Short interview clip with Robert Whitfield MD describing his journey toward specializing in breast implant illness. He explains that his training is in oncology and reconstruction for cancer defects, that breast cancer reconstruction (often implant-based) exposed him to implant failures, and that he frequently offered autologous (patient's own tissue) reconstruction instead of repeat implant-based procedures.
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What I would love to add to this is understanding kind of your personal story in terms of what got you from where you started to specializing very specifically with breast implant illness. It's not something that a lot of people are talking about, not something that enough people are talking about.
I mean, first of all, thanks for having me and I appreciate being able to speak to the community you have. My background in training really is in oncology and reconstruction for cancer defects. So in that capacity, there's things that we can do for head and neck cancer, for sarcomas, and for breast cancer. Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer that we would face for reconstruction. So just by default, you would see more patients. And because the implant based reconstructions are by far the most common, I would get the failures of those reconstructions sent to me. And rather than repeat plan A, which would be to do another reconstruction using an implant, I would just, if I could, offer the patient their own autologous reconstruction. So use your own tissue to perform the reconstruction. I just said so. I was actually probably taking care of this problem before I knew what the problem was.
