Robert Whitfield MD explains how bacteria from routine procedures like teeth cleaning or colonoscopy can enter the bloodstream and infect implants like breast, hip, or knee replacements. Patients with prosthetic devices may need preventive antibiotics before certain procedures to stop infection from taking hold.
And then people want to know, well, how in the hell did I get that on my implant? I haven't been doing anything to get anything on my implant. So in the history of medicine, we used to use things like mechanical heart valves. And I, as a student, would listen to someone's chest because they had a mechanical valve. And you hear, go, ping, ping, ping. Obviously, now we don't have those. We have, like, little pig valves and all these fancy things, right? That patient with a mechanical valve, if they went to have their teeth cleaned or they went to get a colonoscopy or any invasive procedure, maybe it was a male and they need to have something done for their prostate, a cystoscopy, to look at their bladder, whatever, they would always give that patient a prescription for an antibiotic or give them an IV antibiotic because they want to protect that mechanical valve. Right. Should survey your audience who has breast implants. Did they ever get a prescription for an antibiotic to take before they get their teeth clean? Because your audience is probably very into making sure their teeth are okay. Your mouth is the other end of your GI tract, which, you know, there's your front and the back, the oral microbiome. It's not. Not a clean place. So it's quite easy to see how something could get into your bloodstream. So that's by far the most common way to get a contaminant on any implant. Hip, knee, breast, dental, neurologic, cardiac. Is something gets in your bloodstream from, say, like, a teeth clean into colonoscopy. Someone gets a cold. All you folks who fly a lot, like, I just came back from a long trip. I cleared my ears when I was landing. I had trouble clearing my ears. What do you think I got, like, two days later as a sinus infection? Oh, God. And then I had, you know, I felt like my head was going to explode and I have to take an oral antibiotic. Now, if I had had a breast implant, hip implant, knee implant, it could have got infected. Yeah.
