How Long Does Breast Explant Surgery Take to Recover From? [DOCTOR EXPLAINS]

Hey, it's Dr. Robert Whitfield, and welcome to my breast implant illness podcast. Today we're going to talk about recovery. And so how long does recovery take after explant surgery, which obviously is paramount to everybody when they come in to visit with us? And it really depends on the nature of how you start, how diligent you are about our program, and what combination, if combination of techniques is going to be performed to help you get your surgical result. 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 capturing 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 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. I work diligently to identify toxicity, so that's done through a urine test, a total toxicity test, and there's another urine test for inflammation. So those are really. We can hone down in on what things we need to optimize in your diet, your lifestyle, maybe your home environment, your work environment, maybe you're in mold. And we need to carefully consider options around optimizing your air quality, work environment, home environment. So we look at that carefully. And then diet obviously plays a key role in all of this. If you can't eat and absorb your nutrients, you can't recover easily. So optimizing your diet, examination of your food sensitivities and how you absorb through the food through your GI tract and ultimately create elimination through your stool. Seeing if you have bacterial or fungal overgrowth or parasitic overgrowth, what balance is there? Do you have leaky gut? Do you have a high secretory IGA level? And then looking at your blood work and your hormone balance, because hormone balance has got to be optimized in order to recover. Women have really high levels of cortisol sometimes and estrogen as well. And these can really prolong recovery. I look carefully at estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. We optimize those levels. We have supplements that help as well. So we're looking at all this to really shorten your recovery time. We also use red light therapy in my office. We also use lymphatic massage in my office. We have many clients who use hyperbaric oxygen therapy to enhance their recovery. Taking supplements, as I mentioned, optimizing diet, carefully following instructions and staying on track with your diet really limits fluid accumulation by changing your oncotic pressure, which is the protein content in your blood, so that you go from a leaky phase or catabolic phase after surgery to an anabolic phase or a non leaky phase so that you absorb your fluid, pee it out, your swelling goes down more quickly. And you know, I've done this for many, many years for cosmetic and reconstructive patients. Way we approach it really allows you to recover according to your, your plan that you know, we create for you. So I want everybody to have it as individualized plan as possible so that, you know, it's, it's not just our surgery. It's really you buying into your genetics, your diet, your lifestyle, your environment, your hormone balance to give you the best possible results. And that really decreases your time. If you have a explant and it's above the muscle, that's a one to two week recovery. Behind the muscles, a couple of weeks depending on how hard it is to get it out from behind the muscle. You know, the fat transfer patient is going to have more healing because we take fat from areas. So that's why I really emphasize the diet. Fatic massage. Like I said, other, other clients of mine have used hyper oxygen therapy. We're introducing things all the time to enhance recovery like peptide therapy. We really want you to do as well as possible and recover as efficiently as possible. So please, if you're not seeing me in Austin or virtually in a discovery session, please seek out a very, very qualified explant surgeon to learn about your options and other considerations.