Craft MD

Breast augmentation: Motiva® 525cc Demi implants, dual plane, six months. With liposuction of the axillary fullness.

The specifics, because patients researching implants deserve them: Motiva SmoothSilk, 525cc, Demi projection. The SmoothSilk surface sits between traditional smooth and textured — engineered toward lower capsular contracture rates with a soft, dynamic feel. Demi is the middle of Motiva's projection range: enough forward volume to fill the frame, not so much that it announces itself.

Placement is dual plane. Upper pole beneath the pectoralis — that's the natural slope, no shelf at the top. Lower pole behind the breast tissue itself, so the implant fills the breast rather than fighting it.

The underrated move: liposuction of the axillary fullness — the small pocket at the front of the underarm. Augmentation draws the eye to that junction; contouring it is the difference between a result that looks bigger and one that looks better.

Shown at six months, fully settled. Areolas covered for platform guidelines — nothing else in these images has been touched. Individual results vary. Shown with patient consent.

Fact-checked a viral parenting post so you don't have to.

The version going around: "Scientists followed 200 dads for 10 years and found one pointless thing that raised the most emotionally resilient adults." Compelling. Also not a real study. The numbers are invented.

Here's what the actual research says, and it's better. German researchers followed families for 22 years, from toddlerhood to age 22. The single most predictive father variable at age two wasn't income, discipline, or hours logged. It was how he played. Sensitive, challenging play: on the floor, slightly harder than the kid can handle, dad helps them win anyway. Those kids at 22 had more secure relationships and healthier self-reliance.

One asterisk from a separate 5-year study: roughhousing built emotion regulation when dad stayed warmly in charge of the game. Chaos without structure went the other direction.

So the internet got the numbers wrong and the conclusion right. The "pointless" game is the point.

Sources: Grossmann et al., Social Development, 2002. Flanders et al., Journal of Family Violence, 2010.

What's the pointless game your kid makes you play? Mine involves Vader.

A patient came to me after breast reconstruction with chronic pain. For the better part of a year the system moved her from one pain specialist to the next and told her that what she felt was normal.

It wasn't. She knew it wasn't. Not one of those visits sent her to a plastic surgeon to examine the reconstruction that was causing it. We diagnosed it. We corrected it. She went back to the activities she'd given up.

She was right and the system was wrong, and it took her a year and a referral out of the building to prove it.

I should say plainly that I run a cash-pay practice and I profit from the conclusion I'm about to draw. Factor that in. It holds anyway.

I was chief of surgery and vice chair for surgery across a national hospital system. I sat in the rooms where these decisions get made, and what I saw wasn't villains. It was a structure measuring throughput, volume, risk exposure and contract terms. All rational at the institutional level. None of it the patient in front of you. Physicians went from autonomous decision-makers to protocol executors inside a single generation. You still sign the operative note. You're just no longer the one who decided.

I didn't leave medicine. I left the part of it that had stopped asking my opinion.

Believe the patient. It's the cheapest fix in medicine and we are still not doing it.

A parenting account told me shared sleep stabilizes an infant's HPA axis and that co-sleepers score higher on emotional intelligence. Both halves sounded good. I went and read the studies anyway, because that's the job.

Half of it is real and much smaller than advertised: one cohort, one stressor out of two, at five weeks old. Half of it isn't there at all. And all of it is about newborns, which is not what's happening in my house.

My son is six. He slept independently as an infant. He doesn't now.

The reason isn't a cortisol curve. It's a divorce, and a break-in he heard, and a kid whose nervous system is doing precisely what it was built to do. He was never in danger. He understood what he heard anyway.

A child who wants to be close to you after that is not regressing. The independence he had at eight months is not a credential he can lose.

I don't need the study. The reason is better than the study.