Episode 16: Cutting-Edge Techniques: How Fat Transfers and Stem Cells Are Changing Lives

Foreign Dr. Rob Whitfield, the board certified plastic surgeon specializing in explant surgery. Breast implant illness is a topic that is not often talked enough about, especially in medical community, but is something that affects many women. In this podcast I will be discussing the latest research, treatment options and personal stories of women who have undergone explant surgery in an effort to heal breast implant illness. In this podcast we'll explore the symptoms.

Of breast implant illness and delve into.

The latest surgical techniques for explantation and the recovery process. Whether you are currently experiencing breast implant illness or are considering explant surgery, this podcast is a valuable resource for anyone looking to take control of their health and wellness. So let's dive in.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Whitfield. Really excited to be back in Austin after traveling for several meetings recently, the Biohacking conference hosted by Dave Asprey, and then most recently the Cell Surgical Stem cell conference in Las Vegas. Certainly we picked up tons of what are going to be, I think great value additions for us in our clinic. We're adding more lymphatic massage with Lopressa and we're adding nanov which helps with improvement in your folding of your proteins and recovery. We also have H wave to increase further increase lymphatic drainage and help recovery as well. So very excited. And then to top it all off, I went back to my hometown Las Vegas where I grew up and I went to the Cell Surgical Conference about stem cells at the Wynn. And many of you know I've done several thousand fat transfers and fat transfers work for a host of reasons. It's your own tissue, which means it's autologous. There's no genetic dispatch, there can't be because it's not coming from another donor or individual like an allogeneic product is. The reason I'm so comfortable with it is I started studying it many, many years ago, selfishly initially because I was trying to figure out how I could make new cartilage for my banged up knees. After five knee surgeries, I don't ski or snowboard anymore, stopped playing basketball a long time ago and take it easy on my knees. But I thought, oh, if I figured out how to do this, it could get some cartilage for me. So there's still an opportunity for that through relationships we have, but that's, that's a whole different show. So let's go back to what adipose derived stem cells can actually do. And they can become adipocytes, which are just fat cells, they can become bone cells or Osteoblasts and they're of course, like I mentioned, can form cartilage. So those are, you know, the three main functions I think one of the presenters actually talked about they should be into neural tissue. But that's, I haven't seen that in the laboratory yet. So when I get asked, you know, my, am I worried about development of cancer wherever we do a fat transfer? And so by history, I did many, many years of sarcoma reconstruction. Sarcomas are tumors of muscle, fat, bone, cartilage. And so these are tumors that are concerning because they're mesenchymal in nature. So you wouldn't put a fat transfer into those areas or I would not because the cell of origin is mesenchymal. When we do fat transfers for breast augmentation or breast reconstruction, which has been done for many, many years, I started doing them in 2005 and had to have done several thousand. So the reason they work obviously is you're transferring the patient's own tissue. You have adipocytes, pre adipocytes, vascular cells, you'll have the adipose derived stem cells, pericytes, if I didn't mention that. So it's a whole mixture of cells that actually get transferred when you transfer fat. And the particle size matters of the fat being transferred. So all things being equal, obviously we're on the side of alignment where without minimally doing anything to the cells, you can transfer them and they'll have an opportunity to heal. And then we get asked quite a bit, why, why can we do the transfer and how does transfer work? Is it going to last? And so I'll put it simply, if we were doing fat transfers on people in their, we'll just say twenties as an example, when all things being equal, the hormonal environment is good. There's no thyroid dysfunction, there's no metabolic disease, there's no metabolic dysfunction. There's really what they call homeostasis through, you know, normal hormones or hormesis. Mitochondrial function is good. The, the movement of a product of fat from one place to another in that patient should, should be, you know, without question, it's going to work. And so many, many years ago, buttock augmentation started in earnest in South America. And they went through and have had, you know, different time points where there may have been problems. And then in the United States, we'll just say, we'll use Miami as an example. Augmentation of the buttock became, you know, very common there. And then several years ago, there were safety issues recorded because there were Problems with basically the technical issues. And I wrote a safety paper about that. You can look it up. It's just technical. And now it's as it should be. It's a very safe procedure to do. So in those patients who are young, who are getting buttock or breast augmentation with autologous fat transfer, you should get very good results in the buttock. You don't want to put it in the muscle or in the danger area below the muscle certainly, because that can lead to untoward events. And then in the breast, we're not trying to put the fat into the breast gland. I mean, that doesn't make any sense. It's going to create a bunch of cysts. So you want to be beneath the skin, but above the breast gland. That's the fat compartment, if you will, on top of the breast. If you looked at it under MRI or mammogram or ultrasound, even you can, you can see this. And you expand that. And I explain it as, you can only put a certain amount in this space. So if you think of a pocket on a shirt over the chest, you can expand that pocket or fill that pocket with your glasses or a pen or what have you. And in this case, we're filling that pocket with fat and then there's only going to be a certain amount of expansion before the skin gets too tense.

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When the skin gets really tense, you'll see something called podourage which is just the surface of the skin starts to look like the surface of an orange. That's why it's called poterage. And that indicates that you should not be continuing to expand, that there's just too much pressure. It doesn't expand in the way that when you put an implant in because it, obviously it's a different space, but implants press out because they can hold, hold the shape because of the pressure they can maintain where fat can't. And it's not something that you want to keep adding volume to. So the, the end game is how much you can put in as a function of where you start. So if, if someone's super young and their skin is really tight and they haven't had weight loss or weight gain or they haven't had a pregnancy or something, they change the breasts or maybe they just didn't develop and they have tense skin. You can't put a lot of fat in there. At one time. You would do a series of sessions for that type of client to give them more volume. But doing it in a stage fashion would help in that situation. What I commonly get faced with is when I take out implants which have been in place for a period of time. Patients have gone through weight loss, weight gain, pregnancies, breastfeeding, and in those situations, many times the skin is stretched out. And so when we remove the device intact, I'm sorry, with its capsular material intact, we're trying to then not fill the pocket where the old implant was because that's potentially about a third of the time has biofilm in it. We're trying to go in a separate plane of dissection or what we, we were talking about beneath the skin. And that's where we place the fat. So that's where it belongs. And then how it heals, you know, why it heals. Adipose derived stem cells have a number of benefits. They will help, you know, rejuvenate wounds. I think if we look back in the literature, probably wounding and certainly first first. And one of the most impressive things I ever saw was reports out of Italy with radiation wounds and chronic non healing wounds where they took fat and did transfers beneath these wounds and got them to heal. And is it the fat or is it the stem cell or all the above. And adipose stem cells have and can differentiate into these other cells. They can have effects on cells around them to help turn genes on. They can produce exosomes, they can modulate your immune system response. So say you're in a really really pro inflammatory state. It can actually make you in a anti inflammatory state. So it, they can help with mitochondrial function. The adipose derived stem cells which were, which are mesenchymal, they really can produce a lot of interleukins which can be helpful as well as vegf. So there's lots of reasons why, if you want to think of it, why a fat transfer is more than just the fat. I would say sounds a little cliche, but it is a lot more than the fat. It's like the lady from the Wendy's commercial, where's the beef? So here it's just where's the stem cells? Not so much where the fat is. The fat's going to go in the right position, the fat's going to heal. And how are we going to maintain it over time as a function of, you know, the quality of food, fluid and air you put in your body. And then we have to look at your toxicity, your ability to detox. Gut health.

Super important.

Dr. Hasan gave a great talk about the gut microbiome and lack of bifidobacteria, both in the diet and then really in the things that are supposed to be helping the gut microbiome like probiotics and kombucha. So I did a little thing on Instagram about that recently. So there'll be more to come about that. But certainly we, we feel strongly about, you know, offering fat transfers and obviously why they heal as stem cells. We offer to harvest stem cells via fat and have them baked. I get mine every three to six months. Is a, is our standard and up due for some actually. And so we do that through American Cell technologies or stem cell bank that we use. And then we have a cell surgical device. And then of course I've harvested fat for many, many years. Since 1998, I've been taking fat out of people and moved it from one place to another. So these are all exciting times. I look forward to being able to do more and offer more as it relates to stem cells. All right, any questions, hit us up. Send us a comment on Instagram Restimplant illness expert or Dr. Rob Whitfield. And we' answered. Subscribe to the show like the show. I have two the breast implant illness show and then my show about cosmetics and then our YouTube channel certainly subscribing like that. We put out a lot of information. Let us know anything you're interested and we'll try to get a show done for it.

Thanks for joining me today. I hope you found the information and stories shared on this podcast helpful and informative. Remember, taking control of your health and wellness is key to recovery from breast implant illness. If you're looking for additional resources and support, be sure to visit our online store, Dr. Rob's Solutions at drrobsolutions.myshopify.com you'll find a wide range of wellness products and supplements to support your journey to recovery. From specially formulated detox supplements to personalized skincare products, we have everything you need to aid your recovery. Visit Dr. Rob's Solutions today at DrRobsSolutions myshopify.com Thank you for listening and we'll be back with another episode soon. Remember, you're not alone in this journey, and together we can overcome breast implant illness. Take care.