Robert Whitfield MDAmerica's Breast Implant Illness Expert™

Understanding Breast Implant Care: Managing Infections and Solutions

21 Apr 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:20

This is a brief excerpt from a YouTube interview (Robert Whitfield MD) about managing breast-implant pockets to prevent or treat infection and capsular contracture. Whitfield emphasizes that incomplete capsule resections can lead to problems, that pocket management practices needed to change, and that lowering pH in irrigation solutions (rather than relying solely on topical antibiotics) has been researched as a preventive strategy. The clip also critiques standard CLIA swab culture thresholds used to declare infection.

Chapters

So explain that difference because some people may have gotten already their breast explants and were told they were negative for infection and never treated. Do you then need to go back and do anything different?
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I haven't, I've had people come with incomplete capsule resections and I've taken care of them. It just became really. It was obvious that what we were doing, whether it was placement or removals or explants, something needed to be changed in terms of how you manage the pocket. So a lot of people are worried about not just placement of implants, but somebody who gets a capsular contractor. So a lot of research was done using solutions that lower the pH. And in particular, if you think about it, that makes much more sense because then it's not dependent upon basitracin, which is an antibiotic, or clindamycin, which is antibiotic, or anything any antifungal put in there. So in a CLIA based system, you swab the pocket using the Q tip and you rub it on a plate once it gets to the lab. And then it has to grow above a hundred thousand colony units for them to. Then the lab tech to go, oh yeah, this is infection.