The first person in the world to receive two facial transplants says he is feeling well, three months after his latest groundbreaking operation.

Jerame Hamon had his first transplanted face removed last year after signs of rejection following a treatment with an antibiotic (抗生素) during a cold.

The 43 year old remained in a hospital in Paris without a face for two months while a compatible donor was sought.

He said: “The first face I accepted immediately. This time it’s the same.”

Mr. Hamon suffers from neurofibromatosis (多发性神经纤维瘤), a genetic condition that spoiled his face severely.

His first transplant, in 2010, was a success, but he caught a common cold in 2015 and was given antibiotics. The drug was incompatible with the immunosuppressive (免疫制疫的) treatment he was having to prevent a rejection of the transplanted material.

The first signs of rejection came in 2016 and last November, the face, suffering from the death of most of cells, had to be removed.

Mr. Hamon lived without a face in a room at Georges-Pompidou hospital in Paris without being able to see, speak or hear until January, when a face donor was found and the second transplant carried out.

To avoid further rejection, Mr. Hamon—dubbed “the man with three faces” by French media ―had special treatment to clean the blood prior to the transplant.

His new face remains smooth and motionless, and his skull, skin and features are yet to be fully matched. But he is positive about his recovery.

“If I hadn’t accepted this new face it would have been terrible. It’s a question of identity… But here we are, it’s good, it’s me,” he told AFP news agency from the hospital, where he is still recovering.

The hours-long operation was led by Prof Laurent Lantieri, a specialist in hand and face transplants who carried out Mr. Hamon’s initial surgery eight years ago.

“Today, we know that a double transplant is practicable, it’s no longer in the field of research,” he told Le Parisien newspaper.

Anaesthetist Bernard Cholley said: “Anyone who loses their face and then has to wait for a possible and imagined transplant for an unknown length of time—that’s something that nobody has ever had to go through here.”

“I’m amazed by the courage of a patient who has been able to get through such a different experience.”

The first face transplant was carried out in 2005 in northern France. Since then, some 40 operations have been performed around the world.

For thousands of years, traditional Chinese medicine(TCM)has been used across China and Southeast Asia. Its practices have developed over time and now, scientists are giving it a high-tech update.

Developed by Singaporean company AiTreat, “EMMA”is a robot masseuse（女按摩师) designed to give Tui Na, a type of TCM bodywork similar to a deep tissue massage (深层组织按摩)，a 21st-century makeover. Using sensors and 3D vision to measure muscle stiffness (僵硬)，EMMA (which stands for “Expert Manipulative Massage Automation”) identifies pressure points and gives massages to patients to help offer pain relief and relaxation. AiTreat founder and CEO Albert Zhang hopes that EMMA can create low-cost massage treatments that can be part of the growing attraction of preventative medicine.

In 2015, Zhang founded AiTreat. A trained TCM physician, Zhang has firsthand experience treating patients.

Patients lying on the table might not even notice the difference between EMMA and a real-life masseuse -but Zhang doesn't want robots to replace masseuses. Instead, he says that they can help by taking away the back-breaking work masseuses do every day, and enable them to “focus on the 10% highly skilled part,” which can increase their productivity and income while reducing the cost for patients. “One physician can only see one patient at a time,but with EMMA, the physician can control two robots and see up to four patients at the same time,” he says.

While TCM practitioners accept years of training, EMMA’s AI system has been trained with thousands of “data points”-bodies of different shapes, sizes and ethnicities-to find the acupoints (穴位) in each individual, says Zhang.

Currently, Zhang says 11 robots are working at eight different clinics (诊所)in Singapore, with plans to send them overseas. “We are seeing great responses from practitioners in the US and China,” he adds.

For years, there has been a bias（偏见）against science among clinical psychologists. In a two-year analysis to be published in November in Perspectives on Psychological Science, psychologists led by Timothy B. Baker of the University of Wisconsin charge that many clinical psychologists fail to “provide the treatments for which there is the strongest evidence of effectiveness” and “give more weight to their personal experiences than to science.” As a result, patients have no guarantee that their “treatment will be informed by science.” Walter Mischel of Columbia University is even crueler in his judgment. “The disconnect between what clinical psychologists do and what science has discovered is an extreme embarrassment,” he told me, and “there is a widening gap between clinical practice and science.”

The “widening” reflects the great progress that psychological research has made in identifying the most effective treatments. Thanks to strict clinical trials, we now know that teaching patients to think about their thoughts in new, healthier ways and to act on those new ways of thinking are effective against depression, panic disorder and other problems, with multiple trials showing that these treatments—the tools of psychology—bring more lasting benefits than drugs.

You wouldn’t know this if you sought help from a typical clinical psychologist. Although many treatments are effective, relatively few psychologists learn or practice them.

Why in the world not? For one thing, says Baker, clinical psychologists are “very doubtful about the role of science” and “lack solid science training”. Also, one third of patients get better no matter what treatment (if any) they have, “and psychologists remember these successes, believing, wrongly, that they are the result of the treatment.”

When faced with evidence that treatments they offer are not supported by science, clinical psychologists argue that they know better than some study that works. A 2008 study of 591 psychologists in private practice found that they rely more on their own and colleagues’ experience than on science when deciding how to treat a patient. If they keep on this path as insurance companies demand evidence-based medicine, warns Mischel, psychology will “discredit itself.”