Inside the Minds of the Short Men Who Get Their Legs Broken to Add 3-6 Inches of Height

Some short men are so worried about their height that they allow doctors to break their bones during surgery.

The excruciating surgery can involve a year of "relentless, ambient" pain during healing, and the surgeons who do the leg-lengthening often give their patients pain medicine, which raises its own questions about medical ethics.

John Lovedale, a man in his mid-40s described by the magazine as being "built like a saguaro cactus" and looking like a brolic Neil deGrasse Tyson, said that they fill him with enough painkillers that it's not bad. Lovedale, who was five-foot-eight-and-a-half prior to the surgery and now stands about five-foot-eleven-and-a-half, said that he stopped taking the medication earlier than he was supposed to.

Described as a handsome and successful father of three, the cosmetic leg lengthening surgery recipient said that although he was not far from the average American male height of five foot nine, he was still aiming to be above average.

Lovedale said that taller people seemed to have it easier. The world bends for them.

According to the report, a 2009 study of Australian men found that men tend to make about $500 less annually for every inch shorter they are than their taller peers.

Lovedale allowed his legs to be broken so that the world would bend to him.

While limb-lengthening surgeries have been documented in one form or another going back to the 19th century and initially were used as a treatment to help people who had mismatch limb lengths, cosmetic leg lengthening is a relatively new field that has experienced a boom during the COVID-19

Although many short kings have expressed a desire to be taller, the steep cost of the surgery and the lengthy healing process make it hard to enter.

The surgical equivalent of a handheld drill is used to hollow out the bones of patients in order to make them taller. The nails add to the patient's height, but they need to be built enough muscle to support the additional length.

The procedure sounds interesting. It's interesting that anyone would take on such a huge medical and financial cost to experience the world as a tall person, rather than figuring out what it is that makes them paranoid about their height.

I would like to be a little bit taller.

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