Are Drains Used For Breast Explant Surgery?

All the literature used to describe drainage of, say, a breast pocket or a tummy tuck initially was felt to be necessary.

But as we've learned from the drainless tummy tuck, we don't need drains. Now you use suturing techniques to control it. So for the breast pocket, what do I do special?

First of all, I widely undermine the.

Inframary fold, which is the bottom of the breast pocket.

With or without a lift.

I will do this because I want the breastfold to rise. In a way, we're just disrupting it.

In this process, it becomes contiguous or.

Continuous, if you want to think of.

It like that, with the abdominal wall tissue.

So the fluid's going to drain out on the abdominal wall, but underneath the.

Skin in the tissues. Now, this is how I do it.

For fat transfers, for explants alone, explants with lifts.

And I don't use drains anymore.

My hard and fast rule for a.

Drain is a really difficult to control.

Ruptured silicon gel leak in the pocket.

Because drains don't prevent infections, they don't prevent hematomas.

So you'll see more people infect themselves than you prevent infection.

Because we used to drain everybody, because.

We felt it was necessary to help control that fluid accumulation in the pockets. And what we had more of was people infecting themselves by touching their drains but not properly cleansing their hands.

So then we started putting little clear.

Dressings over the drains. We started using antibiotic discs around the drains.

And finally I just was like, let's just use literature and say that drains.

When left in people, cause more infections than they prevent. So if we technically can avoid the.

Drain safely undermining the tissues, people will.

Produce fluid three, four, five, six, seven.

Days, and it'll be gone.

It's a normal process.