Robert Whitfield MD (presenter) outlines a range of symptoms associated with breast implant illness (BII), emphasizing neurologic (brain fog, short-term memory loss), ENT/autonomic, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, and recurrent infection presentations. He frames BII as chronic inflammation in which the implant/device may be a contributing factor and notes some patients continue to have symptoms after implant removal, suggesting possible persistent contamination or incomplete capsule removal.
Chapters
Been called America's breast implant illness expert is breast implant illness and how might one know whether or not they have it? So most of what people experience, and I don't envy the practitioners trying to figure this out when they sit across the table, is people will say they have neurologic symptoms like central nervous system, like brain fog, which, you know, everybody listening to be short term memory loss, you forgot where you put your keys, or you left the groceries in the car or something like that. You can have lightheadedness, ringing in the ears, you can have visual changes, light sensitivity, can also be sound sensitive, all sorts of ENT type issues where you have problems with dry eyes, maybe a catch in the throat or difficulty swallowing. And many patients will go on to have extremity symptoms, muscle pain, joint pain. I know you've done a lot of shows and are interested in gut health. They have problems with a lot of absorptive problems. So they'll have constipation and diarrhea, bloating and all the things associated with leaky gut may have recurrent, recurrent, untreatable, intractable vaginosis. They can have UTIs that just recur and recur and recur. And so I would have people come with these symptoms and not, not really understand and appreciate everything going on. But as we talk about breast implant illness today, and as I sit in front of you, it's chronic inflammation of which a implant, the medical device is a component of. If she just had been wandering around with an INFA implant infection for an undetermined amount of time, I want all that to come out because I wouldn't want to leave an infected scar capsule in. So I would assume that it's likely that there's still some degree of contamination. I get patients all the time from all over the country sending me messages that, that they still have symptoms and all they had was implant removal because they said, here are the standard things.
