One man described this week how he'd paid over 30 grand in order to gain two inches in height. The details of the operation were gruesome (look away now if you're squeamish). They involved breaking bones and stretching them with a medieval looking contraption.

All this pain for a man who, at 5ft 7in was of average stature. Why would anyone put themselves through that?

And what about all those tens of thousands of women who had breast augmentation surgery - and now learn that some of the implants used were filled with stuff designed for injecting into mattresses? (Odd mattresses, surely ... ?)

I feel genuinely sorry for them all. What a mess. And who's to put it right? The taxpayer via the NHS?

The current obsession with cosmetic enhancement (to use the phrase the industry itself promotes) has become grotesque.

Celeb endorsement encourages the impressionable. For every Jordan there are tens of thousands of young women willing to believe that silicone will plump up their lives beyond all recognition.

How worried so many of those women must be right now. The Government needs to take decisive action on this. And it needs to make the cosmetic surgery industry pay.

If anybody is going bust over this, it shouldn't be the NHS.