In a new interview with Access Hollywood's Shaun Robinson, Dr. Frank Ryan said Heidi's comments to Access' Billy Bush -- that she almost died in recovery -- aren't correct. "I almost died after my procedure," Heidi told Billy on Monday. 'I had too much Demerol like Michael Jackson did and my breathing was five breaths per minute which is like almost dead. [I was] in an aftercare center, there were nurses that were supposed to be tending to me at all times." But that isn't how her doctor remembers it.

"That didn't happen as far as I know," he told Shaun on Tuesday. "Where would she get that information from?" Shaun asked. "I don't know," Dr. Ryan said. Heidi also claimed in her interview with Billy that medical personnel, "had to put oxygen on my face and call my plastic surgeon to come in for an emergency." "So Heidi got that information wrong?" Shaun asked the doctor. "Yeah," Dr. Ryan replies.

"I almost died after my procedure," Montag told Access Hollywood's Billy Bush on Monday. "I had too much Demerol like Michael Jackson did and my breathing was five breaths per minute which is like almost dead. (I was) in an aftercare center, there were nurses that were supposed to be tending to me at all times."

"So thank God, Charles, one of my security guys used to be an EMT, and he was timing my breath on his watch and he called the nurses and they had to put oxygen on my face and called my plastic surgeon to come in for an emergency. So, it was a very traumatic experience for me," she continued.

Two months after the surgery, Montag said she is now starting to regain all of the movement in her face. "I'm starting to move my face more and more," Montag said. '(But,) I feel very plastic .. especially when I first came out, it was so hard for me even to smile and it's still hard for me to chew sometimes. But it's feeling more and more natural everyday because the swelling is going down."

• Buttocks augmentation
• Boob job touch-up
• Nose job touch-up
• Chin reduction
• Liposuction in her neck
• Liposuction in her waist and thighs
• Mini brow lift
• Botox in the forehead
• Fat injections in her cheeks and lips
• Pinning back her ears

Solange Magnano, 38, died of a pulmonary embolism after undergoing a gluteoplasty in Buenos Aires, a normally routine procedure which involves placing implants in the buttocks to give them a firmer outline.

The mother of eight-year-old twins, who won the beauty crown in 1994, died on Sunday after three days in a critical condition. Roberto Piazza, a close friend, claimed that the procedure also involved injections and the liquid "went to her lungs and brain". "This woman who had everything is dead because she wanted to have a slightly firmer behind," said Mr Piazza, a fashion designer.

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Ms Magnano underwent the procedure at a plastic surgery clinic on Thursday. The following day she was rushed to hospital with an acute respiratory deficiency. Her condition deteriorated until she suffered the embolism and died on Sunday. "She only underwent the procedure because she thought it was no big deal," said Guillermo Azar, another close friend of Ms Magnano's.

Juan Carlos Seiler, former president of the Buenos Aires Association of plastic surgeons, suggested the doctor who performed the procedure might not have been "a real professional" from an approved cosmetic surgery centre.

Say hello to the nose job tax. To raise money for the health overhaul, Democrats are proposing a new 5% tax on elective cosmetic procedures. The tax was a surprise addition to the sweeping 2,074-page bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid unveiled late Wednesday. It generates $5 billion over a decade for the plan, which is expected to cost $849 billion over a decade.

The tax would fall on the individuals who undergo the procedures. If they don’t pay it when they’re billed for their surgery, then it falls to the provider who performed the procedure. Not all cosmetic surgeries would get taxed. According to the bill, the tax would only apply if the surgery “is not necessary to ameliorate a deformity arising from, or directly related to, a congenital abnormality, a personal injury resulting from an accident or trauma, or disfiguring disease.” It would take effect Jan. 1.

Breast implants, hair replacement surgery or a face-lift performed by the Nordstroem Hospital in Helsinki are among the newest offerings in the carrier’s Finnair Plus loyalty service, according to the program's Web site. "Finnair contacted the hospital," Mikko Tuomainen, the airline's director of loyalty programs, said in a telephone interview. "The idea was to incorporate partners and services from all walks of life."

About 1.3 million flyers are enrolled in Finnair's loyalty program, Tuomainen said. Earning the 3.18 million points for breast augmentation surgery requires 120 round-trip, business-class flights between Helsinki and New York, according to a points table on Finnair's Web site. Miles earned with the airline are valid for five years.

Finnair, which added the cosmetic surgery service about a month ago, is in talks with medical practices to offer other health care services, Tuomainen said. Points can also be combined with cash and used for services ranging from restaurants and clubs to car rentals and hotels. Frequent flyers use three-fourths of all points for flights, Tuomainen said.

The second time I had plastic surgery I got it done for free. People was covering it and I met a team of doctors that had a publicist who kept adding procedures. The guy who did my LASIK surgery wanted to do a "tune-up" and now I've had five surgeries on my eye. I have partial blindness in one of my eyes, actually. It was very much like Nip/Tuck where they'd be like, "Tell me what you don't like about yourself," and then they'd draw all over you with markers to highlight your "problem" areas. One of the doctors was like, "We can do a little teeny lipo on your upper arms." I said, "Are you sure?" He said yes, so I went along with it.

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Paparazzi get photos of celebrities doing pretty much everything, but they never seem to get pictures of stars after surgery. Why is that?

Oh, there's a whole system you need to know about. First of all, the plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills all have secret celebrity doors. After the surgery, you leave the plastic surgeon's office covered in a sheet that's not unlike a burqa. Your assistant takes you to an upscale hotel where you hide in a dark room of shame until you're better. There are bandaged rich ladies walking around the hallways of the Four Seasons and the Peninsula in Beverly Hills right now. It's not unlike being a war criminal or a terrorist.

In the study, which will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe how Stanford plastic surgeon Dr. Michael Longaker's liposuction patients donated one to three liters of their fat, which he called "liquid gold" [San Jose Mercury News]. The researchers separated out the globular fat and prepared the fat tissue cells for reprogramming–a process that took only two days, instead of the three to four weeks required for skin cells. The reprogramming procedure was also faster, taking only two weeks. Finally, it was 20 times more efficient than the skin cell conversion.

In a similar study, published in the Journal of Cell Science, researchers found that reprogramming melanocytes, the pigment-producing skin cells that give rise to moles, was also faster and more efficient than reprogramming regular skin cells. While much more work needs to be done to prove that both kinds of altered cells are safe, the researchers say that making stem cells out of waste products could be a boon for medical research. Says Longaker: "There's a lot of fat in America, unfortunately, and it's a renewable source of cells" [Nature News].

No wonder that earlier last month, news of a surgical "cure" that touts a high success rate ricocheted worldwide. The double-blind study, published in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, found that more than 80 percent of patients who underwent surgery in one of three "trigger sites" significantly reduced their number of headaches compared with more than 55 percent of the group who had sham surgery. More than half of the patients with the real surgery reported a "complete elimination" of headaches compared with about 4 percent of the placebo group.

Forehead lifts are cosmetic procedures that plastic surgeons typically perform to smooth furrowed brows. But a decade ago, after some of his patients reported that their migraines improved post-operation, Dr. Bahman Guyuron, a plastic surgeon and the lead author of the study, began to search for a surgical solution that could address migraine trigger points -- which he defines as where the headache begins and settles -- in the forehead, temples and the back of the head.

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The theory behind the surgery is that because some migraines are caused when sensitive nerve branches are squeezed and irritated by muscles, deactivating those muscles could bring prolonged relief. In the off-label use of Botox for migraines, those same muscles -- when paralyzed with Botox injections -- have eased headaches in some patients for roughly three months. Forehead lifts, Dr. Guyuron reasoned, might result in a longer-lasting, perhaps permanent, alleviation of pain. Only study participants who responded positively to Botox were offered the surgery.

The Senate Finance Committee has discussed imposing a 10 percent excise tax on cosmetic surgery deemed unnecessary for medical purposes. The idea was broached in a meeting with OMB Director Orszag in mid-July, after which Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus told reporters he had heard some "interesting," "creative," and "kind of fun" ideas.

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Malcolm Roth, vice president for health policy and advocacy at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said the New Jersey tax has only brought in about 25 percent of anticipated revenue since it was enacted in 2004 and imposes "another bureaucratic layer," including questions of how to determine what procedures are eligible. Roth said lawmakers at the federal level could expect the same administrative headaches and lack of anticipated revenues if they went down the New Jersey route.

The itemized deduction, for example, has been the subject of litigation in federal tax court. In a 2001 case, a nurse was awarded the deduction for surgery to remove an overhanging skin mass after the IRS initially denied her claim. The court agreed that the mass, which formed after the woman lost 100 pounds, was prone to infection and interfering with her hospital work.

Roth, a plastic surgeon at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., said it "would be a discriminatory tax against women," noting that 86 percent of patients are female and 91 percent are of working age between 19 and 64. He also disputed the notion it would be a "tax on the wealthy," noting most patients earn less than $100,000 a year. "People put money aside for years, sometimes weekly under-the-mattress deductions" to get the surgery they want, he said.