This content was created by Robert Whitfield MD. This content was uploaded by Robert Whitfield MD. This is a YouTube video titled "What is BII and How Do I Know if I Have It?" created on June 30, 2022, featuring Robert Whitfield MD discussing symptoms and experiences related to Breast Implant Illness (BII), including fatigue, pain, and scarring issues.
As we learned in my other episodes, I first encountered this around 2016 after a lengthy career in breast cancer reconstruction, complicated oncologic reconstruction. Now I've come to recognize it with the basics of I always look for extreme fatigue, muscle and joint pain, headache, brain fog, hair loss, skin rashes, chronic dryness of the mouth and eyes, depression, anxiety, insomnia. The most typical symptoms I ever see are fatigue. That has been dominant since 2016. For me, I key in on that when there's a consultation and someone's complaining about fatigue. I want to know how that's been worked up, how that's been explored to see if possibilities exist that there's an underlying breast implant infection, whether your implants have been placed for breast reconstruction or aesthetic enhancement. I've seen a very, very wide range in the time frame symptoms may develop. I've had people tell me they develop symptoms within months and that it's taken years for them to get to me. I've had other people tell me they were fine for many, many years, 5, 10, 15 years, and then they developed symptoms. So that can be a more complicated situation to unpack. I do, however, see a big uptick in symptoms after someone's underwent exchange or revision. When I hear there's been a revision, then subsequent symptoms or then exchange or something's going on, then IKEA on that. I've seen that more more commonly, but the range is a few months to several years, over a decade in time at times. So initially how I thought of or how I in my mind organized what I was looking for is I looked for mechanical things first, things consistent with scarring, things causing pain. So capture contractors always cause pain. Now capture contractors can vary in their origin. It can be from placement issues, it can be from fibrosis that the patient was already going to develop. Regardless, some people genetically densely scar. This has been known. It happens around all sorts of devices and implants and people are bad scar formers sometimes.
