Robert Whitfield MD describes treating an ICU nurse with severe fatigue from breast implants. Standard lab cultures showed only normal flora, but PCR testing revealed hidden infections. He's now tested over 400 explanted capsules using PCR, finding pathogens that traditional methods miss.
Questions this video answers
June 30, 2022.
2019.
MicroGen DX (Lubbock, Texas).
Over 400 PCR-tested explanted capsules.
An ICU nurse who traveled from New Orleans (patient with extreme fatigue).
Chapters
Having been shaped by my early experience finding an infection with E. Coli, I looked at every patient as well. What if they have an underlying implant infection? It's just not been recognized. And so we would do regular laboratory testing like it did, that initially identified the E. Coli case. And that went on for over a year and a half. And I started to get clients coming from out of state. And one client in particular was an ICU nurse who traveled from New Orleans. And she had incredible amounts of fatigue. She said it was hard for even to get out of bed. And so I was very concerned with her being a nurse, obviously, and having that extreme fatigue that she had an underlying breast implant infection and that was responsible for her symptomology. So we did her case, and I'll tee it up by saying I was very suspicious when I did her case that I was going to find an infection, something more significant in her. This was early on in my experience with breast implant illness. So I was trying to perform an en bloc capsulectomy and really do my best to not cause any other disturbance of the tissues. This was already a large procedure for the patients to go through. And in this particular case, I did the explant. And on both sides there was this kind of sliminess to the tissues. And so every time I had encountered this in the 20 year history or more of my career at that point, it led me to believe there's bacterial contamination of some variety. I confidently went out to her husband afterwards and I said, hey, she's going to do a lot better. I feel very confident this was infected. We'll just wait for the laboratory analysis to reveal what the organism is, then I'll put her on the appropriate antibiotic therapy and we'll get her hopefully good as new, feeling better, able to get back to work and function properly, I waited about the traditional week to get her results back, came back normal flora, which means there weren't enough copies of bacteria in a clia based lab system to prove an infection. Or alternatively, the lab was not testing for the right thing. And so that was a very, very frustrating experience for me. And we had started from a research standpoint in plastic surgery, seeing cases of anaplastic large cell lymphoma, of which they had done PCR testing on the capsule and found some bacterial contaminants. So I contacted colleagues and I said, well, what lab or which labs could I contact to do PCR testing on the specimens I have? And so that led me to contacting this lab. Getting back to the patient, I was very frustrated I had drains in this patient and she was just putting out copious amounts of fluid, meaning that it was obviously, you know, there's something going on. I couldn't tell her what it was in terms of is it a bacterial contaminant, Is it a fungal contaminant? Most likely it would have been bacterial. I chose to place her on oral antibiotics given my background with both breast cancer, breast cancer reconstruction, implant infections, and my experience with BII patients, spanning this, you know, career of mine already. And her drainage slowly decreased over the next couple of weeks and she went back to her home and subsequently had her drains removed. And so that kind of reinforced that I need to get on a different path to figure out what's wrong with these. So I started contacting these labs like I mentioned and settled on MicroGen DX out of Lubbock, Texas. It took a period of time for me to get PCR testing online in my practice that really began in 2019. Now I have over 400 PCR tested Xsplat capsules in my series.
