The Science of Breast Implant Illness (BII)

Welcome, everyone. This episode of the Drive is a little delayed because I was out of town traveling. But some exciting news. My book was finally published about the Sharp method. We'll go into that. Also, what to us is the, you know, a very important paper was published, and I want to give a lot of credit to Craig Tipton, Nicole Diaz, and Kyle Landry for helping me get this paper published. It looks at almost 700 consecutive samples about biofilm and bacteria involved in the biofilm production. So let's dive into, you know, what was incredibly busy time for me over the past couple weeks. So, first of all, we've been getting the book over the finish line. And if you haven't written a book or published a book, it can be arduous. I had contributed to books for different reasons over my academic career, and I had published manuscripts before, but I had not published my own book. Now it's up Sharp. You can get it on Amazon and you can listen to it on Audibles. It'll be on ibooks. You can go to our store and buy it. But so it highlights, you know, fundamentally we think is going on. So we'll summarize, you know, what has been, you know, a busy period of time of travel and getting these publications up and running so you can learn from them. So I always discuss breast implant illness as a chronic inflammatory process of which a breast implant, this medical device, a breast implant is just one component. And if you think of it with that lens, it'll make more sense. Now, we published this paper to show what microorganisms, what bacteria, what can be on the implant surface up against the scar tissue, interacting with the scar tissue, and stuck against the scar tissue that the patient produces around the implant. So think of it. I always use this analogy of an Easter egg. So an Easter egg at the time of Easter, you have those plastic eggs, put the candy inside. So we'll say the candy is the implant, and the wrapper on the candy could be bacteria, so it can touch the inside of that shell. But if the shell is not completely sealed, meaning your scar capsule or has a leak, or if it's just not woven very tightly because you didn't lay enough thick scar tissue down, that can interact with the breast tissue. And so in our series we know about, specifically in this series of almost 700 samples, 29% had bacteria. But at any given time, when you looked at an audit of my series, because I've done so many several thousand now, it'll be close to a third. So we're just going to use a third. A third of the time we're going to find a bacterial contaminant using quantitative PCR analysis. So PCR analysis looks specifically for DNA fragments. If you remember from the pandemic, you could get an antigen test or a PCR test. The PCR test is more accurate. It lets you know if the DNA fragment is there. So the DNA fragment in this instance is one of which a panel is looked at. It looks at 150 different types of bacteria, fungi and mycobacteria. So what's important is in our series there's two dominant species of bacteria and one's called Cutibacterium acnes. Yes, acne, it's found in acne. And two is Staph epidermidis, which is found on the skin. So it's roughly a third. This is the largest study published in the world to date to show the incidence of bacterial biofilm of those patients who present with breast implant illness. So that's done and dusted. That's what it is. Now another paper published this year shows that the interaction between those bacteria, specifically bacteria like Staph epidermidis, which produce biofilm, and C bacterium, which does produce, readily produce biofilm, those bacteria in their communities of bacteria. The biofilm will interact with the breast tissue and specifically an oleic fatty acid in the breast tissue. Once this happens, it produces oxylipin. So it's oxidizing and creating this oxylipin, which is called tenhorm. Now this can go on to affect your immune system. And basically the stimulation of the immune system can lead to more symptoms. I'm not going to go into every specific component. It's a little too detailed and nuanced for this. I will produce another video and I'll voice over and show the paper and discuss it in more detail. But so oxylipin tinho is just one molecule. There are other oxylipins that can be involved and elevated in patients with breast implant illness. So now for the first time we have the specific incidents from the paper we published of about a third, we'll just use that number. A third of the people can have this bacterial component. And then you're gonna, you know, ask, well, other people that I've taken care of in my practice who that I've operated on did not have this bacterial component. So why are they having so many issues? And so this is really why I published the book Sharp. I reverse engineered this by, through the pandemic. Just more and more work on our own because obviously There were a lot of limitations of what we could do in terms of referring patients out to see a functional nutritionist or any kind of providers because people couldn't see people in person. And I was considered at that point non essential. So I wasn't able to see patients and operate on patients. So that being said, the Sharp program really looks at your genetics. So that's fundamentally how you detox and metabolize based on your genetics looking at vitamin D synthesis, methylation pathways, utilization of glutathione and antioxidant pathways coupled to hormone metabolism. So using that in conjunction with a toxicity test, where the toxicity test looks for things like and you need to get these things in your vocabulary, so listen carefully. Environmental toxins that, that we're looking at can be for molds. So those are called mycotoxins. And so there's aflatoxins, fumicins, there's ochratoxin, there's all sorts of mycotoxins. After that, you know, we can look at and evaluate for heavy metals and heavy metals can include tin and cadmium and lead and you know, aluminum, all sorts of things. Other environmental toxins are just a whole wide variety, but I'm going to name some of the basic ones. So parabens, Parabens can be found in female products for skin care and or feminine hygiene. Glyphosates are what are herbicides and pesticides can be sprayed on foods and that contributes to increased glyphosates. Those are just a couple. There can be just a wide variety of chemicals like isoputyric acid. I mean I've seen triclosan, all sorts of strange things in high, high concentrations in patients from all over the United States and the world for that matter. So once you have, like I said, genetics, we use invision labs for genetics, the toxicity test. Then we look at gut health and we've used different vendors. Suffice to say we're going to look at an analys of the stool and we're trying to see is there a parasitic overgrowth, fungal overgrowth, is there bacterial imbalances or H. Pylori add a food sensitivity test to look at food triggers. We look at hormones to see what's out of balance, total testosterone free testosterone, thyroid function tests. We're looking for estrogen imbalances, high estrogen counts. People who are estrogen dominant will have higher than normal amounts of estrone. High amounts of estrone can lead to problems with the cycle, difficulty with pain, excessive bleeding, endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome. And there are avenues to support this holistically through supplementation of things like Prisin. And the final thing that we are striving and always looking for testing to help us clarify what's going on from an inflammatory standpoint. Metabolomics. Metabolomics is looking at certain chemical reactions and measuring their products in blood spot tests. So those tests provide a lot of clarity about what each person is experiencing and with that we formulate a detoxification plan. So there's this thing called, you know, basically discuss. It's called bio individuality. So I'm different and you're different. All of our listeners are different. So each of these tests is going to be different and we're going to go back to it to help you improve and heal over time. So sorry about my voice today. So that's really what Sharp is about. The other things that I feel were important to put in the book is not just embracing and understand your bio individuality and your genetics and all the different aspects of it, but how to measure and really help yourself by the quality of sleep you get, food you put into your system, air quality and fluid quality. So all these things, you know, I think anybody who listens to my podcast or YouTube channel, you've heard me discuss air quality. I do it a lot. We currently use Jasper Co in my office and recommend it to our patients. So that'll help improve your air quality. 2 fluid quality. In my office we use ECHO to filter water and produce hydrogen water. So filtered water is the minimum. We add hydrogen back. Hydrogen water can help reduce oxidation in gut quality of food. It's probably the hardest thing your going to find As a society we've got very used to eating out or eating fast food and or processed foods or things that can be reheated. Reheating foods in plastic is a terrible idea. Eating processed foods is incredibly from a nutritional standpoint, poor for you. It also has a lot of preservatives and the reason it can stay on a shelf for a long time is it has sugar in it. So we want to reduce refined sugars, eliminate processed foods and preservatives out of the diet. And I don't support any specific diet other than I want a high protein diet. So there's ways to get protein, animal, plant based protein. I don't. That's not a fight I'm interested in. I'm interested in elevating the quality and quantity of protein in your diet and reducing your inflammation. So that's what's most important to me. Eating quality Organic, really cleanse your fruits and vegetables. Those are important. Eating healthy fats. So you have to be careful with how you source nuts and how you source your avocados so that they're. And cleanse them properly, of course. So how does that all translate into what I said regarding quality of sleep? We'll end on sleep. So I measure this sleep two ways using the Ultra Human ring and the whoop strap. And I've had a Whoop Strap since 2016. I've had an ultra human ring a little over a year now. And the reason I like the Ultra Human ring over other rings on the market is I've compared it to the whoop strap, which I feel is currently the most accurate. So we're looking at HRV heart rate variability to establish how you're recovering. So I recently had a patient come to the office and say, you know, their HRV was in the teens. And so that's really poor. So if that's the case, that means you're unable to, you know, recover. So let talk about some strategies to recover just on a daily basis separate from surgery. So we try to follow the three, two, one rule. So stop eating about three hours before bedtime. Then you want to have your last large amount of fluid intake about two hours before bedtime. And the reason being is a lot of people wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. And that can be directly correlated to the fact that they were not able to go to the bathroom before they got off the bed or the volume of fluid they drank. Like get a big glass of water or something right before you went to bed, or you drank a bunch of tea or you had a glass of wine or whatever. Whatever the issue is, we have to time it up better. We have to be smarter than that. So I'm encouraging you to follow this and see if it works for you. So stop eating about three hours before bed, stop drinking about two hours before bed. Then the hour before you go to bed, cool off the room you're going to sleep in. If that's your bedroom, cool it off so that it's, it's slightly cooler than the ambient temperature in the rest of the house. Make sure that it's not got a lot of bright lights on, dim the lights. And then, you know, if you need noise asleep, you know, set up sleep noise. If you need a sleep mask, get a sleep mask organized, then you can go back out. And if you have a lot of difficulty getting off to sleep, then I want you just really to get off your screens entirely one hour before you're going to bed. And if it's still difficult to get off to sleep, I have kind of a sleep hack. I use a combination of our magnesium, which is bisglycinated, and our calming sleep support, and melatonin srt. So I can do one of each of those, or I can do two of each of those, and I just take those with a little, like, Dixie cup full of water or shot glass full of water or small amount of water, and then I go to sleep. Now, the other thing is, if you snore, you need to get checked for sleep apnea, because the last thing you want to do is not be able to sleep and get recovered because you have sleep apnea. That's an easy fix. There's a company called ResMed that will actually send you the test and you can do it at home and then have a telemedicine visit. So that's how I want you to go ahead to start to improve your recovery by improving your hrv, by improving your sleep sleep. So the quality of the food, quality of the air, quality of the fluid you take in, the timing of it, and remember every second counts and everything you put into your body is important.