Robert Whitfield MD outlines his approach to breast implant illness, which has shifted from surgery alone to a combination of genetic testing, lifestyle changes, and supplements designed to reduce inflammation before explant. He sees chronic inflammation as the core problem and positions explantation as the definitive treatment when the implant is the main driver.
What are the treatment options for breast implant illness? I started taking care of patients with breast implant illness in approximately 2016. And at that point, given my experience with implant based problems, surgery was the number one treatment option for patients with breast implant infections. What would become breast implant illness to me? Fast forward to 2023 and we have a much, much different program. We use my holistic accelerated recovery program prior to surgery. And it's rooted in determining causes outside of implant based causes that are leading to chronic inflammation. So when we look at everyone's genetics, certain genetic archetypes predispose you to more problems with inflammation. So if your vitamin D metabolism is poor, if you have a poor methylation pathway, if you have limited ability to perform binding with glutathione in your liver, if you have poor antioxidant pathways, you're more susceptible to problems with chronic inflammation. And as everybody's heard me discuss on my show and interviews I do on other shows, I believe chronic inflammation is basically the root, if you will, of breast implant illness. And that's why confusing really to providers, when a patient shows up and they're, they have all these different symptoms and the provider is kind of taken back because it doesn't fit a recognition pattern for them. But if you just understand from a genetic standpoint why people develop more problems with chronic inflammation, then it makes more sense when you hear their symptoms. And so it's not so much that this is a figure out all these different things, categorize it as a specific, you know, disease entity, and then treat it. I think it's more of what are the individual characteristics in this given patient that are leading to the chronic inflammation symptoms? Are there things in their environment, things in their food, things in their air, water quality? Do they have a incredibly stressful situation in their work, home life? Do they have really, really difficult problems with hormone metabolism? Are they estrogen toxic? Once you determine all that, you can preoperatively, you know, in my clinic, have these addressed by going through functional testing, genetic testing, using supplements to lower inflammation via my inflammatory support bundle. Because basically what you're trying to do is decrease inflammation. Because the root of all of our organ disease is really, if you think about it, chronic inflammation. It doesn't matter which system you, if you have kidney failure, if you have liver disease, heart disease, lung disease, it's basically a chronic inflammatory process. And I constantly say you can't outrun a bad diet and you can't pick your parents. So it's important to understand your genetic characteristics and do everything you can to control and reduce inflammatory stimulus in your environment, your food, your air, your water. When you do that, you can severely lower your inflammation, and that creates a better environment for what would be the step to ultimately take care of someone suffering from really symptomatic breast implant illness, which is an explant in my experience, you can work and work and work diligently to lower inflammation, but if one of the main drivers of inflammation is the implant itself, then that removal process is going to be key into completely healing from breast implant illness.
