Dr. Robert Whitfield, a plastic surgeon, describes breast implant illness symptoms including extreme fatigue, anxiety, dry eyes, migraines, and chest tightness. He connects these concerns to bone health and breast cancer care.
Well, I'm excited to get into this conversation because it's not something we've ever talked about before. Right. And it may not ever be talked about by a lot of other people because they may not know. They may not know the cause of mysterious symptoms and things like that, especially if somebody has had breast implants and things like that in the past. So I'm really looking forward to getting into understanding more about breast implant illness and even the connection to bone health here.
My sister is a breast cancer survivor, and it was my second week of med school, she called me and told me she had breast cancer. I ultimately changed and chose plastic surgery because I really fell in love with doing microsurgery, oncologic reconstruction, and aesthetic surgery. And that's. That fits me. It fits my personality and what I can offer as it relates to taking care of women and breast cancer and then ultimately breast implant illness.
And so I would think that the people listening, at least to this point still. Right. That they are people that either have breast implants or they know someone that has had breast implants or recently got them, and they're maybe concerned about them or just want to understand the full picture. Maybe they've noticed some symptoms that we're going to talk about here shortly, and they want to understand if this could be contributing.
So I have patients come with the following. Extreme fatigue, like my very first patient did, anxiety and or depression. And you just go down. Dry eyes, dry mouth, light sensitivity, sound sensitivity, migraine and or bad headache. When you go to the chest symptoms, they may have tightness in their chest, shortness of breath, just chest discomfort in general.
I mean, if you're listening right now and you know somebody that has breast implants or you're concerned about breast implant illness, comment below. Number one, let me know what you learned already and then also share this with somebody as you're listening to this, that you think this could really help, because I think this is important information.
