Robert Whitfield MD explains how breast implants can trigger chronic inflammatory symptoms like brain fog, headaches, chest pain, and severe gut problems. Implants act as foreign bodies that activate the immune system, and low-grade infections around them are hard to detect. PCR testing can identify bacteria, fungi, or mycobacteria in the implant pocket.
Questions this video answers
PCR test (to detect bacteria, fungi, or mycobacterium inside the pocket).
From 1996 until 2013.
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So if someone came to me already with gut trouble, Sjogren's syndrome, lupus, history of autoimmune disorders, because autoimmune disorders predated implants. But setting up somebody for absolute abject failure is, Is not great. So I would not do that.
And so did you start noticing a pattern of. Of women all saying they have the. The same set of symptoms after breast implants?
So if someone has an implant that actually has bacteria around it, we have no way of knowing that, really.
There's no scans or anything that can detect.
Now, if it's not frankly infected, like, you don't show up, and you have red skin or swelling or something that tip us off that will show up on a diagnostic study, there's no way to really alert you that there's underlying chronic infection. And so a PCR test is the most definitive way for us to see any kind of bacteria, fungi, or mycobacterium inside the pocket. I want to know what's up inside that against your scar tissue. So really what's hugged and stuck inside, because that sends a signal to your body. And when your body reacts to that signal, your immune system gets activated. And saline smooth implants were used predominantly in our country from 1996 until 2013, when a new kind of silicone implant was brought back to market, and then the other implants were brought back to market as well. So I've seen all of them.
Yeah, all of them have caused problems. People get breast implant illness no matter what kind of implant.
Yeah, there's not an easy to indict situation here. It's a foreign body. And whether it's, you know, your dental implant or your cardiac implant or. I used to help all the orthopedic surgeons. Anybody can get infection from the implant place. But many times they're used for really functional purposes, like reconstructing someone's jaw for cancer or replacing a knee joint for osteoarthritis or cancer.
I guess we should probably define what is breast implant illness.
Most of my patients show up with a laundry list of chronic inflammatory symptoms from head to toe. So neurologically, they can get brain fog, think of headache. They can have light sensitivity, sound sensitivity in the whole ear, nose and throat system, dry eyes, cough, sinusitis, chronic stuff that has no answers. Heart palpitations, chest pain, shortness of breath, nerve pain in their extremities, tremors, and then the gut is just wildly abnormal.
Like everything that's interesting that you say the gut. I don't think I would have ever thought that gut problems could be caused by breast implants.
