Dr. Robert Whitfield (YouTube) explains that explant surgery for breast implant illness requires different aftercare and planning than elective explants. He emphasizes starting preoperatively with a holistic "heart" accelerated recovery program and performing saliva-based genetic testing to identify immune-pathway predispositions; the genetic test turnaround is typically a couple months.
So undergoing explant surgery for breast implant illness is obviously very different than if someone came in and said, hey, I just don't want my reconstruction or I don't want my augmentation anymore or if I had a capture contracture and they were asymptomatic. So we'll take the breast implant illness situation because it's a little bit more difficult in terms of what does it look like in terms of aftercare, if you will. So it really starts preoperatively, starting on our heart program, holistic accelerated recovery. And, and what we're looking at is identifying your genetic predisposition to immune problems. So if your immune pathways don't work well, we need to optimize those. So we do genetic testing for that. It's a saliva test. It's very simple to do. Turnaround time is a couple months normally. So that's something we need to start right away if we're going to have that as part of your plan.
