A short medical explanation by Robert Whitfield MD describing the body's inflammatory response to retained foreign objects (e.g., a splinter). The speaker outlines possible outcomes including chronic inflammation, granuloma formation, infection, ulceration, tissue necrosis, fistula/drainage, and severe progression that may require extensive surgical removal.
If you got a splinter stuck in your finger, it would get red and irritated around that splinter. And that's because it's not your tissue. It's foreign. If you left it in there, it would form a chronic inflammatory reaction around it, including but not limited to a granuloma. It could get infected, it may get ulcerated, it may need to be drained. All these things can happen. That's just the simplest way to think about it. It could lead to ulceration, tissue necrosis, ultimately infection, fistulas, drainage, all sorts of problems, ultimately requiring probably not just a lumpectomy or partial removal of where that was, but it would lead to mastectomy and disfigurement because of this.
