These are the five most common patterns I see

Hello, hello, we're live in the circle. Gotta load up our talk, a couple minutes tardy today, had to make sure that I had a couple of the streams fixed. So everybody hop on. Just gonna make sure I have everything organized here. Gonna get everybody loaded, make sure everything's on. Show comments. Uh, just gonna make sure we're live inside the circle, doing a little bit of a check. Everybody hop on, feel free to join, let me know you're here in the circle. All right, live in the circle now. Perfect. Okay, how's everybody doing? May 6th, we're at 12:06 now, a couple minutes after my start time, so sorry about that. We will get rolling here shortly. So today, uh, we're doing this live top 5 symptoms I see, and, uh We'll get rolling in just a minute. We have, uh, and can do a Q&A for a period of time after that. And then tomorrow night I have a special live, uh, with Dr. Britton and, uh, Dabney Poole. Oh, I see Danielle. Hi, Danielle. Gotta make sure I keep track here. Okay, perfect. All right. Hi, Danielle. Hey Sandy, hey Ryder. All right, everybody join. We're live on all the platforms right now. Just gonna double-check everything and then we'll get going. Perfect. Alright, so we're live on Substack, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and just double-checking right now. Perfect. Okay, let's get started. Okay, here's what I'd like you to understand today. Uh, BII, or breast implant illness, is not one disease. I think it's more of a pattern. It's a constellation of symptoms that share a common root. Your immune system responded to something it was not necessarily designed to tolerate long term. The challenge is that these symptoms overlap with dozens of other conditions. That's why women get bounced from specialists specialists for years. So think of specialists like rheumatologists, endocrinologists, GI doctors, psychiatrists. They get told it's stress, they get assigned to an autoimmune problem, they get told it's aging or it's in their head. It's not in their head, it's in their chest wall, so to speak. So we'll talk about that. I'm going to give you 5 symptoms, the ones I most consistently see across thousands of patients. And I'm going to try to give you an explanation of why one happens to, uh, experience these physiologically. So symptom number 1 is chronic fatigue. Now this may be, um, a little bit harder to unpackage, but we'll go through this. So sometimes I have patients come with relentless fatigue that sleep does not fix. So even though your sleep hygiene is good and you go to bed and you get you know, 7 to 9 hours of sleep. You wake up and you still feel tired. So they wake up exhausted and they tell me how they used to be such a high performer, working out a lot, working a lot, taking care of the family, doing all these activities. And now they can barely get through their afternoon without requiring a nap, shutting down, waiting. Here's what's happening. The immune system for lack of a better example, is chronically activated. Like the sink is on, the stopper's in the, the bottom of the basin, and now the water just keeps filling until it runs over. So when you have a foreign body, you have biofilm, or when you have a device that's degrading or leaking over time, it diverts resources away from our energy production towards our immune surveillance. Our mitochondria, the things that produce energy, will potentially downregulate or become impaired. There'll be mitochondrial dysfunction. Your cortisol rhythm will change, and also your thyroid function will change. It's not laziness. It's not your body, you know, it, it's your body really trying to protect itself. It's trying to prioritize survival over performance. The tell is the fatigue itself doesn't respond to more sleep, right? So that's when we recover, when we sleep. So it doesn't respond to that. Uh, you may be coffee drinkers like I am. It doesn't respond to coffee and it doesn't respond to supplementation. So despite what you may be trying to do in terms of alterations of diet, supplementation, uh, sleep hygiene, it's not resolving it because we have to get to the, the core of it. Number 2 is brain fog, and that used to be like a hard thing for me to understand, and patients explained it to me, I think, very eloquently, to the point where it's, it's more like just short-term memory loss. And so that, coupled to difficulties with concentrating, maybe finding words in addition to the short-term memory loss, is really what brain fog has been characterized to me by my patients. Women tell me they feel like they're potentially just losing it because they used to be very sharp and now they have trouble finishing sentences, finding their keys, remembering they left something in the car. Um, and the mechanism here to me is more having to do with neural inflammation. When systemic inflammation is elevated, and when we can measure this with markers like um, think of like our, our tox screens. Like, if we have elevated PFAS, if we have elevated mycotoxins, um, those coupled to other biomarkers give us insight into what may be disrupting our neurotransmitters at the, the level where this is happening. They may in fact impair neurologic functions at the hippocampal level. And this is not dementia. This is not aging. This is not perimenopause, although it gets mixed diagnosis, all of those. This is your brain responding to a body that is difficult, having a difficult time with inflammation. I've watched this resolve in patients within weeks to months of X-Plan. So that tells you, that the, one of the drivers can be the chronic inflammation from the Number 3 is joint pain or muscle aches and/or stiffness. Often these can be migratory or move around. One day it's in your hands, next week it's in your shoulders, your hips. So bad that you can't get up and down. Now, I have this great patient, Leah. If you ever go into Dr. Rob's circle, Leah is in there all the time. She'll tell you how within a week, much of her joint pain resolved. And so that's a big issue. I also have a great patient, Cindy, same type of thing. These women were sent to different doctors, orthopedic surgeons, rheumatologists, neurosurgeons. They get tested for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren's. They may have surgeries. Sometimes the ANA comes back positive, sometimes it doesn't. Either way, they're told it's difficult to be definitive. They may end up, uh, being told they have this low-grade autoimmune condition. They may end up having surgeries. I think the short answer is that they have this chronic inflammation at the tissue level. And when your body's mounting an inflammatory response to that, the body drives more and more inflammation. That can then be represented by more and more problems with, we'll just say, pain. One of the drivers of symptoms can be oxylipentin home, which has been measured in the research environment by Dr. Mathun, These patterns can be seen in the morning when people are first getting up. They can be seen with movement, and they typically don't respond well to traditional therapies like anti-inflammatories. Now, when I mentioned my patient Leah, hers responded to me removing her device and her being able to, for the first time, twist off the, the top of a bottle for a very, uh, long number of years. I don't remember the exact The next is hair loss and skin changes, including rashes. I think, you know, this one is potentially one that bothers people a lot because anything that affects hair loss, um, super disconcerting, right? So your hair and your skin to me are very, very much indicators of inflammation. And when I see skin changes and hair loss, I think things have gone pretty far. Your, your body's in this state of chronic immune system activation. Um, it's deprioritizing non-essential functions like hair growth and skin repair, and it's prioritizing, like I said, fight or flight, survival. What I see clinically is thinning, uh, not like traditional, uh, pattern baldness. But overall thinning, brittle nails, dry, flaky skin, sometimes unexplained rashes and hives and acne go without any, um, or happen without any triggers. And this is your body telling you, like, it's allocating resources to fighting something else, and it's not just surveilling these normal, you know, issues. Number 5, anxiety. Anxiety that comes out of nowhere. Is concerning. Depression that doesn't respond to medication, mood swings, a feeling of being disconnected from yourself. This is one of the things that gets missed fastest. You're stressed. The common reaction may be, here's an antidepressant. Have you tried this before? Have you tried other modalities? Maybe have you tried meditation? Here's what the literature shows. Systemic inflammation directly impacts serotonin and dopamine synthesis. Chronic immune system activation depletes tryptophan, the precursor of serotonin. Um, and there's a specific pathway for this. The body literally cannot make enough of the transmitters that make you feel good because it's using all the raw materials for immune defense. So this is not a psychological problem. It's more of a biochemical consequence of chronic inflammation. So those are 5 symptoms: fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, hair and skin changes, and basically anxiety or mood dysregulation. Uh, none of these alone proves anybody has breast implant illness because I consider breast implant illness a chronic inflammatory process of which a breast implant is playing a role. When you see 3, 4, or all 5 together in a woman with implants and our other conventional workups have came back normal, um, it doesn't mean that everything's normal. It means something else is going on, and it's incumbent upon the providers to help the patients, or the patients to help themselves become educated about other options. And my job is to provide education. Many of you know that I've been censored on platforms, and I routinely— we got millions of views on videos of which now you can't find magically. So if you were to go to my website, drrobertwhitfield.com, and type answers, there'll be a whole series of videos. If you go to my YouTube channel, Dr. Robert Whitfield MD, you'll see over 4,000 videos. If you go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and find the Dr. Whitfield Show, there'll be over 160 podcasts. So it's not for lack of trying to give you the information, it's being suppressed. So if you want the information, if you don't want suppression of information, if you just want education, then go listen to or view a show. If this resonates with you or someone you know, the next step would be just to book a free discovery call with the team. They will guide you. We can definitely set you up to have things measured and looked at to really assess what is going on. The Sharp Method looks at genetics, toxicity burden, gut health, food sensitivities, hormonal balance. Those are the core, uh, aspects of it. I wrote a book about the Sharp Method. You can get that on, uh, the site as well. We wrote a book about breast implant illness called— I'm sorry, called Breast Implants, Explant Surgery, and Breast Implant Illness. It's there as well. So I'm going to open it up to questions. We're going to take some here quickly on TikTok, Instagram, uh, Substack, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, everywhere I can grab a question from, and then we'll go in the circle for a live Q&A, excuse me. Hey, Mike, nice. All right, what questions do we have here? Let me roll back. All right, it says the circle is frozen. Uh, let me see. Try again, Danielle. I may have clicked out of the window and that was the problem. Sorry about that. Danielle, let me know if that's working now. Please type in there. So we're gonna go and I'm live in the circle. I'm gonna type in the chat in the circle, I am live now. So I am live in Dr. Rob's circle right now. Oh good, Danielle's here. So the circle's working. So I want you to go to, So it's D-R-R-O-B-S-C-I-R-C-L-E.com. It's free to join. And I can't be censored in the circle, it's mine. So once again, I have videos with over 30 million views, 160 podcasts, 2 books, and most of you don't know I exist, which is pretty funny. And it's not funny in a good way. So I'm going to respond to Lizzie here. The question is, my ANA has been as high as 640. BRCA2 positive, osteoporosis, celiac, Hashimoto's, misdiagnosed with MS for years. Um, so I'm going to make the assumption they had reconstruction with implants. So I've helped, uh, patients with this problem. Um, so if that's the case, then I would encourage her, uh her book, a free call with my team. So if you have a friend, a loved one, somebody who's got this kind of challenge, and you want more information, you can go into the circle and learn for them, or you can connect them with the circle. Um, I gave you a shout out, Leah. Uh, Lana, are you post-op now? Did you have surgery? I have people in the circle who are live. Trying to make sure I get everybody's questions answered. Who has a question? I'm gonna reply to Miss Thee. Check. Hi Jen. Hi Lee. Dr. Bonnie. Uh, Kristen. Michael again. Just trying to make sure that All right. Yes, ma'am, Misty. So Misty, you should hop into the circle. All right, um, Lana is one day post-op. Congratulations, Lana. Lana could not travel to us, but we sent her to a surgeon near her in Indiana. We wish for the best. Okay, any other questions on Instagram or TikTok? Oh, I have 4 new messages on TikTok. Oh my gosh. Okay. I'm going to take some questions here before I just go live into the circle. Are there any other questions I can answer? No, Miss Andrade_11, nobody has the same protocol I have. Remember, I have 3 full-time functional practitioners that work as part of our team. So we have Gina Chelsea, Melinda is part of our team. I have a full-time nurse practitioner, Violet, who's had an explant with us in the office. We have a full, uh, team that helps with our recovery protocol, including our lymphatic therapist, our esthetician, our reception team, our MA, uh, Millie, our nurse in the office, Leticia. Um, yeah, I mean, I have a fleet of people helping all the time. So no, I would, I would not think anybody's doing the same things. Not at all. Okay. Okay. I'm going to shut down these other streams and just go into the circle. All right, everybody. Who wants to join? Um, oh, I can't type. Okay, we're gonna go in the circle. Um, we got 3 new messages on TikTok. Why, why am I so lame? I can't comment on TikTok. Off. It's just terrible. I can't be this dumb, right? I feel like I'm dumb. Mm. All right, everybody on TikTok, go to drrobcircle.com. All right. Okay, I'm in the circle now. I'm gonna turn some of these streams off. So we're going to shut down Facebook, LinkedIn.