Oh my, people go for this?

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I was researching a college assignment today - "Pituitary Gland and it's Impact on the Body". As you probably know, this gland secretes GH, or the growth hormone or somatotropin, and that GH is essential for "normal" growth of the body.

As usual, I spent a lot of time reading information that isn't directly useful for the assignment but makes interesting read. While googling "pituitary and height" and other related terms, this stie often came up.

This is the first time I have heard of limb lengthening.

Read more on limb lengthening or whatever the hell it is!

I gasped. Why the heck would someone go through all that trauma for a few inches of extra height? Could you be so obsessed with your stature? I understand when some people have growth disorders, but I am amazed that otherwise healthy people also opt for this in great numbers.

Don't you think such a surgery would permanently weaken your limbs? Would a patient, who has undergone this, ever be able to run with great speed? Sounds pretty fishy to me.

I am not tall, but I have never considered this a handicap. You are what you are. Why would even governments allow this type of thing?

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Yes- it has been a problem here. It was for treatment of dwarfism and it had some negative side-effects.

It was hushed up I think but was covered on a Newsnight programme just the once. It was scary.

They had been collecting some brain extract from autopsies I gather and using it on dwarfs. I think some got that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease which is like mad-cow disease.

They offered the cause as cannibalism. Before the outbreak of mad-cow disease they had been feeding waste cow meat to cows. Scientists will go against the collected wisdom of the species in the service of a pet theory.

But that's all I know about it except that a bloke who visited mortuaries told me that there were a lot of brains in buckets and I assumed it was to get at such chemicals.

Whether it's been abandoned I don't know.

We have a dwarf come in our pub every now and again with his brothers who are all quite normal. In regard to their size I mean. He seems happy enough and he works in a local grass cutting machinery firm on the computer. The kid they showed on Newsnight was in a hell of a state. There must have been a few cases for them to cover the story.

Science is not all roses.

But I must stress that I know next to nothing about it.

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Wasn't such a method parodied in Flatland?

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Oh my, people go for this?

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