Surgery | featured news

Imagine a tiny snake robot crawling through your body, helping a surgeon identify diseases and perform operations....

Jin Xing was the first person to have a sex change operation in China and go public with it. Seventeen years later, she’s become a cultural icon in China and the government even uses her as an unofficial ambassador of the arts.

It is 50 years since the first breast enlargement using silicone implants. Today it rates as the second-most popular form of cosmetic surgery worldwide, undergone by 1.5 million women in 2010.

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who has treated former Vice President Dick Cheney for many years, says his long-time patient is doing amazingly well following heart transplant surgery on Saturday. In a phone conversation, Dr. Reiner said he was amazed by what he saw this morning when visiting Mr. Cheney in the hospital.

For some people with diabetes, surgery may be the best medicine. Two studies have found that weight loss operations worked much better than the standard treatments to control Type 2 diabetes in obese and overweight people. Those who had surgery to staple the stomach and reroute the small intestine were much more likely to have their diabetes go into complete remission, or to need less medicine, than people given the typical regimen of drugs, diet and exercise, the studies found. The surgery also helped many to lower their blood pressure and cholesterol.

Doctors at the University of Virginia successfully stopped the tallest man in the world from growing, the Daily Progress reports.

A small but growing number of teens and even younger children who think they were born the wrong sex are getting support from parents and from doctors who give them sex-changing treatments, according to reports in the medical journal Pediatrics....

Singer Adele has undergone throat surgery to stop a recurrent condition that prompted her to cancel tour dates and promotional appearances for the rest of the year. A spokesman for Massachusetts General Hospital said the British singer underwent vocal cord microsurgery to stop recurrent bleeding from a benign polyp. The condition is usually the result of unstable blood vessels in the vocal cord that can rupture.

Adele's voice has given her the biggest success this year - and the most trouble. The singer will have throat surgery and has now canceled all tour dates and promotional appearances for the year.

Steve Jobs had a long run with a rare form of cancer (a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor) that is sometimes curable by early surgery. While I was not his physician and don't have access to the details of his illness or its treatment, assertions that his use of alternative medicine shortened his life strike me as uninformed.