Excerpt from a February 6, 2025 YouTube conversation (Robert Whitfield MD and another speaker) discussing potential triggers—genetic and environmental—for illnesses associated with breast implants. Speakers propose that events (trauma, infection, stress) or toxin exposures (including from implants or mold) may epigenetically ‘turn on’ genes that impair detoxification and lead to illness, with cumulative effects and liver detoxification highlighted.
Chapters
But I am super curious from the standpoint of even with what you've seen with patients that have breast implants, I'm super curious from a standpoint of like, okay, what is it that turns on this gene? And I talk to my patients about this all the time. For some people, they can clearly delineate, or it was a trauma, like a motor vehicle accident, or it was like the stress of a divorce, or they went out and they had some sort of parasite that they know or some type of infection. They got some foodborne illness type of thing. And other times it's a little bit harder to trace. But I suspect that for some people, it could be hay, the toxins from something like these breast implants, and that is actually creating that epigenetic expression where all of a sudden, maybe for years they've been in a moldy home that hasn't been bothering them, because if that gene's not expressed, your immune system's not having a problem. And then all of a sudden, it feels like one day it's out of the blue. But it was just that there was another toxin or another something that actually triggered that gene to, say, express and turn on. And now somebody has that illness on top of, you know, breast implant illness.
Yeah, I think it's to your point. To us, it seems very cumulative. Yeah, well, they typically genetically are a little challenged in terms of capability of detoxification, especially in the liver, where predominantly we detoxify substances.
