The Cheerful Oncologist

"Boob job with your hot dog, ma'am?"

"Patient's Own Body Fat Used in Breast Remodeling"

These two headlines have something in common. Did you decipher what it is?

That's right - they both refer to the same news release about an advance in reconstructive surgery for breast cancer patients, and I might add they prove the theorem that many headline composers are nothing more than unemployed comedy writers. Let's parse this news by first reading the copy below each headline. Here is story number one:

A scientific journal says that women could be having breast-enhancement procedures during their lunch breaks as early as next year.

Carumba! Who would have ever guessed that women yearned for cosmetic surgery over their hot dogs? Oh, what a roguish sense of humor reporter number one has. What does the lead for the second story say?

Injecting a woman's own fat from her belly or thigh into the breast to reconstruct it after breast cancer lumpectomy shows real promise, the developers of the new technique say.

Oh...so much for the lascivious innuendo. Welcome back to the world of science, in this case the arena of stem cell research and breast cancer. What the investigators in this report are saying is that "they can create a fat mixture with concentrated stem cells, which, when injected into the breast, apparently encourages tissue to grow."

The key to the procedure is fat-derived stem cells, which supposedly are not absorbed back into the body but remain in the breast, stimulating angiogenesis and cell growth. The injections are meant to fill out the defect left behind in a breast that has undergone a lumpectomy or partial mastectomy, operations that are commonly used to extirpate breast cancer. Many times the affected breast becomes asymmetrical because of the surgical cavity, and the investigators propose that injecting the breast with fat containing stem cells will expand the defect over the next several months, restoring symmetry.

The largest trial so far has involved 19 women in Japan. All of them had had at least partial mastectomies and all responded well to the treatment, with no major side-effects. Clinical trials are continuing, and the company hopes to introduce the therapy to Europe in early 2008.

Leave to the disciples of what The American Spectator's Bob Tyrrell calls "Kultursmog" to take a medical advance for women with breast cancer and turn it into yet another puerile addition to the expanding garbage pile known as American reporting.