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On the verge of being the first to offer silicone gel breast implants for cosmetic surgery since they were pulled from the market 13 years ago, Mentor Corp. also wants to bring back the equivalent implant for men: the gel-filled artificial testicle.

Some urologists argue the prosthetic testicle, which the formerly Minneapolis-based medical device company has been selling in a saline-filled version for the past few years, has received short shrift from the medical community. Few doctors and patients even know they are available.

Dr. Paul Turek wants to change that. He set out to see if the benefits of testicular implants were deeper than just cosmetic by heading a clinical trial involving 149 implant recipients. The study, published in the October 2004 issue of the Journal of Urology, concluded recipients enjoyed a significant boost in their quality of life.

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This is a disappointing article that could have presented the evidence as to the effects of the artificial testicle on self-esteem, but instead chose to report the scantest of details.

Unfortunately, any article like this that presents no critical evaluation of any of the facts presented in the article, fails to provide even a slim Canadian perspective, and ignores the simple tenets of benefit/harm reporting tends to read like nothing more than promotional material for a company's product.

We did not access the press release that likely lay behind this story but we suspect it would have read very much like this article

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