A YouTube interview (Robert Whitfield MD, Nov 4, 2024) discussing breast implant illness (BII). Dr. Whitfield reports very low observed rates of fungal findings in testing (six patients out of over a thousand) and gives a head-to-toe symptom inventory for suspected BII, including sensory sensitivities (sound, light), headaches, sinus symptoms not responsive to antibiotics, dry eyes, swallowing difficulty/esophageal pain, chest pressure/shortness of breath, and heart palpitations. The segment emphasizes systemic inflammatory symptoms rather than bacterial infection.
Questions this video answers
Six patients (out of over a thousand tested).
Chapters
If there's some correlation between implants and fungal overgrowth, we do GI maps on virtually everybody and there's no correlation between that and fungal overgrowth. I've only had six have fungus out of 900 so far.
Yeah, yeah.
Or actually over a thousand.
Let's say somebody can get all the fancy testing and everything and a woman is listening in and suspects based on the fact that she has implants that she might have this. You briefly ran through the symptoms earlier in the show, but can you run down what they'd actually look? Let's say they can't do blood testing, everything. What are they going to feel that might give them a clue that they.
Could have breast implant illness? Right. So I think from head to toe, I do the symptom inventory like this. I would do sound sensitivity, light sensitivity, headache. You can have sinus symptoms, pressure pain in the sinus area. And you can may have what's termed sinusitis, but it's not able to be treated by an antibiotic.
Right.
People will kind of refract a, reflexively treat you with that. And it won't go away because this is not a, a bacterial phenomenon. It's inflammation. They'll have dry eyes, very characteristic problem. And then as you go down the systems, they'll have difficulty with swallowing and they feel like something's catching, almost like an eosinophilic esophagitis, like a swelling almost. You can have even pain in the esophagus, like chest pains and chest pressure, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, lots of kind of very concerning cardiovascular symptoms, respiratory symptoms, like I said, shortness of breath, pain, pressure. Things that are obviously, when you hear those, those are very disconcerting symptoms, especially in folks who have kids and they're taking care of their families and their spouses and running the household.
