Short-form interview/transcript excerpt where Dr. Robert Whitfield describes patients seeking breast implant removal due to systemic symptoms (brain fog, fatigue, chronic inflammatory symptoms). He reports observing slimy biofilm on explanted implants in 2018, and describes PCR testing that found Cutibacterium acnes in high concentration; he explains biofilm's role in protecting bacteria and perpetuating immune activation leading to systemic symptoms.
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And she put me on a social media platform, and I just had patients start coming out of the woodwork wanting their implants taken out. So my office is getting calls, and they're like, why are these people calling to get the breast implants removed? So now it's a mixture of patients, because you.
By the way, you think that women would want to retain those implants for esthetic purposes, but what you're implying is that there's something going on that makes that overrides their desire for the aesthetic appearance of breasts, because there's some underlying issue that those breasts have caused.
And at this point, I did not understand the problem. And all of a sudden, now I'm thrust into this situation where patients are coming in complaining of brain fog and fatigue and chronic inflammatory disease type symptoms. No. Now these are a mixture of patients. They're cosmetic patients.
So cosmetic patients now as well, not cancer patients.
And I'm like, you. I'm like, what the hel is going on here? So in 2018, I had a nurse travel, and she came from New Orleans. Her sister lived in Austin. And I took out her implants, checked them on the back table, and they were just covered in biofilm at that point.
So when you take out the implants, you can set them on the table and literally see what's on.
Yeah. So this one in particular was really slimy. I took these out, I opened them on the back table. I'm like, these things are all gooey.
They're not ruptured.
They're just covered in this goo that's not normal.
The one from the implants that you took out that had the goo on them came back normal.
And I was like, there's no way this is possible. So I got frustrated, and I said, okay, we're going to start looking at PCR testing. PCR testing looks for DNA fragments of different, you know, pathogens, bacteria, fungi, mycobacteria. And the bacteria is cutie bacterium acnes. It's found in extremely high concentration. Cutie bacterium acnes. It's what you find in acne, but it readily produces biofilm. And so for everybody listening, biofilm makes it so your body can't attack it in and kill it. Right.
It's like a shield, like a gooey shield.
You have a foreign body. You have something that readily produces biofilm. It attaches and it switches on your immune system, Right? And it can't shut off. And the longer these folks go, as you. As you would imagine, they get adrenal fatigue, they get chronic inflammatory symptoms. They get gut dysfunction, they get brain fog, they get, you know, arrhythmias, they get shortness of breath.
