Dr. Robert Whitfield walks through breast explant surgery for implant illness or aesthetic concerns. Before surgery, patients undergo extensive testing for inflammation and dietary changes. The procedure typically uses general anesthesia with vertical lifts, sometimes adding fat transfer to restore volume, followed by lymphatic therapy and close follow-up care.
Questions this video answers
June 22, 2023.
General anesthesia (typically).
Chapters
Hey, it's Dr. Whitfield. Welcome to my breast implant illness podcast. Today we're going to answer the question, what is the process for having a breast explant surgery? And so expand surgery we do. When patients are suffering from symptoms of bii, they also can be for mechanical symptoms like capture, contraction or nerve pain. They may be because someone's tired of their reconstruction, both from an aesthetic or reconstructive standpoint. And so then it becomes like, how do you identify a plastic surgeon who's going to be your surgeon? You're going to be comfortable with them. And so, you know, outside looking in. Do they do explant surgery as a routine part of their practice? Do they, you know, show examples of this on their, you know, social media or YouTube or practice website? They have a gallery that will help you decide, you know, and comfortable with them. If they have a podcast like I do or a channel where you can hear them speak before you ever meet them, it will help you develop a level of comfort with them based on how they discuss breast implant illness and their process for identification and treatment and planning for surgery. If indicated many times you'll, you know, try to stay, you know, local because it's. It's convenient to go learn. But I've had a lot of. Of people have negative experiences in their local communities when asking plastic surgeons about breast implant illness. So they'll travel to talk to me or they'll work in our program to get a discovery session, you know, with me that will help clarify their symptoms and how we feel we could help them. And I think patients, you know, want to ask the questions and get the answers to the questions that others haven't. You know, why do they have so many symptoms that people can't explain? We go through a really extensive testing process to get as many root causes to their problems as possible to answer those questions for them. And obviously, coming to see me in Austin is part of getting them ready for surgery. But we work really hard for them beforehand to make as many changes in their diet and lifestyle and supplements, get them off medicines that may be, you know, not helping them and really get them prepared if they're going to have an explant surgery with us for what that looks like. I think from, you know, our standpoint, adhering to our heart program, holistic, accelerated recovery, that really gets people on the right track for our explant process. But really it's our process to lower inflammation or prepare them and optimize them for any procedure. But in particular, I developed it for my Breast implant illness population. And because I do so many simultaneous lifts and fat transfers, we do these cases typically under general, we use, you know, vertical lifts to narrow breasts and lift the nipple areolar complex without detaching it. We don't need to do that in this instance. We add volume back in cases in the upper pole and the cleavage area to really help with the visual changes that are going to happen from the patient's perspective and just their appearance in general. Now with, you know, those, you know, text techniques, we're still running my program to optimize recovery. If you're in Austin, you're going to come see us for that first week after surgery. And a couple times we're going to get you in our lymphatic device and really get fluid out of you to help optimize your recovery, make you feel better quicker, decreases your recovery time. And this I'll give you the tips and tricks postoperatively that will help you from a physical standpoint and then this will empower you emotionally as well to recover. And we have a lot of support now in our program, more so than I've ever had, to really support you through the process and the healing journey. We want everything to really go as smoothly as possible, efficiently as possible, so that the ways we've tried to optimize your diet and lifestyle pre op and then adjust things for you in the or give you the best possible one time simultaneous treatment. If I could do that for you with fat transfer, that sets you up for, you know, success. If for whatever reason we felt your inflammation was too high, then we would have obviously adapted your procedure, maybe just did the explant alone, working towards getting your inflammation down so that if you chose to have a lift later or if you chose to have fat transfer later, you could do that. It's really, I base these decisions on each patient's individual case with as much data as possible from their genetic testing, toxicity tests and inflammatory tests, blood tests, hormones, food sensitivities and stool testing to really help give them an overall picture of what their recovery looks like. So it's unique to them. If you're, you know, interested in that, then you gotta obviously come visit us in Austin. And if not, you really gotta look carefully at your plastic surgeon who's gonna help you with this and get your options laid out and have a really clear expectation of what that looks like for you and your explant journey.
