A conversational YouTube video by Robert Whitfield MD explaining biofilm — microbial colonies that adhere to device surfaces — and its emerging role in problems with breast implants. The speaker recounts learning about the issue via his sister, expresses surprise that the phenomenon was previously unknown to clinicians, and describes a surge of patients seeking implant removal after exposure on social media.
So biofilm for the audience is a collection of, in this instance, we'll say bacteria that get stuck on the surface of the device and form a colony.
This would be the same type of biofilm that you'll find in, like, people's guts who have mold, fungal overgrowth, et cetera.
Correct. And this is the big idea with this problem. Right? So I was like, man, I missed this. If somebody had missed this on my sister, I'd be incredibly pissed off. So I went back for all of my notes and everything and the scans, and I was like, how did I miss this? And the short answer is like, we just didn't know. Sophisticated as we are, we did not know about this. And she put me on a social media platform, and I just had patients start coming out of the woodwork wanting their implants taken out. So my office is getting calls, and they're like, why are these people calling to get the breast implants removed? So now it's a mixture of patients. It's because.
By the way, you think that women would want to retain those implants for aesthetic purposes.
Right.
But what you're implying is that there's something going on.
That makes.
That overrides their desire for the aesthetic appearance of breasts, because there's some underlying issue that those breasts have caused.
