A short interview with Robert Whitfield MD discussing his focus on breast explant surgery and fat transfer procedures, and his surgical background in oncology and microsurgery. The speaker describes how his practice has shifted toward explants due to high demand, and gives a lay explanation of microsurgery and transplant immunology.
Their foreign bodies.
So is basically the only thing you're doing at this point breast explant surgeries, or are you doing other surgeries as well?
So we do fat transfers, but I have so many people now coming from Asia and Europe and in the United States that there's not really time to.
Do much else, right? Yeah. It's kind of become your entire thing. Was that on purpose? I mean, were you interested in BII from day one as a plastic surgeon, or were you just doing regular breast augmentations and then started noticing a pattern of having problems?
Most of my background's in oncology, so I did microsurgery for almost 20 years. Getting old. So microsurgery is like sewing together the coffee stirrer you get at Starbucks with a piece of hair that you can't see under a microscope.
And what does that do?
So that connects the blood vessels. So think of the coffee stirrers. One's an artery, one's a vein. And when you do a transplant of tissue, you have to have an artery to take the blood flow in and a vein to bring it out. Otherwise it fails. And so the last surgeon to win a Nobel Prize was Joseph Murray. He showed that you could transplant a kidney in a Siamese twin. So that works because your immune system is identical in those two people. And then out of that, everything afterwards requires some level of immunosuppression. A lot of people get implant based breast reconstruction in the United States.
