Robert Whitfield MD explains how your body walls off implants with scar tissue, a process that can restrict lymphatic drainage. 29% of explanted implants had bacterial contamination, while fungal contamination was rare.
29% of the explanted specimens.
Less than five out of a thousand (i.e., <0.5%).
But the fascia, what I've seen in pictures and what I know to be true, the body has a foreign. Foreign material in it. It's going to wall it off. It's going to try to block it off, and it's going to create like a shell with a fascia. And then that creates lack of drainage. Right. Because that's going to block down some of the lymph. Like, how do we balance that with. But it really helps the person feel good about themselves and overcome whatever disease they were dealing with or they needed it for some various reason. You know, there's. There are breast implants that are put in because it's elective and some that aren't. Either way, it ends up. There's implants in there and we've got to deal with it. So there's this fascia piece that I'm really like, ugh, is that really restricting flow? And does the body ever see it as part of it?
Well, I'll answer it in that. So I had a dual appointment at the university I worked at, and it was in plastic surgeon, orthopedics. I helped a lot of orthopedic patients with cancer or reconstructive needs from trauma, infection, tumors. And they may have a hip or knee replacement. They may have treatment because of a sarcoma. And when you have these large prosthetics in place, obviously your body naturally responds with this is foreign. And it creates basically a scar tissue around it. And that's the tissue that's around the implant. Doesn't matter if it's a hip, knee, breast, cardiac, neurologic. The body responds and creates scar tissue around it for the most part. And that woven network of collagen we'll say is not impervious. So there can be communication between the tissue and that device. So we recently published a paper where 29% of the explanted specimens had a bacterial contaminant. Bacterial, not fungal. So fungus, in my experience, is less than five out of a thousand.
