Robert Whitfield MD explains cancer risks linked to breast implants, including rare lymphomas and squamous cell carcinoma, and describes en bloc removal, a technique that takes out the implant and surrounding capsule intact. He developed a training program to teach surgeons how to perform it safely.
Everybody knows anytime you had an implant, you could always have an infection because it's not your tissue. The two is, the more important is cancer surveillance. You want to make sure that nobody has a recurrent cancer. So predominantly this was been done in breast. And that's what my basic career was about. And I, in 2016, was asked by a patient who wanted to go flat, would you just do this en bloc technique? And I'm like, kind of weird for a patient to ask me that, but I know what it is because it's just a pathology term we use. But basically you want to take out everything intact entirely, and not in every instance can you do that. But you can certainly put yourself in a better position to take care of your client if you're trying to do that. Because more and more cancers are being found all the time now. There's breast implant associated squamous cell carcinoma, there's breast implant associated lymphomas. So there's no, you know, if you're looking at it from a provider and you're trying to be safe, then, you know, we created a training program to help people, you know, observe what I do to make it easier for them to execute for practices. We created a training program so that they could take care of the patients better understanding how we take care of them. But it is a very safe and executable operation in experienced hands.
