First It Was Barbie....

For those who wish that Michael Jackson could have left his once-handsome fact alone and simply age normally, there's a new and frightening trend among certain men that is just as bad as anything Jackson did. Some of what's happening around body dysmorphia is downright scary.

It's bad enough that women have long hated their bodies. Eating disorders, plastic surgeries, cosmetics, extreme procedures- anything to be beautiful. The cost is enormous to our health, our well-being, to our culture as a whole. We've been dying for beauty for a long time.

Increasingly, men have also been affected by the pressure to be perfect. Behaviors such as extreme exercising, chest implants, calf implants, extreme dieting and plastic surgeries have been around for a long while.

Now there are susceptible young men, caught up in the swirl of social media, who have gone to such extremes it may cost them their lives.

One 34-year-old Brazilian, Rodrigo Alves, has spent half a million dollars turning himself into a human "Ken doll." So far he's had 51 plastic surgeries and more than 100 cosmetic procedures.

Problem is that it's eventually going to cost him his nose. His nostrils are now so small that when he developed a nasal infection, his doctor was unable to swab him for a sample. If he has another procedure, his nose could fall off. He struggles to breathe. In his grotesque attempt to be perfect, he's suffocating.

It's a sad statement that doctors continue to work on people like Jackson and people like Alves who clearly have a serious mental problem. The compulsion to do more and more has enormous cost, not just to these people but to their families and friends. These doctors are fully complicit. Happy to continue to prey on these people's sickness, they give them what they want. Or think they want. They don't need surgeries. These young men and women need help.

Social media and the media at large feed us images of photo-shopped perfection. No one will ever attain what Rodrigo Alves' wants. He's dying to be what he will never be. The moment he sees a wrinkle, a grey hair, he will panic. The cycle will begin again. It will never end, the same way this sickness infects aging stars.

The cosmetic and plastic surgeons will be right there, scalpels ready. All over the world.

I honestly don't know which is worse: the media that feeds the false image, or the medical community that has the scalpels but no scruples.