Speaker Robert Whitfield MD emphasizes that all surgical implants (orthopedic, dental, cardiac, neurologic, etc.) carry a non-trivial risk of infection and that surgeons must disclose this risk during consent. He highlights cancer-reconstruction patients as higher-risk due to multiple surgeries and adjuvant therapies: chemotherapy (causing immunosuppression) and radiation (increasing skin/wound problems over implants), drawing on his experience in orthopedic oncologic reconstruction.
Chapters
It's not something that is to be taken lightly at all. If you had to guess when you're kind of explaining that as a risk back when you were doing this, how many women, and I guess sometimes they'd have their. Their partner, you know, man or woman there. How many of them kind of took that seriously or kind of like you do when you're signing some, you're just like. Yeah, just like. Well, that's the problem. I think young people just sign stuff, and then as you gain life experience, you ask a lot more questions. Yeah, and I always pro, you know, kind of approached it in the worst case scenario. I would always tell anybody that got an implant. And I worked with. I was a associate professor of orthopedics as well, so I worked with a lot of orthopedic surgeons doing reconstruction for sarcomas. And they put in these huge prosthetic devices to reconstruct your leg. And I mean, it was. It was crazy. But all those things can get infected. Yeah. And so whether it's a, you know, knee implant, hip implant, dental implant, cardiac implant, neurologic, anybody who puts in any implant as a surgeon always has to explain and disclose that this can become infected. So. So I always gave that disclosure and discussed that. And I did a lot of cancer reconstruction. And those patients always had more surgeries and more problems. And then they had other therapies. Like they'd have to undergo chemotherapy, which would immunosuppress them and put them at higher risk for an infection, or they would get radiation therapy, and that would put them at risk for problems with the skin over the implant. So there are all these extra things that, that I just got used to talking with patients about.
