Dr. Robert Whitfield explains why symptoms persist after breast implant removal: surgery may miss microscopic DNA fragments and bacteria that visual inspection can't catch. He recommends sending samples for forensic testing and pathology review, and notes he's diagnosed four patients with breast cancer in six months that earlier exams had missed.
So I get patients all the time from all over the country sending me messages that they still have symptoms and all they had was implant removal because they said, here are the standard things. The implant capsule was too thin to remove. The implant capsule was too adherent to the chest wall and they felt it was too dangerous. They didn't see anything wrong. All right, all right. So for everybody listening, you can't see any of the things I'm talking about. These are all basic forensic analyses done using techniques that look for DNA fragments that you can't see. So you can't ever tell a family member or a patient that you didn't see anything. Like, I will always tell folks like, we can't see the bacteria. We're going to send it off, we're going to get it tested for, and then we're going to make sure that the pathologist looks at everything. Because breast cancer is still the most prevalent cancer you're going to find, which in the past six months we've had four patients with breast cancer. And it's all deep lying breast cancer that you would not have picked up otherwise because it was early stage and they wouldn't have known about it.
