What The Great debate 📋

If you are anything like me, the smallest decisions can quickly become material for the greatest debates of your life. You can turn the tiniest molehill of an issue into a huge mountain of a decision just by sitting down and analyzing too much.

Sound familiar? Have you ever gotten weighed down in trying to make small decisions of little consequence and had trouble keeping perspective? I definitely have. It is so easy to take a minor decision like ‘what should I eat for breakfast?’ and turn it into a two-sided debate that can last long beyond normal breakfast hours. You begin to debate whether you should have a healthy, balanced breakfast of wholegrain toast and fruit or if you can indulge (just this once) in a less-healthy meal of packaged pastries and a latte. Did you eat healthy enough the day before to reward yourself with sugar-filled breakfast? Are you planning to eat better food for the rest of the day? These questions and more can add unnecessary stress and debate to your choice.

Those of us who are analytical by nature have an even tougher time not turning everything into a debate in our head. Take shopping for example. You find a great sweater on sale for ten dollars, but there is an even cuter sweater that you are sure you’d wear more. The cuter sweater, however, is forty dollars. What do you do? People like me start making mental lists of the pros and cons on each side of what has become a great debate during your day. Do you save the money but forfeit the better looking sweater? Or do you splurge and take some dollars away from another item you really needed to buy? What a task it can be to make choices like these when we let ourselves make big issues out of small ones.

Is there anything we can do to stop making ourselves debate each decision we make each day? I, for one, am tired of living this way. It is one thing to be intentional about the choices you make, but it is another thing entirely to overwork your brain with debates over breakfasts or new sweaters.

I guess I only have one piece of tested and tried advice to give people whose biggest opponent in any debate is themself: stop it. When you feel a silly debate about to be had in your head, just stop it. Take a moment to settle down your thoughts and to really consider how important this decision is. The chances are that it is not anywhere worth near the time and energy you will spend analyzing the choice. You will find, as I am beginning to, that ninety percent of the things I let become a great debate in my head are really not worth having a debate about at all. Have the unhealthy breakfast, buy the expensive sweater. Do, what you want. Just stop being so indecisive about what that means. 

 2nd)   *  The Great Implant Debate *

The debate on silicone and saline implants is a hot one. For a long period of time, silicone was dominant, but health concerns led to saline coming to the front.

Silicone first became a popular enlargement resource after World War II. Doctors would shoot silicone directly into women’s breasts to create enlargement. This direct approach resulted in numerous complications including cysts, sores and systematic illness. These complications led to the reduction of interest in silicone, but it would make a comeback.

In the early 1960s, two Houston plastic surgeons developed the first contained silicone implants with Dow Corning. To say the two plastic surgeons, Thomas Cronin and Frank Grow, revolutionized plastic surgery would be a minor understatement. The procedure because very popular, and there was practically more demand than there were plastic surgeons to satisfy it.

The implant was made of a harder silicone sack covering soft silicone gel. The implant was very popular because it held form better than saline implants. The implants, however, were not regulated at the time. As time passed, the Federal Drug Administration was given oversight and concerns started to arise regarding problems associated with leaks or complete failures of the implants. This was particularly true for second generation implants which were designed to be as soft as possible per surgeon requests, a situation that led them to be very thin and result in failures. One version had a polyurethane coating that actually degraded into a carcinogen, a product quickly pulled from the market.

The debate on silicone implants is heated, but surprisingly bereft of facts. What is clear is silicone implants leak silicone into the body. Silicone in the body is assumed to be a bad thing, but the exact correlation to specific diseases and problems are not clear. The primary reason is there has not been sufficient time to study the issue long-term and get verifiable results. Many women, however, have shown distinct negative health problems when suffering from leaking silicone implants, complaining of chronic fatigue, neurological and rheumatology problems. While studies have found conflicting results, it is clear women who have had ruptured silicone implants removed tend to show improved health. The debate continues to this day, but the FDA restricted the use of silicone implants to medically necessary procedures as of 1992.

With the restrictions on silicone implants, saline implants have come on the scene. Originally developed in the 1960s, the implants were overshadowed by silicone until the 1992 ban. Saline implants have a rubberized surface and are filled with a saline solution. In general, they are considered safer than silicone because leaking results in fewer health risks, as saline is not toxic in the body. That being said, there have been some complaints regarding saline implants. Specifically, the implants can be difficult to manipulate into the correct form, they can wrinkle and can bottom out – a situation where they sag at the bottom. While these are concerns you should discuss with your plastic surgeon, what is clear is the saline implants do not involve the risks associated with silicone implants.

There is an ongoing debate regarding implants. Since the FDA has banned silicone, it is a debate being won by saline breast implants.