Hymenoplasty has been practiced for decades in the Middle East and Latin America because of social and religious customs that stress virginity.

Recently, some leading newspapers reported that hymenoplasty, or restoring a woman’s virginity by surgically reattaching the hymen, is becoming more common among women of Muslim origin who live in France, Germany, Canada, and other parts of the world, including the United States.

For example, on June 11, 2008, The New York Times published an article titled, “In Europe, Debate Over Islam and Virginity,” in which the head of the French College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians, Jacques Lansac, was quoted as saying there is no place for this kind of surgery in secular French society, where the procedure goes against equality of women, human rights, etc.

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From Brain Bloggers and its editor, Shaheen Lukhan, MD, comes the first in a series of posts called Ethics 101, which are intended to summarize and comment on "the entire ethical spectrum of behavior by doctors, patients, nurses, and the entire medical system.

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Patients who had gastic-bypass surgery to treat morbid obesity show a dramatically lower risk of cancer than similar patients who didn’t have surgery, Canadian researchers announced Wednesday. The difference was significant in colon and breast cancers, Nicolas Christou, of McGill University in Montreal, said.

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