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Woman Shocks Botched Doctors by Revealing She Has Two Implants in Each of Her Breasts
There’s a reason why you’re not supposed to have more than one implant in each breast.
Brittany Mann took the Botched doctors completely by surprise when she revealed that she had “stacked” implants.
“I’m super nervous to tell Dr. Nassif and Dr. Dubrow that I have four implants in,” she said in a clip from Monday’s episode of Botched. “It kind of feels like telling my mom that I did something wrong when I was younger.”
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While sitting down with the doctors, Mann explained that the problem began the first time she went under the knife.
“My first boob job was 600 CC under the muscle,” she said.
“Immediately after, my implant was actually poking out of my right breast. And my doctor said he wouldn’t touch it and it wouldn’t be worth fixing. So I decided to seek out other doctors and do consults,” she continued, adding that she “knew right away I wanted to go bigger.”
“You thought, If I have to get this fixed, I might as well go bigger,” interjected Dubrow, as Mann replied, “That’s exactly what I thought.”
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In the process of finding a doctor who would continue to work on her breasts, Mann said she “met a lot of great doctors who turned me away.”
“I had a very specific number in mind,” she added.
“Which was what?” asked Nassif, as Mann replied, “It was 1,300 CCs.”
Dubrow went on to explain that “silicone implants come in a maximum of 800 CCs.”
“Anything larger than 800 CCs puts the tissue under too much tension and predisposes you to thinning of the skin, atrophy of the breast tissue or significant capsular contracture,” he added. “It’s like putting a bunch of people in an elevator that meets the weight capacity. You can do it, but do you want to be in that elevator?”
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And that’s when Mann broke the news that in order to achieve her goal, her doctor “said we could stack silicone implants.”
“Two implants?” asked Dubrow. “You have two implants in each breast?”
“One’s below the muscle,” she explained.
Continuing, Dubrow noted, “You go to the implant company inserts, it specifically says, do not stack implants. It’s forbidden.”
Botched airs Monday at 10 p.m. on E!
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Shay Mitchell Just Fired Back at an Instagram Troll Who Criticized How She Breastfeeds Her Daughter
Shay Mitchell was mom-shamed by a troll on Tuesday, after sharing an intimate breastfeeding photo of herself and her newborn daughter
Mitchell, who welcomed her first child, daughter Atlas Noa, in October, took to social media to share an incredibly gorgeous breastfeeding photo on Tuesday. However, some of her followers weren’t so supportive of exactly how the You star is shown feeding her firstborn.
“Breast friends,” Mitchell captioned the stunning image on Instagram, which looks like it belongs on the cover of a fashion magazine. While so many people were touched by the sweet snap of mommy and daughter, not everyone was a fan.
“I’m a fan of her but this picture just says but it’s an attention getter [sic],” snarked one of her followers. “She’s not even looking at the baby, she’s not connected with the baby she’s connected with camera.”
Mitchell wasted zero time before snapping back, defending the photo with gusto.
“I missed the part in the baby books that stated I had to maintain eye contact with my daughter while she feeds rather than capturing an amazing moment we were having,” she wrote in a major snap moment. "Pls let me know where I can download your parenting manual, I'll get right on it!"
After all, she is right. While science has proved that breastfeeding boasts a number of health benefits and often improves bonding between mommy and baby, there have been no studies finding that making eye contact with an infant makes any difference. In fact, in most cases, babies might glance up every now and then, but staring into a mother’s eyes the entire time would probably be uncomfortable for both parties, tbh.
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Luckily, Shay has no room in her busy life for mommy-shamers. “I know what I’m doing,” she told People recently. “I have such an amazing support system. I’m having such a great time with her and I just don’t really pay attention to [critical comments].”
“I’ve really had a good experience, from even before being a mom, with dealing with negative comments sometimes and other people,” she continued. “But it’s never about me at the end of the day, it’s about these other people, so I’m just gonna let them say what they wanna say but it doesn’t really affect me.”
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ALMA spots most distant dusty galaxy hidden in plain sight
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have spotted the light of a massive galaxy seen only 970 million years after the Big Bang. This galaxy, called MAMBO-9, is the most distant dusty star-forming galaxy that has ever been observed without the help of a gravitational lens.
Dusty star-forming galaxies are the most intense stellar nurseries in the universe. They form stars at a rate up to a few thousand times the mass of the Sun per year (the star-forming rate of our Milky Way is just three solar masses per year) and they contain massive amounts of gas and dust. Such monster galaxies are not expected to have formed early in the history of the universe, but astronomers have already discovered several of them as seen when the cosmos was less than a billion years old. One of them is galaxy SPT0311-58, which ALMA observed in 2018.
Because of their extreme behavior, astronomers think that these dusty galaxies play an important role in the evolution of the universe. But finding them is easier said than done. “These galaxies tend to hide in plain sight,” said Caitlin Casey of the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of a study published in the Astrophysical Journal. “We know they are out there, but they are not easy to find because their starlight is hidden in clouds of dust.”
MAMBO-9’s light was already detected ten years ago by co-author Manuel Aravena, using the Max-Planck Millimeter BOlometer (MAMBO) instrument on the IRAM 30-meter telescope in Spain and the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in France. But these observations were not sensitive enough to reveal the distance of the galaxy. “We were in doubt if it was real, because we couldn’t find it with other telescopes. But if it was real, it had to be very far away,” says Aravena, who was at that time a PhD student in Germany and is currently working for the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile.
Thanks to ALMA’s sensitivity, Casey and her team have now been able to determine the distance of MAMBO-9. “We found the galaxy in a new ALMA survey specifically designed to identify dusty star-forming galaxies in the early universe,” said Casey. “And what is special about this observation, is that this is the most distant dusty galaxy we have ever seen in an unobstructed way.”
The light of distant galaxies is often obstructed by other galaxies closer to us. These galaxies in front work as a gravitational lens: they bend the light from the more distant galaxy. This lensing effect makes it easier for telescopes to spot distant objects (this is how ALMA could see galaxy SPT0311-58). But it also distorts the image of the object, making it harder to make out the details.
In this study, the astronomers saw MAMBO-9 directly, without a lens, and this allowed them to measure its mass. “The total mass of gas and dust in the galaxy is enormous: ten times more than all the stars in the Milky Way. This means that it has yet to build most of its stars,” Casey explained. The galaxy consists of two parts, and it is in the process of merging.
Casey hopes to find more distant dusty galaxies in the ALMA survey, which will give insight into how common they are, how these massive galaxies formed so early in the universe, and why they are so dusty. “Dust is normally a by-product of dying stars,” she said. “We expect one hundred times more stars than dust. But MAMBO-9 has not produced that many stars yet and we want to find out how dust can form so fast after the Big Bang.”
“Observations with new and more capable technology can produce unexpected findings like MAMBO-9,” said Joe Pesce, National Science Foundation Program Officer for NRAO and ALMA. “While it is challenging to explain such a massive galaxy so early in the history of the universe, discoveries like this allow astronomers to develop an improved understanding of, and ask ever more questions about, the universe.”
The light from MAMBO-9 travelled about 13 billion years to reach ALMA’s antennas (the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old today). That means that we can see what the galaxy looked like in the past. Today, the galaxy would probably be even bigger, containing one hundred times more stars than the Milky Way, residing in a massive galaxy cluster.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
Deciphering the equations of life
Research led by the University of Arizona has resulted in a set of equations that describes and predicts commonalities across life despite its enormous diversity.
“Our study develops a general theory to study the extraordinary diversity of life using simple rules common to all species. We can further apply these rules to predict specific traits of species that we might know a lot less about,” said Joseph ‘Robbie’ Burger, an ecology and evolutionary biology postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of the Environment and the Bridging Biodiversity and Conservation Science program at the University of Arizona. These specific traits, include the timing of an organism’s reproduction and death, called an organism’s life history.
Burger is lead author on a paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which also included collaborators from Missouri University Science and Technology and the University of New Mexico.
“When thinking about the enormous varieties of lifeforms, it would seem that life is very complicated and wouldn’t be that predictable,” he said. But whether you’re as large as a whale or as tiny as plankton, or whether you’re a giant clam that lays millions of eggs at once or an elephant that births a few 250-pound calves in a lifetime, all species have evolved to reproduce, grow, survive and replace within universal biophysical constraints.
“If you impose these constraints on the mathematical model, then certain unifying patterns fall out,” Burger said.
One of the constraints is demography. Regardless of the number of offspring produced in a lifetime, on average, only two survive to replace the parents. Another constraint is mass-energy balance. Living things allocate energy to bodily maintenance, growth and reproduction, all of which must balance in a lifecycle.
Imposing these constraints explains two fundamental tradeoffs in how organisms reproduce: the tradeoff between number and size of offspring, and between parental investment in offspring and offspring growth.
“What’s so cool about these equations is that to solve it, all you have to know are two values — the size of the offspring at independence and the adult size,” Burger said. “If you plug that into the equation, you get the number of offspring an organism will produce in a lifetime and myriad other life history characteristics.”
To arrive at this new understanding of how organisms allocate energy to growth, reproduction and survival, Burger and his colleagues compiled published data on the life histories of a diverse array of wild animals in stable populations.
Their new theory refines old understandings about life history tradeoffs. Past assumptions were that offspring size and number increased or decreased at the same rate. For example, elephants have relatively large calves, so they have few in a lifetime, while tuna produce millions of tiny eggs. It turns out that the relationship is not so straightforward, a realization that inspired Burger’s work.
“We now need to put these equations to practice by developing user-friendly programming tools, collaborating with field scientists refine ecosystem models and informing management decisions,” he said.
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Materials provided by University of Arizona. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
All age groups worldwide ‘at high risk’ of drop in children’s physical activity
Emphasis on particular groups hinders efforts to address the problem of declining physical activity in children, according to a study led at the University of Strathclyde.
A review of more than 50 published studies, covering a total of 22,000 children, found that children of all ages around the world are at risk from a decline in physical activity. It fell steadily from the age of four or five, in both boys and girls and in every part of the world covered by the study.
Daily activity fell by three to four minutes each year overall, although it remained higher at weekends and on holidays.
Previous Strathclyde-led research found that physical activity levels might start tailing off as early as the age of seven, rather than during adolescence as is widely believed. It studied children in the north-east of England but the new research, published in Obesity Reviews, suggests that the drop in physical activity is a global issue.
The study also involved researchers from University College London, the University of Glasgow and the Aspetar Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Hospital in Doha, Qatar.
It comes as a World Health Organization survey finds that more than 80% of girls and boys aged between 11 and 17 globally did not meet current recommendations of at least one hour of physical activity per day.
Professor John Reilly, of Strathclyde’s School of Psychological Sciences & Health, was a partner in the new Strathclyde-led study. He said: “Higher levels of what is defined as moderate to vigorous physical activity in children improve their bone health, brain development and learning, levels of body fatness, cardiovascular and metabolic health and sleep.
“However, despite these many important benefits, only a minority of children and adolescents meet recommended levels of physical activity.
“The view that physical activity is high in children and does not decline until adolescence — and even then chiefly among girls — continues to be widely held among policymakers and practitioners around the world.
“As a result, policies and practices aimed at promoting activity have focused on adolescent girls, who are seen as a group at high risk group of low and declining physical activity; our study indicates that, while the relative decline is greater among girls, there is no one high risk group. All children face a high risk and physical activity needs to be promoted to them — and their parents — before they even start school.
“While we found a lack of studies covering developing countries, our findings do appear to bear out the conclusions of previous research and suggest that this is a worldwide problem.”
The research assessed studies of children and young people aged between two and 18, which measured activity with accelerometer devices. The individual studies covered Australia, New Zealand, the US, Mexico and numerous countries in Europe, including the UK.
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Materials provided by University of Strathclyde. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
White Island volcano: Why New Zealand is importing skin
The number of people with severe burns means doctors are sourcing donor skin from the US.
Health24.com | Can air pollution take a toll on your memory?
Air pollution may trigger Alzheimer’s-like brain changes and speed memory decline in older adults, a new study suggests.
Previous research has implied that exposure to fine particle air pollution increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia, but it wasn’t clear how this type of pollution affects the brain and memory.
Exposure to fine particle pollution
“This is the first study to really show, in a statistical model, that air pollution was associated with changes in people’s brains and that those changes were then connected with declines in memory performance,” said researcher Andrew Petkus. He’s an assistant professor of clinical neurology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.
“Our hope is that by better understanding the underlying brain changes caused by air pollution, researchers will be able to develop interventions to help people with or at risk for cognitive decline,” Petkus explained in a university news release.
The study included nearly 1 000 women, aged 73 to 87, who had brain scans five years apart. The researchers also assessed information about where the women lived and environmental data from those locations to estimate the women’s exposure to fine particle pollution.
The results showed that women who were exposed to higher levels of fine particle air pollution had more Alzheimer’s-like changes in brain structure and greater memory declines than those with less exposure to such pollution. But the study only showed an association, and couldn’t prove that air pollution caused brain changes or memory declines.
Tiny air particles
Alzheimer’s is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. There’s no cure or treatment.
“This study provides another piece of the Alzheimer’s disease puzzle by identifying some of the brain changes linking air pollution and memory declines. Each research study gets us one step closer to solving the Alzheimer’s disease epidemic,” Petkus said.
Fine particle air pollution – which is inhaled easily, and reaches and accumulates in the brain – has been linked with asthma, heart disease, lung disease and premature death. These tiny air particles come from industrial production, forest fires or vehicles, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
The findings were published in the journal Brain.
Image credit: iStock
Health24.com | Telling the complex story of ‘medical xenophobia’ in South Africa
The phrase “medical xenophobia” is often used to describe the negative attitudes and practices of South African health care professionals towards refugees and migrants. It is used whenever foreign nationals are denied access to any medical treatment or care.
Research on migration and health in South Africa has documented public health care providers as indiscriminately practising “medical xenophobia”. But this dominant, single narrative around migrants and health care is misleading.
My recent research showed that there was more complexity, ambivalence and a range of possible experiences of non-nationals in South Africa’s public health care system. I conducted the research in a public health clinic in Musina, a small town on the border of South Africa and Zimbabwe.
I found that frontline health care workers provided services, including HIV treatment, to black African migrants who are often at the receiving end of xenophobic sentiment and violence. This was in spite of several institutional and policy-related challenges.
Discretion and innovation played a crucial role in inclusive health care delivery to migrants in a country marred by high xenophobic sentiment. This was because health care providers subscribed to an ethos of what was right for the patient.
Public health and individual discretion
There are a few issues with the current framing of “medical xenophobia”. First, the focus on attitudes – and not health care delivery – reflects a particular generalisation of how health providers are perceived to treat African migrants in South Africa.
This framing does not consider challenges facing the health system. These include shortages of medical personnel. Many migrants seeking care in South Africa’s public health system do face challenges arising from being “foreigners”. But there are other grounds beyond citizenship or legal status on which medical care might be denied. Not all cases of poor treatment are “medical xenophobia”.
South Africans also face challenges with the public health care system. These are related to the general shortages of nurses and doctors. Other challenges include high bed occupancy, high workload, low morale among nurses in public health facilities and the burden of the HIV pandemic.
Second, existing policy responses to communicable diseases in South Africa and the southern African region do not adequately cater for migrants. For example, treatment guidelines in South Africa have been found to be incomplete or inapplicable to migrant patients. Policies and programmes in the Southern African Development Community on communicable diseases such as HIV do not extend to migrant patients.
Health care providers often have to operate within these institutional, bureaucratic and policy constraints.
This scenario makes frontline discretion unavoidable. Health care providers have to rely on their own judgement to determine what “best practices” to invoke with relatively little input or interference from other institutions.
In spite of these challenges, frontline health care providers were doing their best to provide health services to black African migrants. They bypassed institutional and policy-related barriers to registering and treating undocumented migrants, non-native speaking migrants and migrants without referral letters.
This suggests that the experiences of non-nationals in South Africa’s public health care system were more complex and varied than implied by the dominant discourse on “medical xenophobia”.
It is true that some health care providers stereotyped migrant patients and blamed them for their destitution. But my research showed that these stereotypes didn’t directly translate to the exclusion of migrant patients from health care services. This was because of the health workers’ strong professional conduct and an awareness of the public health implications of not providing migrant patients with HIV treatment.
Working around the system
Health care providers in the clinic I visited came up with a system of using the date of birth to identify and keep a record of undocumented migrant patients. This replaced the 13-digit South African identity number, which is normally used to open patient files. Several of them used notions of morality, ethics and public service to frame their decision making. They understood health care to be a right for everyone, in line with Section 27 of the country’s constitution.
Others provided HIV treatment to migrant patients without referral letters. This decision was also mediated by how patients professed their “belonging” through “alternative” forms of knowledge and expertise. For example, one nurse claimed that she only provided anteretroviral therapy if migrant patients demonstrated knowledge of their medication, or if they brought a medicine container for a refill.
Health care providers reported difficulties interacting with migrant patients who spoke Swahili, French, Portuguese or Chewa. Staff and local patients worked together to ensure that migrant patients accessed health care services, often in extremely demanding circumstances. Health care providers made the effort to connect with migrant patients through informal interpreters by asking co-workers or patients fluent in these non-native languages to translate in English or other native languages.
These health care providers didn’t use language, documentation and referral letters to discriminate against migrant patients. They used innovation, creativity and compromise to provide services to migrant patients living with HIV.
Way forward
Policymakers need to recognise the importance of human relationships, communication networks, leadership and motivation in strengthening the country’s ailing public health system.
More crucially, activists need to identify the informal, inclusive and innovative practices of health care providers in addressing challenges related to documentation, referrals and language.
This should be coupled with calls to strengthen and invest in these grassroots responses to build greater solidarity. This is what can be done while waiting for policymakers to respond to ongoing calls for public health care systems to adequately engage with mobility.
Kudakwashe Vanyoro, Research Communications Officer and Doctoral Researcher at the African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Health24.com | Study finds smog particles can reach developing foetus
Air pollution can penetrate a pregnant woman’s placenta and potentially threaten the health of a developing foetus, new research warns.
The study is “the first to show that air pollution particles can reach the foetal side of the placenta,” said study author Hannelore Bove, a postdoctoral researcher with the Centre for Environmental Sciences and Biomedical Research Institute at Hasselt University in Diepenbeek, Belgium.
Black carbon particles
The finding follows an analysis of high-resolution images taken of placenta tissue retrieved from 28 women who had just given birth at East-Limburg Hospital in Genk, Belgium.
Five gave birth prematurely, while the remainder carried to term. In each case, placenta tissue was retrieved within 10 minutes after delivery.
Bove and the research team reported detecting black carbon particles – most commonly produced by fossil fuel combustion – in the placenta of all the participating mothers.
But the tissue of those residing in relatively polluted areas had collected notably higher levels of carbon particles in their placenta than those from less polluted locations.
The study was published in Nature Communications.
Whether those particles definitely harm foetal development remains an open question. The researchers only set out to see whether pollution was present in the placenta. “This is the subject for another study,” said Bove.
Barrier against toxicants
Still, the new findings underscore a basic fact: that a mother’s environment is also the foetus’ environment. And the placenta cannot offer fool-proof protection from the outside world.
“The placenta’s principal function is to deliver nutrition and oxygen to the foetus,” explained study corresponding author Tim Nawrot, a professor of environmental epidemiology at Hasselt University. “But to some extent, it also forms a barrier against toxicants.”
In fact, “decades ago it was thought that nothing can cross the placenta,” said Bove. “And that the foetus is completely safe inside the womb.”
But in the 1960s, the thalidomide crisis shattered that belief, she noted. The infamous sleeping pill’s ingredients were found to have crossed the placenta in pregnant women, triggering massive birth defects.
Since then, it’s become clear that all kinds of substances – including alcohol, drugs and now fossil fuel pollution – can and do cross the placenta, said Bove.
Placental inflammation
Once inside the placenta, foetal exposure to pollution rings a number of alarm bells.
For one, “black carbon particles are thought to be especially toxic, since they can absorb toxic compounds like, for example, heavy metals and benzene,” said Bove. Such cancer-causing agents can mix with the oxygen and nutrients that feed a developing foetus.
Ingestion of combustion pollution can also boost infection risk, trigger problematic alterations at the molecular level, and provoke placental inflammation, according to Dr Mitchell Kramer.
Kramer, who was not part of the study team, is chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at Northwell Health’s Huntington Hospital, in Huntington, New York. He warned that such inflammation “is known to be associated with low birth weight and preterm birth, which lead to adverse developmental and cognitive impairment”.
The bottom line, Kramer suggested, is that it’s “indisputable” that inhalation of smog pollution poses a real danger to foetal health.
Changes in daily routines
What can expectant parents do? Both study authors said there is no easy answer.
“Individuals cannot do much to avoid pollution,” said Nawrot.
And Bove said that “moving homes is not realistic” for most people living in highly polluted areas.
“But small changes in daily routines may already reduce the exposure levels,” she added. Using candles, cooking with gas or wood, barbecues, and walking near busy roads are avoidable, she said, and women should “limit their time in the neighbourhood of these sources”.
Image credit: iStock
