Robert Whitfield MD hosts a conversation about breast implant illness, a contested condition some people blame for health problems. The FDA held hearings in 2019, but published studies cover only about 100 explants while Whitfield claims 1500 in his practice. Genetics and environmental factors may shape who gets sick.
Here's my problem with this conversation. It's so black and white. It needs more gray. It's. There's lots of nuances. Like, the problem is people are either, I love implants, implants are great. Mine have not done anything, or I have breast implant illness. For me, I feel like I am sort of in the gray. There were things that weren't adding up that were not making me feel good, but it wasn't one camp or the other. When I started to recognize those signs over and over, like little breadcrumbs, I wanted to do something about it. But I don't think that it has to be, like, so black and white, because not everyone is not the same. We're all different. We're all, like you said, different genetic makeups. There's such a fight over this, and it's not. I feel like there would be more easy conversation if people could just have a normal conversation about it, like we're doing right now, as opposed to like, so. Well, so fighty.
I look at it pretty simply. There's. I think a lot of people just aren't aware of the potential downsides to getting an implant. You only, you know, people don't talk that you could have these, like. I mean, I've known Lauren a long time. There was never conversations of, hey, you could experience inflammation, or you could experience rashes, or you could experience. I don't think people correlate the two. And so this is. You know, more and more people are talking about this, and I think it's a fight because many have not had the experience of a poor experience, and others are like, whoa, I've solved everything that was going on in my system. Yeah.
In 2019, they had a series of hearings that I testified at the FDA in Bethesda. This is about implants and breast implant illness. And so this is mainstream with the fda, it's mainstream with providers. What it's not clear about, because the data was pretty limited, and the pandemic made that worse. We got funding when I was president of the Aesthetic Society's research foundation to explore breast implant illness. And so the studies that have been done show that there's symptom improvement. Some of the things I think could be expanded, certainly, because it's a very limited. They looked at basically 100 explants. Well, I've done 1500. So I have 15 times the information they have, plus I know all the genetics behind them. So the long story, short story is what you eat, what you drink, where you live, where you work, the air you breathe. Your genetics dictate much of this. And you can't pick your parents. You can do better with your environment and what you eat if you can do that, and then you can actually change how your genes are being expressed. So someone like Candace, on her own, troubleshooted, trialed and errored it and basically figured out how to make herself feel better with supplements. So we did all that already. So because I know all the genetics, we created just a series of supplements that helps treat inflammation.
