once fixed and I accepted those that I couldn't, made things a lot better.

LOL.  10 a year is beyond insane (assuming that's 10 different things and not the same one getting refilled), and that's what he said was the average.  I'm not saying that it isn't warranted in some cases, but I daresay that most people having 10 or more a year need to figure out what's wrong with their heads before they worry about their bodies.  I haven't had even close to 10 in my whole damn life.

You must not get sick. Or have kids. Or ever injure yourself. Last time my kiddo got sick -- lovely stomach bug floating around his school -- it ended up being three scripts for him, then three for my wife when she got it. Not counting the injection at the doctor's.

Of course, one -- or possible two, it was awhile back -- where simply so he could stop throwing up. We could have skipped those -- do medicines given to you in the hospital as you're hooked up to IVs due to severe dehydration count as 'prescriptions'?

I take three dailies -- Keppra for seizures, linsporil for hypertension that has ignored any other attempts to moderate it (It's been 130/90 for over a decade. Regardless of my weight, how much or little I exercise), and aspirin as about the only 'precautionary' way to treat a high risk of DVT. (First drug company to perfect a drug that'll deal with clots without making you a hemophiliac -- well, a drug that doesn't need to be metered via IV -- is going to make a bundle.).

So I have 24 prescriptions a year. Well, since I do three-months on Keppra it's only 15 a year. That's without getting sick. Add a case of the flu, you can add two or three more. A decent injury -- fracture or sprain -- three or four more, depending on how long I need to be on painkillers or anti-inflammatories. Food poisoning -- well, do you could the ER drugs?

Should I have my head examined? Are my seizures psychological? Will my blood pressure magically go down if I just man up?

Hey, maybe you're one of the exceptions...

But yeah, I have kids, and yes, I get sick.  That leads to a net prescription increase of exactly zero.  Penicillin would be a different matter, but if you're on that every year, something is seriously messed up.  And I don't injure myself enough to require a prescription (I mean, wtf are you doing?) and I haven't fractured a bone since I was sixteen, and even when I did I took a single pill for pain the first day, and that was it.  It isn't about "manning up", it's about being wary about what kind of terrible garbage I'm putting into myself.  None of this stuff is natural, but people don't even think twice about inhaling it.

People are just too quick to put what amounts to poison in their bodies for what ultimately amounts to a bunch of simple ailments.  Some of yours are more serious than that Morat, I'll grant you that much...that isn't really the kind of stuff I'm talking about.  Hell, I have to take a stupid statin for my cholesterol, and I only do that with extreme prejudice and because I exhausted natural methods of getting myself out of the danger zone (it seems to be a more genetic issue with me than a lifestyle one). 

So, 10 a year in specific case is probably understandable.  But an average for the entire population?  MADNESS.

You're the unfortunate exception rather than the rule.  Having a seizure disorder places you into a small minority as does having hypertension at a young age (since it's not due to obesity).  I don't envy your situation at all and am impressed by how you have managed to overcome it.

For the record, the list for exclusion criteria for the 10 prescription number I threw out was long.  Refills were not considered beyond the first fill.  Oral contraceptives also weren't considered. I just tossed out the number as an offhand way to demonstrate that our reliance on prescription medication is a bit overboard.   The number is even more staggering if you consider the millions of people that don't get prescriptions due to cost.  

I've got a number of things which appear to be wrong with me medically, but I probably average around one prescription a year.  Last year I don't think I was on anything.  My disorders are unfun.

Having severe seasonal allergies and bad GI issues means constant treament is a way of life.  As far as prescriptions, I only have 3 that I use and 2 are just emergencies (spray + epi-pen).  Weekly/bi-weekly allergy shots, claritin D (yay OTC), and omeprazole (only constantly used scrip) are part of my routine (lactaid and and something like pepcid as needed). At least I've worked the nasal sprays out of daily use, that was making my feel pilled.

Then.. if I get one of my many sinus infections that's usually another 2 prescriptions (antibiotic + heavy duty decongestant).  At least those have gone down in frequency. 

I'd like to be on nothing, but without the above I'd be walking around feeling terrible all day and then unable to sleep at night.  YAY.

Well, if they're excluding a lot of shit -- including refills, then 10 is a bad number.

But just because it's "a lot" doesn't make it bad. You need to make an actual case beyond "God, that's a lot of stuff our forefather's didn't shove down their throats!". It's not like the human body is a perfect machine -- it's a jury-rigged collection of parts evolved to last until 40ish, and anything after that is just gravy.

I'm not exactly a fan of pharmacuetical companies (mostly because I know exactly how much price gouging goes on) but the existance, even the widespread use of pharmacueticals is neither good nor bad based on volume or quantity.

Just as a contrary example -- the fucking whooping cough epidemic in California can be tied directly to crazy fuckers who thought their kiddies got too many vaccinations, and it was going to make them sick.

Did you see the part of my comment that said that I do research on drug-induced disease states?

Unnecessary pharmacy is why we're observing more and more drug-resistant bacterial strains.  Polypharmacy is a symptom of the breakdown of our health care system.  Take a look at the top 200 drugs by prescription some day.  You'll see that 90% or so are purely palliative agents.

Pharmaceuticals are a great and wonderful thing for some situations (seizure disorders, migraines, cancer, infection, AIDS, etc) but they've become a go-to for years of neglect and poor body maintenance.  Patients get ANGRY when they go to a physician and don't get a prescription.  There's something seriously wrong with that picture.

We prescribe so many drugs because a) patients want to leave the office with a prescription and b) if you tell a patient to go home, fix their diet, lose weight, and exercise, they will take their business to another physician that will give them something for their type II diabetes, a statin, a beta blocker, and a loop diuretic without telling them how shitty they've abused their body for the last 20 years. 

And we have non-drug induced disease states. And yes, people can be over-prescribed. I have no doubt that, right now, large numbers of Americans take medication they don't need -- or wouldn't need if they'd lost weight years earlier, or died in their 50s, or exercised more.

On the other hand, I bet there's just as many Americans that don't take medication they DO need -- because they can't afford it, or because they think incense will do more than drugs, or because they think they're 'over-medicated'.

And certainly you're right about many Americans not liking leaving a doctor's without something that they think will make them feel better -- whether it's placebos or antiboitics for a viral infection. And certainly that's something that should be changed.

So the average American fills 10 prescriptions a year. There's nothing magic about that number. Nothing to say it's 'good' or 'bad'. No way to say that's the wrong number. That it means Americans are "over-medicated". (Frankly, you can't argue it at all. Whether a patient is properly medicated is entirely individual. Taking some average across a population -- especially one like ours, with highly irregular access to health care -- is pretty useless).

And then, of course, there's the question of what to do with your titular examples -- the American who needed to lose weight and exercise 20 years ago, so he doesn't feel so bad now. Should we let him suffer, if there are drugs that will allieviate his pain? We lack a time machine to fix it 20 years ago -- and in my experience, every fucking doctor I've ever BEEN to has, in fact, started any general exam (as opposed to "I can't help but notice the blood dripping off that gash, let's stitch you up" visits) with weighing me, checking my blood pressure, and asking about how much exercise I get -- and then telling me to fix it, if it's wrong.

How does telling them "You wouldn't need this if you'd eaten better over the last 20 years" unmedicate them? It doesn't change their current medical condition a damn bit, and their current condition dictates whether they -- as an individual -- need medication.

I do happily agree that more emphasis should be put on long-term care, preventative care, and other such things that would lower the incidences of Type 2 diabeties, obesity, and high blood pressure. Unfortuantely, those are the sorts of things our ad-hoc system does very poorly with. Not because of Big Pharma, but because our medical system doesn't look for cost savings over 20 or 30 years, because the people paying for it won't have the same patient that long.

Nonetheless, that doesn't make your case that an average of 10 a year is "too many". Offhand, I'm not sure you CAN make a case that any number is too little or too much. It's a disconnected number, complete absent any real context. Like, for starters, what's the PROPER number? How many prescriptions a year is 'just right'? How few is "too few"? How can you say "too many" if you can't say "just right"?

Man I feel uber.. I haven't had a scrip in 4 years and I see the doctor regularly.  The kids haven't had one since the son caught strep at day care in November.  Woo.

Since this thread has derailed so far that it has found a new set of rails again, can I get your opinion as to the severity of this problem?  I have heard/read a couple of pieces over the last few years regarding growing difficulty in treating infections, with warnings that soon we'll have few real options against certain "bugs" (mainly found in hospitals, IIRC).

We're over-prescribed.  We'd rather take a pill to address the symptoms than work on fixing the cause of the problem.

There's also been a lot of redrawing the lines on "healthy" to pawn off prescriptions that have no effect or make things worse.  (Statins, I'm looking at you.)  Then we let Pharma get away with changing the salt compounded with their Wonder Drug to draw the patent out another few years.  Try to push generics or things like Vitamin C & D and they quash you quick, because those are cheap and they can't get royalties off them.

And I thought my daily 3 drugs were excessive.  Asthma is just not fun to deal with, although I could probably go off that drug and just use the rescue inhaler as needed and save myself the $20/mo...

This is already the case with some bacterial strains. Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA for example), Clostridium difficile and Pseudomonas aeruginosa are some of the main ones that have high levels of resistant and multi-drug resistant strains in the community . There are a very few anitibiotics available that basically have restrictions on their use (Linezolid for example) because they're the only drugs we have left that so far have low levels of resistance found in the wild.

Many traditional antibiotics are now essentially useless due to the rapid evolution of resistance as a result of over prescription. When penicillins were first developed they were a "magic bullet" that revolutionised infection control. Now they're pretty much completely unused outside of labs. Resistance develops quickly for several reasons (fast replication times, resistance genes being carried on DNA seperate from the genome known as plasmids, high mutation rates, etc) but over prescription of antibiotics is a major factor in this. In addition most people don't complete their antibiotic course but just stop taking them when they're better and this exerts a strong selective pressure towards development of resistance.

The other serious problem with antibiotic resistance is that R&D into new antibiotics is highly unprofitable. It takes decades of work and 10s of millions of $ to bring a new drug to market. If that drug is an antibiotic then the chances are high that it will be useless within 10-20 years because of the rapid development of resistance. Why would a drug company do that when they can make untold amounts of money by simply making new copies of Viagra and new drugs to treat diabetes and depression or new vitamin supplements instead?

It's hard to predict the precise outcome of all this, obviously, but personally I believe that we can't just leave it up to the drug companies to find solutions, we need a huge invesment into research to develop new ways to combat MDR strains and we need a major rethink on how to limit the spread of such strains, particularly in high-risk places like hospitals. Privatising things like hospital cleaning services for instance is not a correct direction to be going in.

And to lighten that mood:

Most prescription drugs treat the symptoms and make things more manageable for the person while their biology adapts or copes with the illness. That said, I have only taken 3 prescriptions in the past year, one of which was my own. Cleanest narcotics in the US come from big pharma companies  :grin:

What the christ, 10?

I've only ever taken drugs while I was younger, to curb the allergies, and the last two times I got any prescriptions were once 5-10 years ago for a serious sinus infection I just couldn't fix myself (most of them are pretty easy to fix), and once for an ear infection. The first was antibiotics, the second was just some slime inhibitor thing, and I was pretty chuffed that it wasn't some antibiotic.

Massive topic under a great deal of academic scrutiny.  Nosocomial strains of some bacteria are serious cause for alarm (i.e. MRSA) and some new evidence suggests that different bacteria can actually confer resistance to each other... which is really scary.

You mean cross-species? Yeah that does sound scary, how does that work? Plasmid transfers? :ye_gods:

Yes.  I've attended a number of talks in the past few years that attempt to describe the mechanism of transfer.  As I'm a chemist, a lot of the mechanistic cell signalling stuff isn't in my comfort zone, but the talks were pretty scary.  I'm sure a search of NIH.gov would turn up all the information you ever wanted to read.

Well if you wish to go down the route, this is mother nature's way of slapping the human race around with more and more trump cards. We are long overdue for a worldwide viral outbreak that kills off a ton of people (hence the hysteria over SARS, BIRD FLU, SWINE FLU, etc.). I think humans have advanced enough to control many factors like clean water, drugs, better foods, to keep the wave at bay and might have the chance to continue to a point - but companies will continue to resurrect the specter of a global virus outbreak that kills off a ton of humans to sell shit that might only affect a small portion of the population. And hey, if the population doesn't want to fork over the money for a life-saving shot in the arm, they'll just take your tax money by pushing the gov't to protect the population by having the needles at the ready.  

Viral outbreaks will happen.  We're pretty terrible at doing anything about a virus.  The scary thing is that we have a way to treat bacterial infections... when that becomes useless, then we're proper fucked.  Just look at average human lifespans prior to the discovery of penicillin for reference. 

 :ye_gods: Seriously? 10 per year? That's mindnumbing.

Yea, my parents who are in their 60s have a few regular meds they take, but shit, I've probably had two prescriptions (amoxicilan for an infection) in the last ten years. Canadians would consider anyone under forty that has more than one or two prescriptions in a year as either a hypochondriac or an AIDS patient.

Don't use yourself as a data point. It's human nature to decide everyone is like us, but it's not actually true.

Some people get sick easily. Some have reoccuring conditions (allergies that require a doctor, not a trip to the OTC antihistimines, diabties, migraines, whatever). Some have rough enough lives -- from work, from sport -- that they're frequently injured, and require something stronger than Alleve. Some have things like cancer or AIDS, which means your daily life is a cocktail of medicines.

And lots of people are just fucking old -- which means they need medications to deal with cholesteral, blood pressure, this or that other illness just from getting old.

When I was in my 20s, all I took was an anti-epileptic for the seizures and the occasional aspirin or NSAID for soft-tissue stuff like pulled muscles, unless I got ill enough to see a doctor. Now, I take three -- the anti-epileptic, a blood pressure medicine, and daily aspirin. Although I've been bouncing back and forth between steroid shots, prescription NSAIDs and cortico-steroids for the last six months trying to avoid surgery on my damn foot -- and that's been off and on for two years now. (I'm fucking sick of walking in pain from what is, basically, a damn pulled ligament that wouldn't heal, and then scarred).

I suspect as I hit my 40s and 50s, I'll take more -- I can think of two or three other genetic risks, just from my parents, that if they pop up require one or two medications apiece. None of which can be mitigated by diet or exercise, either at onset or a lifetime before.

So better than saying "10 is too many" -- how many, on average, unnecessary prescriptions does a patient get? How many aren't medically necessary? How many times do you leave the doctor's with a script that shouldn't have been given to you, in a world where doctors face no pressures to hand them out?

10's just a number. Is it too much? Too little? Just right? No telling, really -- not with our hodgepodge of medical data collections. But you might be able to tease out how often people get given antibiotics as placebos, or demand Drug X because they saw it on TV and the doctor just writes it to shut them up.

Mmm yeah enormous amounts of stuff turning up on horizontal gene transfer. Pretty amazing stuff really. Actually the basic mechanisms of this are the core of molecular biology and geneticists learning to use and modify those mechanisms in vitro created the discipline and it's tools.

Funny how quickly I forget this stuff. Only been out of the field for 3 years or so and already I've pushed it our of my head to make way for other things. Maybe I should install some more memory.....  :awesome_for_real:

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Nanogene  :grin:

Side-effects include zombism, creepiness, and gas-mask face. Patients run a high-risk of being hit on by Captain Jack.

Still my favorite...

(http://media.theonion.com/images/articles/article/1606/onion_news1789_jpg_600x1000_q85.jpg)

Haha!

So where's Pfizer's poster claiming that their placebo is better? Of course all they'd have to do is make it more expensive (http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20080204181613data_trunc_sys.shtml) for that to be the case anyway  :grin:

Pot, Kettle and all that.

Not everybody that is fat eats like a pig. That doesn't change that the majority of fat people DOESN'T have a glandular condition.


And lots of people are young --- which means they shouldn't need medication at all. Those cancel out your old people - statistically.

Here is a neat trick. Compare medical data with country of comparable health care system first world health care system. Begin talks with those data points in mind.

This is not Politics.

My apologies, that triggered a reflex in me and I got carried away. Two days seems to be my personal limit for letting such things stay unchallenged, I'll work on my self-control and wait for the move to politics for further discussion.

When I was abroad I got a total of 4 infections due to allergies. Strep throat, ear infections, and 2 head colds. I was on antibiotics, sudafed, allegra, singulair, and advair inhaler, as well as a rescue inhaler for my cough, and alieve for my headaches.

Meanwhile I realized that if I stopped taking allergy medicine, I could afford more useless shit to bring back home, so I stopped taking all of my meds and started using a neti-pot for my sinuses. My allergies went away and I never had a problem after that. Since then, Ive been able to concentrate more, and the ocassional scratchy throat and itchy eyes never seem to bother me as much when I'm not using steroid inhalors, antibiotics, a decongestant and all the crap they put into allegra D.

Point being I feel so much better when not dealing with the effects of my allergy meds that it is more than worth the occasional runny nose or sneeze.

Poll: Is it acceptable to give your 18 yr. old daughter breast implants as a high school graduation gift? Not that I even have a daughter, just wondering if I'm the only one who thinks thats bat-shit retarded.

I don't know I would need to see some pics to decide :why_so_serious:

Unless her tits are literally going in her chest, then I would say no. And even then I would've said she would have to be teased mercilessly for this to even be a topic. There are tons of men (and women) who don't desire their SO (or fuckfriend of the day) to have 2 ton tits that stick straight out no matter what she's doing.

Quick edit: Or, of course, one tit is significantly larger/smaller than the other, but that kind of goes in under the "teased mercilessly" bit.

Bat-shit insane may be a tad extreme, but it certainly sends every kind of wrong message. 

- That you should care what other people think.

- That you are your appearance.

- That the original you isn't good enough.

I have a 16 year old daughter and it's bad enough that I have to remind her daily that she doesn't need to be skin and bones to be beautiful.  Sadly her mother is the type that would consider buying her breast implants for her graduation, so I have that battle as well. 

How did you get along with the mother for that long?  :uhrr:

It takes more than five minutes?

Sometimes you don't learn things about people until after you divorce them.

I bet Drumm got big tits to help her career just like she got Botox for her face, even though there is something wrong with her cleft. Jesus what the hell is that.

Sometimes it's not about looking good yourself but manipulating others for your own needs. Or is that one in the same?

My (non-existant) daughter would be allowed implants when she's physically mature enough to be fully developed and mentally mature enough she feels she doesn't need them.

Zen as it sounds, that's my take.  There are still reasons one might one them, however the main reason cannot be thinking they'll improve your self-worth.  (It's one of the reasons I've never done so myself.  I'm still far too critical of my own physique.)

Were I to have a daughter I would absolutely never pay for implants. That's a decision you make as an adult who doesn't rely on the support of your parents.

That being said, I think most of the time that implants are obvious, low-class, and tacky.

My ex-girlfriend one day told me her parents told her that if she went to college in state, they would pay for a boob job.  Not that I would have minded the physical change.....but part of me just thought it was wrong.

If you want boobs, by all means get them.  But don't expect them to be some magical cure-all for your self esteem issues or automatically make people like you.

But sadly, it does make men like you, most of them at least.  :oh_i_see:

I'll never understand why any woman would want the kind of man that fake boobs are likely to attract.  Apparently they don't get that part. 

Creepy men are just a side effect.  :awesome_for_real:

There's definitely alot of "they shouldn't ogle and stare at me!" attitude that goes along with it.  I don't get it personally.  If you get them obviously fake, people are going to stare and that same breed of man is going to ogle and drool.  Sounds to me like a sign you went with the wrong size or poor surgeon choice ;-)

Obviously, acceptable or not, some people are gonna do it.
I wouldn't. Let her live a few years on her own dime before deciding that thousands of dollars for fake titties is a great idea.

My comment was more meant to be: If you use superficial means to attract a man, you're going to attract primarily superficial men. 

I learned quickly in medicine that the kinds of women that get breast implants are largely using them as bait to attract wealthy, materialistic men.  You get what you fish for. 

Other than things like having a plastic surgeon do reconstruction for severe injuries, you probably shouldn't be having any sort of cosmetic surgery until your body is done growing.

After that, well -- if my kid wanted it, I'd say LASIK would be something I'd 'gift' a kid for (assuming I could afford it, of course) as soon as the surgeon said he was old enough to have it safely. Breast reduction surgery, for a physical problem (I know one person that had it at 21, due to serious back problems. She's still pretty busty, but a lot happier). A few others -- mostly to correct actual physical problems.

For sheer 'I want to change my looks just because'? As soon as they can afford it themselves.

All men are likely to be attracted however. Its like instinct or something. It may be why they were put on the front.

I know plenty of guys who aren't attracted to fake tits, especially if it's obvious. Different strokes and all that, but not every dude is around saying, "Huger tits? WHOOPEE!"

Honestly, I think getting fake tits can also have the side effect of suggesting you're a brainless idiot. This doesn't bother the already aforementioned idiots.

Except you're wrong, since people have already expressed dislike. The vast majority of fake boobs are awful, porn has become a frankenstein show. One of the top ten most beautiful females I've been lucky enough to be with was extremely small-chested...and it did nothing to mar her beauty, if anything her confidence in the face of what would make most women either self-conscious or get surgery was even sexier. I guess it helped that she was almost painfully beautiful.

The only thing worse than fake boobs is botox on the face, especially the lips. Shannon Tweed paid a lot of money to fuck herself up.


I guess if you have a fetish for the Joker and the bride of Frankenstein, ymmv.

You want fake tits to look real? You need two things:

1) A very good surgeon.
2) A reasonable/subtle increase.

Americans don't do subtle. Even a full cup size is a pretty hefty change, and the bigger the change, the more obviously fake it is -- no matter how good the surgeon. Going from A to C or B to D is just going to look bad, but mainstream porn is all about bigger tits --- unless they're doing "oops, I'm barely legal" shit and I bet even that's seen cup size inflation.

There's also probably some basic bias going on -- a good boob job is the one you don't notice, and a bad one is the one you do. So you see lots and lots of bad boob jobs, and probably don't even notice the ones that just had subtle work done.

Then again, I like boobs and don't know why you'd take a knife to them without a good reason. (Like, you know "I'd like this tumor removed" or "My back hurts 24/7")

As someone who has never put up with a fake boob girlfriend (they are not that common over here anyway), do even those subtle increases feel real?

In fairness, I've known a number of girls that got boob jobs because they see them as a fun body modification, along the same lines as tattoo's and body piercings.  These were the type of women who had crazy dyed hair, dressed funky, and pierced all over, but I guess if your going to do those other things, getting a bob job isn't that much different.  So I can appreciate that if your into body modification as a whole concept.  But most chicks aren't.  They just want big boobs so people will like them.

What do you jagoffs have against big boobs? Better boobs through science is the work of the Lord.  :drill:

Nothing at the moment.  :rimshot:

It's more about misshapen, odd textured, scarred boobs than the size.

The only problem I have with fake boobs is when the butcher leaves bad scars. Other than that, bring on the balloons!

Of course, that's for women old enough to make up their own mind (and pay for their own damn boobs). 16-year olds and plastic surgery are a bad combination.

3) Go to Japan to have it done :awesome_for_real:

I was going to post something similar to what Bloodworth said.  If you're assuming most fake boob jobs are botched porno/stripper monstrosities, then you probably have a point.  But assuming the boob job is tasteful, then I think all heterosexual men are attracted.  Of course if men know they're fake, then they might have a negative philosophical reaction - which you may or may not understand or agree with.  Maybe they rightly think that the kind of person who gets her boobs done is too superficial for their taste.  But if you don't know they're fake, and you see nice tits, you're attracted.  It's physiological.

True, I don't have much experience in the matter.

So the one exception out of ten was small chested, but really it was because she was also painfully beautiful and extreme self-confident despite her size...  and there's wonder why those of us not so lucky get a little self-conscious at times? :-P

Its not about big or small, its about proportion.


Kinda what I was getting at.

You, my dear, have nothing to worry about. You're perfect.

I was just trying to illustrate that breast size had nothing to do with beauty, sorry if it came across the wrong way. There is something very wrong with a man who can't be attracted to a woman just because she doesn't have a couple balloons on her chest, but then some guys are repulsed by women with short hair. Whatchagonna do? (Another of the more attractive women I've been with had a mohawk and was then bald).

S'okay, I'm picking on your word choice.  And thanks.  I've accepted my lot even if I do secretly wish the Boob Fairy makes another fly-by on some days. ;D

I'd imagine there are women out there who wouldn't mind if the boob fairy took some of theirs and redistributed it a bit more fairly. Genetics can be harsh, and breast size seems to be one of those things that screw women coming and going.

Too small? You don't fit society's view as 'attractive' (even though, strangely, heroin-addict thin models with smaller breasts somehow form the basis of another part of society's ideal beauty). Too big, and you're often deemed less capable or dumber.

Of course, this is America. We're pretty fucked up about that sort of thing. :)

For some reason the Armour hot dog song popped into my head.  :why_so_serious:

I can see saying someone is not personally attractive because they're too thin, but bitching because their breasts are too small?  Crazy talk.

Milla Jovovich being a prime example.

Yes, big boobs bring on the "whoa boobs *stare*" thing, but I personally enjoy it much more if they're NOT overly endowed in the boob department. I guess it's just me being nerdy, but I prefer it when the women don't have huge cleavages that just end up sucking up all your attention, because that leaves less time for what I'm more interested in: the person inside the meaty bag of mostly water.

tgr's last interchange before the divorce proceedings

"Honey, do these pants make me look fat?"
"You're a meaty bag of mostly water honey."

tgr just failed the Turing test.

But he passed the Star Trek nerd test.

Yeah, if the Boob Fairy wanted to take a cup from me and drop it off with Lantyssa, I think we'd both be down with that.

The main thing about being naturally chesty is having to listen to dudes go on and on and on about how they prefer smaller titties in the hopes of standing out from the derrr heerrrrp booooobs crowd. So then you get the self esteem hit of OH GOD MY BOOBS ARE GIGANTIC instead of the hit the smaller boob'd get of "OH GOD I AM PRACTICALLY A BOY WITH THIS CHEST." Being objectified is a hoot.

At the end of the day, most any guy will be happy with any boobs he can get.  Men are seriously not that picky.  It's easy to proclaim one's preference when wading through the petabytes of porn on the Internet, but real life doesn't tend to offer someone their pick of hundreds of thousands of people.  Ladies, work with whatcha got, the guys will cope.

Self-esteem doesn't listen well to reason, even if you believe that reasoning with all your heart and experience shows it to be true.

God, but I do love posts about boobs.  I think we may need to start introducting photo evidence in this thread.

For me, it's more about shape than size...though BIG boobs with a nice shape trump all other boobs.  Anyway, while it might be one of my favorite (physical) part, there are plenty of other parts to factor in the equation.

I like all the boobies.

This is my stance as well, I've never met boobies I didn't like.

There are so many ways I hope this is wrong.

It's true, self-esteem prefers to listen to Society At Large rather than individuals assuring you that seriously, your boobs are fine. Let's blame the patriarchy!  :why_so_serious:

Oh no you didn't.