Breast cancer is a massively distressing disease which can be emotionally devastating. The loss of a breast, deeply traumatic in itself, can be made worse by having to wait for breast reconstruction surgery, which for some women is an essential element of their rehabilitation after such drastic action has been taken to eradicate the disease.

To have to spend long months on a waiting list is bad enough. But it is adding insult to injury to learn that that wait is being made longer because a growing number of drug addicts with abscesses and violent young men who smash their fists through windows are being given priority treatment for self-inflicted injuries which require the skills of plastic surgeons.

There is a powerful contrast between these two groups. The self-pitying, self-abusing addicts immerse themselves in their sub-culture because they can't cope with real or imagined problems in their lives - yet how serious can their problems be compared to those of women who have had to face up to their worst nightmare and undergo drastic treatment to give them their best chance of staying alive?

Professor David Sharpe, Bradford consultant plastic surgeon, is right to feel aggrieved that resources are having to be stretched between the two, with the non-emergency reconstruction patients being shunted further back in the queue. In the long term, society needs to tackle the moral issues involved.

But what's needed now is an urgent injection of funds and, possibly, the creation of separate units so that those who have brought their problems on themselves and those who have suffered unsolicited misfortune are not pitted against each other.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.