This one’s for all our short kings and queens out there. Over the past few years that we’ve written Thought Starters, we’ve learnt about some weird and wonderful medical treatments (How Istanbul became the global capital of the hair transplant comes to mind). But this one might take the cake – a look at the growing (sorry) world of leg lengthening.
The surgery sounds painful, both to your legs and your wallet. For $75,000, a surgeon will break both of your femurs, insert adjustable metal nails down the centre, extend these nails one millimetre a day for 90 days, all to add three to six inches (7 to 15 cm) of height. Want to get a few more inches? Doctors can break your tibias and insert nails there as well.
A report by the BBC suggest that hundreds of men in the US are undergoing this procedure every year. And studies do show that short guys have it harder. A 2009 study of Australian men found that short men make less money (about $500 a year per inch) and a 2013 study of straight couples from the Netherlands found that women were taller than their male partners in just 7.5% of cases.
The surgery still feels extreme, but overall male cosmetic surgery is growing. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, male cosmetic procedures were up 29% from 1999 to 2019. So maybe we’ll be seeing more of these surgeries in coming years.
This is an excerpt from our Thought Starters email. Once a week we send you 5 interesting articles that have caught our attention, to get you thinking. No spam, we guarantee.