MAST Cell and Brest Implants

This is our 11 AM live, a little behind because we had a technical issue. Yeah, Substack is not working, I apologize. So we're just going to make sure everything's good in the circle and then we'll get going. We have 3 talks this week. Last night I did a live in my community with Dr. Tanya Dempsey. Hope y'all were able to see that. If you're unable to join it, if you, um, go and join the circle, which is live, you'll be able to access, um, you'll be able to access the recording. I'll put it up. Inside there. All right, live now. Is anybody in the chat? I just want to double check. I'm gonna take a picture of that. I know it's middle of the day, I apologize. If you're able to, uh, watch last night, I had a great conversation with Dr. Tanya Dempsey, who's an expert in mast cell activation syndrome, and I had her recently on my podcast, but I wanted to have, uh, her on my live in my private community, so I had her come on. She was great. So I have a podcast to do here in a little bit, and, um, I wanted to hop on and do our Wednesday episode. It's a little bit earlier. I have a special celebration tonight, uh, and so we're gonna move things up on my schedule a little bit, and we'll get going here in just a moment. Everybody hop on. We're going to talk a bit about mast cell and, um, something that I do a lot, breast implant, um removals, capsulectomies, a lot of consultations about next steps. But I only have about 21 minutes, so I'm going to give about a 10-minute talk. I'll take a live Q&A, and then I got to hop on a podcast. So And I've got a full schedule this afternoon, so everybody hop on. Anybody in the circle? Looks like I don't have anybody right now in the circle, which is fine. Hi Lena, I hope you're feeling good. All right, so we're gonna get going here. I know, uh, for those of you who joined last night, a little bit of this will be redundant, but I'm Dr. Robert Whitfield MD, board-certified plastic surgeon, founder of the Sharp Method, our private community, Dr. Rob Circle. And today I want to talk about something that's completely changed, um, how we kind of view our, our patients who are experiencing chronic inflammation from breast implants, we look at, um, with something, um, that has become relatively higher profile and higher profile over time is mast cell activation syndrome. And if you've been dealing with symptoms that nobody can explain, whether without implants, fatigue, histamine reactions, gut issues, brain fog, skin problems, joint pain, hypermobility, this is something that you want to pay close attention to. So what exactly are mast cells? Mast cells are immune cells. They live in the connective tissue in your skin, your gut, your airways, your bladder, your brain, and they act like first responders. And they're very sensitive to threats and allergen and infection, a foreign body, a stress response, and they release a fairly strong amount of chemicals everybody is familiar with, histamine, but they also release things like tryptase, other cytokines, and other inflammatory mediators. And that's their job. And that's a, a very normal reaction of our immune system in surveillance. The problem is in MCAS, um, the triggers that are firing shouldn't be firing. If you have mast cell activation syndrome, they're firing like way too hard where they can't stop firing. And once that happens, it affects system over system across your body because the mast cells are everywhere. Now, for my patients that are experiencing problems with chronic inflammation and happen to have a breast implant, I see over and over again a higher and higher number of patients with you know, mast cell activation syndrome. And, um, that's why, you know, one of the main reasons I've had experts discuss this in the past, whether it was Meg Mill, Kelly McCann, or last night we had Dr. Tonya Dempsey. And, you know, my patients have a tremendous amount of immune system reactivity in my experience. And having MCAS is, is definitely— it's part of it, right? So if we think about what a breast implant is from a core perspective, it's a foreign body sitting in your connective tissue. That's the tissues obviously where mast cells live. It's not inert, so it's signaling, it's communicating. The there's this day after day, month after month, year after year, low-grade chronic inflammatory signal. And for a woman who has, uh, mast cells that are already dysregulated, the implant is making that worse. It's not making it better. It's like pouring gasoline on a fire. And what it looks like clinically is fatigue that doesn't respond to sleep, gut symptoms that the, the GI doctors can't figure out, histamine reactions to foods that used to be tolerated just fine. There may be skin flushing, more problems with brain fog or anxiety or OCD behaviors, and then they're labeled that this is in their head, but obviously it's not. So, you know, there's more and more research being done on MCAS, so now it's recognized as a syndrome since around 2007. There was a big consensus meeting in 2010 about it, but it's taken a long time, but it's definitely grown over the last decade. And since the pandemic happened and long po— long COVID patients started coming into clinics with symptoms that were almost identical to MCAS, researchers started looking at that overlap as well. So The symptom profiles of Long COVID and mast cell activation syndrome are nearly indistinguishable. So SARS activates mast cells directly, but just because of that, um, that, you know, activation, you know, the, the pandemic didn't create MCAS, but it definitely forced medicine to finally pay closer attention to it. And the current estimates are MCAS affects up to 17% of the general population. That's basically 1 in 6 people. But most of them have no idea that's actually happening. So what do we do with this, you know, amount of information? I think first, like, it's become, you know, more and more of an issue with us is we have to recognize that that as an actor in, you know, what's driving inflammation. Our patients, many of them now are coming in after being told they have, or their symptoms are consistent with mast cell activation syndrome. You know, as providers, we understand this, but as other providers, they have to start looking at this and working it up and be more aware of it. And I get a lot of DMs about patients who've explanted but don't feel well. Now, this may be a piece of that puzzle, uh, programmatically. Like, I talked with Dr. Dempsey last night. Our, our program is set up to preoperatively look at genetics and toxicity burden, gut health, food sensitivities. Uh, we pay close attention to that for a reason. I think travel history is important. I think parasitic Co-infections are a problem as well, and Lyme disease. All these different things are certainly playing a role. We have to be more and more diligent and look more carefully at them. So, you know, last night I sat down with Dr. Dempsey in the circle and we talked about this. She's one of the leading experts in the country on MCAS. We We had a— I guess we talked for over an hour about it, how to test for it including molecular testing like FISH assays that standard labs would completely miss and how to actually navigate, you know, this for the patient. So we'll put that up in the circle. It's being edited by our team now and tonight We, uh, we'll have that up by tonight for sure. And then tomorrow night at 7 PM Central, we'll put together a full compilation of education on the entire arc of MCAS, how it connects to breast implant illness, how we're looking at testing, treating. And we want you to be able to obviously advocate yourself So if you want to join us tomorrow night or to today in the circle, go to drrobscircle.com and sign up for free. Um, if you can't join today because you're at work or busy, I totally understand. I'll be on for another about 10 minutes in the circle just to answer questions. I'll put that in the, the comments here on Instagram. It's Dr. Robscircle.com. And as my great patient Leah says, I'll keep doing this and helping patients until it gets, uh, to the tipping point where it's overwhelming with how many people we have in the circle and how hard it is for me to cope with the comments. But I'll do everything I can to help you all out. So on TikTok, it's D-R-R-O-B-S-C-I-R-C-L-E dot com. Um, hop off of TikTok and Instagram and the other platforms and go into the circle. I'll be there now. Okay. So I'm in the circle. Anybody in the circle, please go ahead and hit me in the chat. I know it's the middle of the day, super uncommon time, that's okay. Here for everybody who can hop on.