36D-23-36 (.com): To Spite Free Plastic Surgery and Viagra, Playboy Gets Dumped

36D-23-36 (.com): To Spite Free Plastic Surgery and purchase cialis, Playboy Gets Dumped

Blonde and blonder … Karissa, left, and Kristina Shannon, Hef's new girlfriends.


Photo: Getty Image

Girl trouble, money trouble. This is not supposed to be the Playboy lifestyle. Times are hard for Hugh Hefner. The pouting face of Hefner's current troubles is Holly Madison, a former glamour model who is 28 years old, boasts measurements of 36D-23-36 (with the help of extensive surgery), and has for the past seven years lived at the Playboy Mansion as one of his official girlfriends. Madison is one-third of a pneumatic trio of blondes who star in The Girls Next Door, a TV documentary about daily life chez Hefner. Her status, in the show and in real life, is "No 1" girlfriend, meaning that she shares his bedroom, while the other live-in love interests, Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt, occupy smaller billets down the hall.

Last week, this cosy domestic arrangement fell apart. After weeks of frenzied speculation, on Monday Madison confirmed rumours that she had left Hefner for a younger and wealthier model, the celebrity magician Criss Angel.

The revelation left Hefner deeply upset. It also represented a severe setback for his long-cultivated public image of master swordsman, on which Playboy relies. But worse news was soon to follow. The following night, Wilkinson also confirmed she had ditched Hefner, telling the chat show host Chelsea Lately that she was in love with a Philadelphia Eagles gridiron player called Hank Baskett and had been indulging in "cybersex" sessions via Skype, from her room at the mansion.

For any man in the public eye, this would represent a bad week. For Hefner, always a creature of habit, it has made for a bewildering upheaval in the domestic set-up he has enjoyed since separating from Kimberley Conrad, his second wife and mother of two of his four children, in 1999. At this point, a brief history lesson: from the moment he bought the mansion in 1971, excluding the decade of his marriage to Conrad, Hefner has filled it with a rotating cast of girlfriends, who get a weekly allowance in cash (roughly $US1000 [$1500] at present) together with being fed, watered, and provided with health insurance, a car and free plastic surgery.

Despite rumours to the contrary, he enjoys energetic sexual relationships with them all (thanks, in recent years at least, to Viagra), and lives out the hypocritical male fantasy of a storybook sheik, expecting girlfriends to remain monogamous despite his own promiscuity. The harem has a 9pm curfew, except on two nights a week when Hefner takes them out, to a restaurant on one night, a nightclub the next. MORE

36D-23-36 (.com): To Spite Free Plastic Surgery and cheap cialis, Playboy Gets Dumped

Law and Medicine Rounds

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By Dainius A. Drukteinis, M.D., J.D.

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
- John Powell

Jury or Administrative Health Court:

Which Would You Choose?

Many physicians are critical of juries adjudicating medical malpractice cases. They attribute the current medical malpractice “crisis,” in part, to jury confusion over complex scientific evidence. In light of this alleged confusion, it is suggested that juries more readily fall for the patient attorney’s arguments. Juries are also perceived as being inherently biased toward the injured patient rather than the defendant physician. The Institute of Medicine suggests removing medical malpractice cases from the hands of the jury, and establishing an Administrative Health Court with experts as panelists. There is current legislation in Congress to establish such a system.

A recent study by the Michigan Law Review questioned these assumptions in Peters PG, Doctors & Juries, Michigan Law Review, 105 Mich. L. Rev. 1453 (May 2007). This was a compilation of three decades of research on medical malpractice jury literature including both large- and small-scale studies.

The results were surprising.

In a 2001 sample of 1,038 medical malpractice trials, only 27% of jury verdicts were for the patient, compared to 52% jury verdicts for injured plaintiffs in personal injury cases as a whole. Based on theories of negotiation and settlements, this appears to be an imbalance. The United States Supreme Court as well as prominent legal scholars has employed the 50-50 win rate to predict a fair adjudicatory process. On the surface, it would appear that the current medical malpractice system favors the defendant physician. This finding, however, was broken down further.

The review demonstrates that the degree of negligence or physician carelessness impacts jury findings. The greater the carelessness, the more likely a jury is to decide in favor of the patient. The review looked at seven studies comparing jury verdicts with independent evaluations by experts. In patient cases deemed weak by experts, patients won only 10-20% of the time. In patient cases deemed strong by experts, patients won only 50% of the time. What does this evidence suggest?

At first glance, 10-20% of weak cases may appear to be high, considering independent experts deemed the patient cases weak. However, this is less than an inter-rater variability of 30%, predicted by numerous studies outlined in the article. Inter-rater variability would predict patients to win in approximately 30% of these cases if they had been adjudicated by an expert. The article suggests that jury verdicts on weak cases are very stringent. On the other hand, in cases deemed strong by experts in favor of the patient, patients won only 50% of the time. In other words, patients lose half of the cases that experts say they should have won.

According to this review, meritless cases rarely win, whereas cases with merit only win half of the time. Based on these results, it may be patients who should argue for Administrative Health Courts, not physicians. It was the conclusion of this review,

“Although the current system of resolving malpractice claims has many shortcomings, neither randomness nor favoritism toward injured patients is among them."

Dainius A. Drukteinis, M.D., J.D. is a fourth year Emergency cheap cialis Resident at NYU/Bellevue Hospital. He may be contacted at ddrukteinis@gmail.com