Robert Whitfield MD discusses breast implant removal with Michaela Peterson. Implants compress your native tissue over time, but after explant, many patients see improvement as tissue re-expands, a process called fluffing. Results depend on how much fatty versus glandular tissue you had originally.
I mean, listen, I'm all, and we've talked about this for, I'm all for people doing things that are going to make them look and feel better. But the key part of that is feel better at the end. If you're doing things and you're not feeling better, you shouldn't be doing it or if there's any kind of vulnerability. One more question for the, for the skeptics out there, for people that are saying, hey, this is not proven that this is what's causing inflammation, or I don't believe that this even innate.
Well, we set up a program to figure it out for them because I don't think you should ever talk from a point where you don't have the data to support you're talking about. So I've done all that work and people ask me all the time, can I test for this? Can I know who's going to have this problem to get implants? And the short answer would be no. I can give you the genetic profile. I can tell you over time what you should look at. But like you said, you get somebody who's 18, you're not going to be able to tell them what to do. But if I had their genetics, I could tell them this is something that down the road is going to be a potential problem for you.
I want to talk about what the breast looks like. After surgery, I text Michaela Peterson, who introduced me to you. She told me all about you. We had been texting and dming and she just gave me all the info and she said, don't even look at your boobs for two weeks. And I thought that was good advice because what happens if you are thinking of getting your implants out is they fluff up. So can you explain like what the boobs go through?
So I think the simplest way that I can explain it is if you had breast tissue to begin with and fatty tissue. Just think of when someone loses weight. If someone's breast deflates when they lose weight, that means they had a pretty significant fatty layer to begin with. If their breast stays exactly the same when they lose 10 or 20 pounds, then they have mostly breast and a very little fatty layer. So when we're doing these explants, if someone can kind of recollect like what was it like, that'll give me a little insight into what I expect afterwards. I also just check and see how much tissue they have. But the implant itself compresses tissue and over time it thins and thins and thins and thins and thins now, my supposition is that when you take that away, the cellular recovery or the fluffing that's talked about dis depends on those layers. Like how much is the fatty layer, how much is the breast layer. Now, if they began with very little, they're obviously not going to end up with much. But over time, a breast is typically more fatty replaced, so there'll typically be more tissue.
So mine, I feel like I fluffed up double since when I looked at them after surgery.
Yeah, I think to begin with, we knew you had a lot of tissue from the very, very beginning. You just had a bigger implant than you needed, really, to get a change.
