Breaking your legs is a bad idea
There are better ways to grow taller, if you must
“A small man with a fine head of course white hair, he has a bony, sloping face suited to someone far taller…”
“His shoes sported elevated heels; without these added inches, one might have taken him for a Little Person…
“She was well over six feet, taller than most men there. They straightened their spines, sucked in their stomachs; there was a general contest to match her swaying height…”
“She’s engaged. Nice guy, too. Though there’s a tiny difference in height: I’d say a foot, her favour…”
- All from the first 50 pages of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Kapote
“If you're a male under 5’ 10’’, life is not worth living. Discuss.”
This is the title of a forum topic on The Student Room website. A chart posted in the thread helpfully suggests men below 5’10’’ “consider dating midgets” and that “if you’re height isn’t on this chart, you should probably consider suicide”. The chart ends at 5’10’’.
Research really can be a joy sometimes. To reiterate, the current Cash height is 5’2’’. That’s a pretty unsubtle hint that shorties like me are completely and utterly worthless, which is always fun. At the very least, we should all go off and live in some Shire-like community far, far, away, where our Hobbit kind clearly belongs. Once there, we should presumably lay the groundwork for some sort of mass suicide pact.
I wonder if those forum dwellers would say the same thing to the little old man or lady down the street. They’ll have lost a couple of inches over time, as muscle mass diminishes and the discs between their vertebrates lose fluid.
Imagine our octogenarians were 5’11’’. But now their lives are utterly devoid of meaning because they no longer grace the chart. Apparently.
You can see why some people go to extreme lengths to increase their height. There are indeed a variety of medical treatments one can seek to grow just that little bit extra.
I first came across leg lengthening a few years ago, but surgical techniques to add height have actually been around for decades now. The first person to use ‘skeletal traction’ to lengthen bones was Alessandro Codivilla of Bologna, who presented the results of his efforts on children as far back as 1932.
The process may have become more sophisticated - Codivilla used “acute forced lengthening for short distances under narcotics” - but leg lengthening operations are still drawn-out, expensive, and physically excruciating.
That doesn’t stop hundreds of people feeling the need to get them every year. All for just an extra couple of inches.
The BBC talked to a New Yorker called Sam about his experience. "When I went to college, I noticed that I was shorter than a lot of the guys and even the girls," he said. "It does affect your life. Honestly, women generally don't date guys that are shorter than them. The hardest thing was sometimes feeling like I won't be able to find a wife."
Sam was convinced being tall and being successful were linked. By his mid-20s, he knew he needed to take action. He was 5’4’’ before the operation. He is now 5’7’’. That’s a difference of just three inches, or eight centimetres. One and a half golf tees. One fifth of a bowling pin. A tealight holder.
To achieve that growth, Sam didn’t just do some stretches (though apparently that can briefly nudge up your height by loosening muscle tension). He literally had both of his legs broken. But not before a hole was drilled into them, and metal rods inserted, with screws to bolt them in place.
That can take at least three hours. The metal rods are then very slowly lengthened. The bones (hopefully) heal around them. For six months afterwards, Sam would have to go through multiple hours of physical therapy at least three times a week.
The BBC found at least a dozen countries where such treatments are available. For those looking for a spot on the operating table in Sam’s home nation, the United States, they can shell out up to £210,000. I take little consolation in the knowledge that, in the UK, most procedures are cheaper. They can still be up to £50,000.
Such is the weight that people think height carries, they are willing to give up the equivalent of a chunky house deposit to get just a smidgen more of it. They will also risk damage to their nerves. Infection. Blood clots. Unfused bones. Diminished athletic ability.
Why on earth did Sam put himself through all of that? For his sanity, essentially. “It's seen as a cosmetic surgery, but I did it a lot more personally for my mental health," he told the BBC.
Doctors cited across similar reports into leg-lengthening note that those seeking the treatment may have underlying psychological problems. A Las Vegas doctor - from a clinic called the LimbplastX Institute, which sounds straight out of a sci-fi fan’s wet dream - who spoke with Business Insider reported his average client to be 5’6’’.
A reminder: the difference between them and men of average height is but the length of a dwarf hamster.
There is a video of this same doctor talking as part of a US news broadcast with a customer who is about to get jacked up. That client is 5’7’’; we’re not just talking about genuine outliers here who feel compelled to change so much about themselves at such cost to their bodies and wallets.
In one of the more batshit moments I’ve come across while researching this, the following words tumble out of that client’s face:
“Being taller than my wife will be a treat.”
The package cuts to his wife sitting by his hospital bed. She doesn’t say “honey, I love you just the way you are”, or anything to reassure him she’s not vacuous enough to care about something as trivial as a couple of inches.
What she does say is: “I think he’ll do great”.
Right before the doctor slams a giant nail right into her husband’s femur.
Of course, there are less painful ways to increase your height. Some, like stretching and posture improvement, are non-invasive. But others are medicinal, rather than mechanical, and are not without their own possible side-effects.
Take human growth hormone treatments. Classically, human growth hormone was used to treat children, like myself, with abnormally low growth, stimulating cell reproduction and regeneration. You can get a synthetic variant of what your pituitary gland should produce naturally on prescription, because that’s what spurs growth for children and adolescents.
As we’ve seen from our previous chapter on gigantism, having the pituitary gland produce too much of the stuff causes its own set of problems. But now, celebrities are branding human growth hormone the ‘Peter Pan’ drug, trying to use it to continue to regenerate cells well into their later years in order to appear younger.
Some swear by a daily injection of the stuff. As do bodybuilders looking to fight the perfectly natural tailing off of the hormone’s production as they age, to fight back the inevitable muscle shrinkage and drop in energy levels.
Not typically known for its interest in scientific research, The Sun nonetheless thought the race to stick human growth hormone into your body was serious enough to talk to the former president of the Society for Endocrinology and genuine professor Ashley Grossman about what it means for our bodies.
“It is expensive and potentially harmful, but the wealthy people in their Beverly Hills mansions think it is quite safe and some doctors feel justified in prescribing it,” he told the paper.
If you wanted regular treatment in the UK you’d probably need to fork over £1,000 a month. In all likelihood, you might be breaking the law if you wanted to get your hands on it; human growth hormone is, technically speaking, a class-C drug here, so your dealer at least would be committing the crime of supplying - assuming of course he’s not also a medically qualified professional offering to prescribe it to you because you have a deficiency of the stuff.
In the US, the Food and Drug Administration classifies human growth hormone as a controlled substance. You won’t be surprised to hear that it is emerging on black markets like the Dark Web, making it even more dangerous because you just can’t rely on getting the genuine article.
You could get a duff mix, if you’re lucky. You could easily overdose if you’re not. In between those extremes, you still run the risk of nasty ingredients being added to pad out the batch.
The phenomenon has become so prevalent that major pharmaceutical firms are resorting to shopping around on The Onion Router - the anonymous network used to communicate on the Dark Web - to route out fakes. An exceptional Bloomberg feature reports on how investigators hired by drug companies are using untraceable Bitcoin accounts to purchase drugs on digital marketplaces so that they can track the knockoffs.
The mission is to protect the brand of the pharmaceutical giant. The knock on effect is that fewer desperate patients, worried that their medical insurance wouldn’t cover what they needed, get a potentially lethal concoction. That doesn’t stop people wanting to take dodgy human growth hormone though, and policing such a vast marketplace will always be a game of whack-a-mole.
This all seems like a lot of effort to go through to fix something that didn’t need fixing in the first place. Users are convinced they need to grow more. Side effects range from the innocuous to the severe. It might be awkward if your hands or feet swelled, or you started growing breasts as a man. But at least you would have avoided the most traumatic impacts of growth hormone misuses like blood clots, diabetes, heart failure and the increased chance of developing cancer.
Injecting anything comes with a risk. It comes with an even greater one if you are inexperienced with needles. But it appears to be the only way to reliably get human growth hormone into your system without your stomach acids nixing it.
From my reading, pills (as I recall being prescribed) attempt to give you a dose of a number of other chemicals that trick your glands into secreting human growth hormone naturally, rather than giving you the thing itself, but the jury appears to still be out on the effectiveness of tablets as a vector and synthetic reproduction more generally.
Breaking bones and shooting up questionable drugs can hardly be described as an optimal outcome, but it appears to be where our cultural fascination with height has taken us.
If increases in stature were driven by better health and diet, then this would be a trend to applaud. But many clearly aren’t.
“Some children in China are being injected with human growth hormone by their parents hoping to make them taller out of concern that being short might hinder the kid’s future,” the South China Morning Post reported in August 2021. Apparently parents have “concerns that their children will be left behind by society if they are seen as short.”
Coincidentally, Chinese pharma company Changchun High & New Technology Industry, a growth hormone producer, saw its shares spike 77 per cent in 2019, and was the top performer across the country’s healthcare index over the first four months of that year.
Speaking to the Daily Mail in 2012, a Marseille-based doctor reported seeing a three-fold increase in interest in leg-lengthening procedures over the previous decade. That’s not nothing. It’s symbolic of our desperate need to feel on a par with our taller peers, and the figures will only have increased since that piece was written as the treatments become more widely available.
More on why people think they might need a leg up next week.