Robert Whitfield MD says 29% of silicone implants are infected and argues for routine capsulectomy to remove the implant capsule. He recommends pre-implant genetic and toxin testing to assess who can tolerate them.
29%
Devices are not going to go away, but it would be great to be able to check someone's genetics and understand their toxicity, burden, and gut health and hormone balance before you ever put one in somebody.
So when you say things like, you know, if that device ruptures and then, you know, the material migrates and could affect the tissue effect, sounds very benign. What specifically do you mean by that?
Yeah, you'll get local inflammation at the site. So you'll see those cells on pathology, histiocytes and giant cells. Those are the cells typically you see of chronic inflammation with or without a rupture. You'll see those. And then when people have a R and leach the components of the shell into the tissues, it gets picked up by the lymph, and then they'll see it in the lymph node. So I always get folks bringing scans or messaging us. Hey, I have silicone in my lymph nodes. How can you get that out? What can I do for me personally is you don't ever go tooling around someone's axilla trying to pluck lymph nodes out because that'll create lymphedema. So we get all of it cleaned out. And that's why I'm a proponent of capsulectomy. We didn't talk about that. That's why I do a capsulectomy on every patient. I don't ever leave caps on anybody. 29% are infected, so I can't guess who's going to have that problem. So I always take it all out.
