A short excerpt from a YouTube video by Robert Whitfield MD recounting a 2016 breast cancer patient who elected a flat closure after prior silicone gel implant reconstruction. Whitfield emphasizes his consistent practice of removing all capsular material in cancer patients to reduce recurrence risk and sending tissue for pathology, and notes links between implants and implant-associated lymphomas and other cancers.
Chapters
So the patient that changed everything for us in practice came to me in 2016. It was a breast cancer patient who had a breast reconstruction with a silicone gel implant like you're describing, and they wanted to go flat. So instead of a cosmetic patient who just doesn't want implants anymore, there's a cancer patient who wanted to go and basically have a flat closure just absolutely within everybody's purview. And so the patient had one symptom. It wasn't something consistent with what you're describing. It was fatigue. A lot of patients suffer from fatigue who have breast implant illness. And a lot of patients who've had breast cancer who got chemotherapy or radiation therapy or take the medications to help reduce the recurrence rates, have fatigue. So I took those out, and I fundamentally still do the same two things for each patient I take care of. So I will always take out all the capsular material, because in a cancer case, you want to make sure they don't have recurrent cancer. And there are a lot of incidences now with breast implant associated lymphomas and swimming cell carcinomas, and just the prevalence of breast cancer in general. So in my practice, just in the last six months, we've had three patients have breast cancer. So all that stuff always gets sent off. You always have access to it. It's not some difficult thing.
