Designer Vaginas - booming business on the NHS

"More and more women are said to be troubled by the shape, size, or proportions of their vulvas, so that elective genitoplasty is apparently a "booming business." Advertisements for cosmetic genitoplasty are common, often including before and after images and life changing narratives. Google produced around 490 000 results when we entered "labial reduction". Forty seven of the first 50 results were advertisements from clinics in the United Kingdom and United States offering cosmetic genital surgery. Television programmes and articles in women's magazines on "designer vaginas" may also fuel desire for ..... "

Requests for cosmetic genitoplasty: how should healthcare providers respond?

Lih Mei Liao, consultant clinical psychologist, Sarah M Creighton, consultant gynaecologist

Middlesex Centre, UCL Institute for Women's Health, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Obstetric Hospital, London WC1E 6DH

British Medical Journal 2007;334:1090-1092 (26 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.39206.422269.BE

The U.K.'s National Health Service in 2004 and 2005 paid for elective surgery on 800 women who had the size of their labia reduced. That's more than double the number of procedures funded by the government 6 years earlier.... who says that doubling the expenditure on the NHS isn't producing results ?

UPDATE - Toni Fabuloso calls (she gets weekends off) to tell us that in the business it's called an "Aussie makeover " ... y'know it's "Downunder".

For the diabetics amongst you the issue also contains the following ..

Study indicates diabetes drug linked to cardiovascular death

Janice Hopkins Tanne

A meta-analysis of 42 trials of the type 2 diabetes drug rosiglitazone (Avandia - GSK) has shown a significantly raised risk of myocardial infarction and an increase in cardiovascular deaths that did not quite reach statistical significance (New England Journal of Medicine 2007 May 21 doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa072761).