A couple of emails have created quite a stir in Britain as Ricochet, a production company (Supernanny), has approached a couple of charities for the purpose of filming facial reconstructive surgery.
One email was sent to the charity of Peter Butler, the physician chosen to perform Britain's first face transplant, seeking out patients who had facial deformities.
Butler's charity called, the Face Trust, said in the email that Ricochet was working on a show that would look at reconstructive and plastic surgery.
Another charity which serves disfigured people, Changing Faces, said that it had also received an email from Ricochet with a request similar to the one sent to the Face Trust.
One of the directors from Ricochet denied there was such a project being made, but couldn't explain the emails that were sent to the charities with their requests.
James Partridge, founder of Changing Faces, said: “There is a need to ensure these sorts of programmes do not feed the insecurities about appearance that they are claiming to address.
“As the leading national charity representing people with disfigurements, we were approached for contributors for this programme, the implication being that people with disfigurements may be good candidates. Such programmes raise serious ethical questions.”
The immediate response from doctors and charities was anger, as they said the deformities of their patients would be exploited by the filming of the procedures.
Butler said he was deeply concerned, “We have to be very careful to avoid exploitation of some of the most vulnerable people in our society."
He added that there was another underlying danger in that people with these types of injuries can have all of their problems solved through this type of surgery or other interventions.
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