Thursday Night Live

Hey everybody, just hopping on here. Give us a moment and we'll be done getting everything lined up. Everybody can get loaded. Mm, mm-hmm. Gotta love it when some of the things aren't working for you. There we go. Perfect. Sort of. Mm-hmm. Okay. Nice, gotta love that. In just a moment, the holders fell over, of course. All right, after a nice technical delay there, quite the day. All right. Now everybody's seen the back of the office. Can you all hear me okay? All right, everybody hop on. And a couple little tech issues that we're going to work through, but it'll be all right. It's our Thursday Night Live. We're going live everywhere. Tuesday was In My Circle. Wednesday we did a live where I had a number of platforms running. We're gonna turn everything on. Everybody chime in, can you hear me okay? Just let me know. I'm gonna double-check everything, make sure it's working. Should be live on all the platforms: Substack, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, and, um, Yeah, all that should be working now. Just let me know if there's any trouble. Hit me in the chat. Hi Greta! Hi Lisa! Heather! Elaine! Vicki! JJ! We're gonna do a bunch of shoutouts in the beginning today. Uh, it was a very busy day and, um, a day that I needed. It's, uh, it's not been a, uh, smooth, uh, few weeks. So everybody hop on and we'll get started. I actually have to load In another window, the circle. All right, how are y'all doing? Excellent. I got everything loaded now, finally. Oh my gosh. Okay. All right, I'm live everywhere. The chat's working. Can you hear me, uh, Courtney? Just make sure you can hear me okay, Courtney. So once again, we have Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Substack, should be live on LinkedIn and X as well. And, um, We'll get rolling here shortly. Yeah, please share the live with other friends and family members. Tonight we're going to talk about a couple of things near and dear to us. We're going to finish up a discussion I've been having about breast cancer, breast cancer reconstruction, breast implants, breast implant illness. We're going to add in some mast cell activation syndrome, autonomic dysfunction with POTS. Some genetic susceptibility issues, um, toxic mold, chronic immune system activation. Yeah, we're gonna dive into all that tonight because it's been kind of a week, uh, and it stimulated me to talk about some more things than I normally would have talked about. That's all good. So I felt like this camera is all right. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, Jess, I don't know much about spinal stimulators. It's not my, uh, not my cup of tea. So you want to share this with anybody who's got breast implants, had breast reconstruction for cancer, you may think they have problems with their implants, infection, immune system activation, people with mast cell instability or mast cell syndrome, autonomic dysfunction, uh, POTS. Genetic problems with detox, toxic mold exposure. So everybody hop on. All right. Okay, we're going to get started. I'm Dr. Whitfield MD, board-certified plastic surgeon in Austin, Texas, and the impetus for this week, the stimulation for this week, was a post I made in a Facebook group last week that ultimately banned me from the group. And it was a post I made about how I got into, uh, taking care of patients and performing explants. There was a cancer patient that came to me in 2016 who wanted to go flat, and so I did their explant. However, after the explant was performed, they had, um, an E. coli infection. And so that led me on a a very kind of circuitous path, but one that made me very curious about: are other people having problems with indolent or silent infection? And so that led us to publish the largest series in the world of PCR-tested explant specimens, scar tissue capsules. So long story short is 29% have bacterial contamination. So I feel like that's a, a fair number. It's a very large sample size. Um, that's one answer to a question that I was curious about. Now, along those same lines, I had a cancer patient of mine come back for a second fat transfer recently, and, um, she's such an authentic person, I wanted to have her on my show. And so Wednesday last week I made the post. I got all these comments. The moderators of that Facebook group, Breast Implant Illness and Research, took it down. And, um, I had prepared this post about the patient Sarah Minnick that we're going to talk about and her cancer journey, and they wouldn't put that up. And now they've banned me from the group, which is fine. Um, the long story short is there are a number of problems associated with chronic inflammation, and if you have a device, um, that is yet just another, uh, layer, if you will. So today, not to get too off tangent, I had two experts, one, um, about mast cell activation syndrome and one about mold exposure on my podcast that'll come out later. And, you know, we work really hard to prepare patients preoperatively with the Sharp Method and execute a series of, of not insignificant surgical steps. And so Sarah Minnick, who I operated on almost a year ago initially, I took down her breast reconstruction. She had so many problems with it, and, um, it took her almost a year to heal herself and start to feel really pretty good again. But she was not happy with the aesthetic result, so we did another fat transfer recently, and she was super authentic on the show I did. I encourage everybody to go to my YouTube channel, Dr. Robert Whitfield MD. MD on YouTube, or @RobertWhitfieldMD on YouTube, or just go to my podcast, The Dr. Robert Whitfield Show, on Spotify or Apple to listen to the entire episode. Because you want to learn something or listen to somebody who's extremely authentic, and that's how you get the best understanding of what we do, how we do it, It's a, it's a great explanation she gives of her experience. And she told me things I didn't realize. Of course, one of the main things that she was very, very concerned about, she has nipple tattooing. And when we first met, I said, you know, I want to try to preserve this for you because they did a good job with this. And that was very important to her. Many times nipple reconstruction, nipple tattooing is the final step in the reconstructive process for patients. And it gives them a great sense of, of closure to the process. And I didn't want to affect that if I could avoid it. So I did her explant initially, and she had tissue expanders and breast implant reconstruction. And those are very significant steps, and they can cause alterations in the rib structure. They can create some indents and things, and she had all that. And that was one of the main reasons she wanted to come back and get, and get an improvement cosmetically. And she lives in Nebraska, so she has to travel with her, her husband and her family. Her husband's super supportive, and her family is super supportive, and they care a great deal about her. So she's came here twice from Nebraska and had, had treatment. So once again, I can't do justice to the episode. You need to watch the episode. So what I can do is explain a little bit about reconstruction and give everybody kind of a basic understanding of reconstruction. And you have to be able to communicate, um, with patients. So when patients are diagnosed and they have a breast cancer diagnosis, there's a series of steps they go through to evaluate tumor biology and genetics. And, and then once all that's reviewed and the breast surgeon can speak to them Am I frozen on Instagram? Somebody on Instagram tell me if I'm frozen or not. Okay, thank you, Christa. All right, so there's 3 types of reconstruction. There is an implant-based reconstruction, there's a couple steps for that. Then there is a tissue reconstruction, so that's using your own tissue, abdominal tissue, inner thigh, outer thigh, um, buttock, back. I've used every sort of, of tissue possible for reconstruction. For cancer patients. And so those are your own sources. And then the final, uh, is a combination of the two. And those are basically three buckets. Basically, you have to think that way. And I'm talking about a total breast reconstruction. That's all I'm talking about right now. And so the last one is your own tissue and should have about a 95% success rate and shouldn't get infected. And if it does, it can be treated and it shouldn't be a problem. That's kind of basic. And then the mixture would be a higher risk profile because you would put a device in to improve the size or shape. Now, the most risky is always going to be the patient who had an implant-based reconstruction because it's a foreign body. And so those things are in the background, right? And then you have things that are chronic immune system activators, and we've seen this uptick in mast cell activation syndrome. I had, uh, Dr. Tony Dibsy on today on my show. She's phenomenal. I encourage everybody to check her out. Um, there's, um, POTS. I recently had a doctor with POTS, and, um, POTS is an autonomic dysfunction issue and affects your your, your tone. Basically, you have blood pressure issues, tachycardia, um, just a wide range of problems. And that one's been a little bit difficult for me because I, um, I haven't seen as many patients with that. I've seen a lot more mast cell activation syndrome patients. And the, the patient we had recently, I was doctor, uh, much of her POTS has, uh, improved from a symptomatic standpoint. I, I certainly hope that that continues for her Um, and then I'm very fascinated always by genetics, either HLA or specific SNPs or mutations in MTHFR and, um, VDRGPX, GSST, GSTP1. So all these things contribute to why the patients are experiencing what they're experiencing, and we're just kind of scratching the surface of what we know about what's happening at the tissue level because we haven't had the techniques available until recently to make more sense of what's going on at the tissue level. So, um, every implant that gets placed in the body basically will develop scar tissue around it. We're going to use this little towel around this implant, this little white towel. So that scar tissue will say represents a collagen sac. The collagen sac is a woven collagen sac, and it's not impenetrable, it's not impervious. It allows for communication between and signaling from anything on the device to the breast tissue and the surrounding tissues. And so I already, you know, basically feel comfortable that we prove that 29% have bacterial contamination. And of that, the two most common types, Ketobacterium acnes and Staph epidermidis, readily form biofilm. Biofilm, in many of the studies, you know, we feel it interacts with the tissues, oxidizes the oleic acid, and that leads downstream to problems including T-bet activation, um, further affecting helper cell function, and then ultimately macrophage polarization. Long story short is it's going to ramp up these symptoms. Now, if you have that going on and you already have a problem with your mast cells and you already have autonomic dysfunction with POTS and you didn't pick your parents right, you don't detox well because you inherited genes, so your detox is a little bit more limited, and just for instance, you add a co-infection, maybe you got Lyme disease, maybe you got, um, Epstein-Barr, maybe you got, uh, chronic mold exposure from where you lived, um, in your first apartment after you left home, or where you grew up, or where you worked. So all these things really create a more complicated and more difficult pathway to navigate. So now we add Sarah's case into it, and she had cancer and underwent cancer treatment. So you are literally creating such an overstimulated immune system that it's not surprising that patients have so many problems. So, you know, we talk about the Sharp Method, and basically we created it to help lower inflammation. And everybody's got different methodologies, different techniques. The, the thing that's important to us is we operate on patients, create a really safe space for them during the prep, intra-op, and recovery from surgery. And we have dedicated nurse practitioners at Explant with us, and we have dedicated detox pressure practitioners who've had explants with us. So everybody's got a really strong support system in my practice. And the only reason you can't get in touch with us or communicate your needs to us is you're not trying. Everybody's going to try to support as much as possible. I always encourage people, obviously they have to get, you know, other people involved if they're suffering from these other problems because I can't solve all those things. And I'm, you know, here in Austin, Texas. Much of my team works remotely. In addition to the team located in Austin. So we serve people all over the United States and, and now the world. So we've had patients from 40 states and 15 countries, uh, travel to us and stay with us. And, you know, Dave Asprey's conference is in Austin right now, and Dave's a wonderful client of ours and friend to our clinic and really helped, uh, get the message out there for us initially a few years back. We hope to be on his show again to spread, uh, the word again and to share my latest book, Breast Implants: Explant Surgery and Breast Implant Illness. Um, we're opening a brand new surgery center really set up to help increase the level of care, improve the patient experience. We want everything to be as seamless as possible for everyone. So I think with that, um, I'll, I'll close. I'll take some questions. And, um, see if I can answer some things. We're on a lot of platforms. Um, I'll try to take a couple on platform and then go into my private community, drrobcircle.com. I'm going to type that in the chat on Instagram. It'll be easier for me in a Smaller setting, put that in the chat. I have no idea how to chat on TikTok. Can anybody tell me how to do that? Hi everybody on TikTok. Somebody add a comment who knows how to spell Dr. Rob Circle and put it on TikTok. How about that? That would be awesome. That would help me. Is anybody got any, any questions for me? Oh my gosh, looking at the TikTok here. I'm in Austin, Texas. I'm a plastic surgeon and, um, excuse me. Oh, I got to give shout out to my patient Laura Dunworth, who came up to me at the Dave Asprey Biohacking conference and said hi. Operated on her in 2019. She's a wonderful patient, um, super lovely to see her today. Um, let me see if I got a— Ezra's on. Hi, Ezra. Yeah, you all need to go into Dr. Rob's circle and see Sherilyn Karkov. Uh, she's got pretty much everything I listed and a bit more. And, uh, she's a phenomenal patient. She's had a very, very tough time with doctors, but, um, we worked with her and continue to support her, and she's getting better and better. So we're really happy. Um, to have been able to help her. I don't have any questions on Instagram, so can everybody on Instagram go to drrobcircle.com? It's free to join. Can anybody on TikTok follow suit and put that in there? All right, I'm gonna shut these down, go into my private community, so hop in there. All right, okay, okay, here we go. Awesome. All right, Sherilyn, how are you doing? Good to hear from you. I'm going to read this. Oh yeah, don't worry about other people. That's, that's to be expected. Yeah, I think those people belong in that group where I get bastardized all the time. It's pretty funny. It's all right, you gotta love the hate. Or as they say in, uh, Ted Lasso, fuck the haters. Uh, I'm gonna shut down some of this so I can get off of some of these. Uh, I'm gonna hop off of Facebook and Substack. Rumble gone from X, gone from— I guess I need a platform where— hold on a second, remove