A short conversational video (Robert Whitfield MD and an unidentified speaker) about how the body reacts to foreign objects (implants, surgical clips, rods) and the variability in reconstructive surgical care. Key points: the body mounts immune responses (referred to as "three R's") and may develop chronic inflammation to implanted devices; many patients are unaware of alternative reconstructive options and may be gaslit or dismissed when they report symptoms; implant-based reconstruction is described as the dominant, locally available option outside large metropolitan centers in the U.S.
Chapters
And it's interesting. I, you know, first of all, I mean, I'm going to ask you back a question because there's a kind of a level of common sense around this, of anything foreign that you place into your body. Your body should have sort of the three R's of immune response. Those are what should naturally happen. Anytime something outside of you enters you, right? And your body has that moment of. Well, and again, the way we respond is going to be unique to each of us. Very unique, very unique expertise that can. You and I were talking before the, the, the recording that basically I often have patients who jump into the frying pan of the cancer space only to jump from one into another. Of oftentimes dealing with implants from either, you know, surgical devices to, you know, rods and whatnot that can have some reactions in their body or clips in the breast from areas that they could have reactions in the body to, to actual implants, you know, breast implants.
So, you know, it's a very complicated equation to get taken care of here in this country. Once you leave a, a city that's we'll say a million plus people, so rapidly, once you get outside of that, you have a much, much lower level of care. The most dominant form of reconstruction, if you choose to do that in the United States, is going to be an implant based reconstruction because that can be carried out at your local hospital.
I'm glad that you brought that up because folks, if they're, if they're only in their own community and they see that this is how everybody is getting their care, they just assume that is the standard. They don't even know to ask what else could be or could there be some harm or some side effects of this. And so when they end up meeting somebody like me, and I'm questioning that initial approach, it's not that I'm dissing the community they were in, I'm just saying, hey, you might not have understood that there were other ways to think about this or approach this or there's certain level of risk potentially involved and we're all very individual and no one can, can know ahead of time how you're going to respond to any one of these things. And that's just, I think that's the piece here is there's just like a level of common sense around that, that of course there's going to be a role of some chronic inflammatory or chronic immune response to anything foreign put into the body, no matter where it is, no matter what it is, just is. And instead of fighting it our medical system tries to deny it, or ghost patients or Gaslight patients or their experience with it, we should be aware that that's just an obvious side effect of what happens. So how do we then support it?
