A short YouTube explanation by Robert Whitfield MD describing why paraffin injections were abandoned. He explains that injected paraffin is recognized as foreign tissue, provoking chronic inflammation (granulomas), potential infection, ulceration, tissue necrosis, fistulas and drainage, possibly requiring extensive surgical removal; notes paraffin injections were largely abandoned in the West by the 1920s.
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Now you got to ask, like, why was this abandoned? What was the problem? And so initially it was fine, but over the course of time, it could have and lead to a chronic inflammatory process. So this is going to be a theme. Our body likes the tissues in terms of recognizing what we call self. And that allows, you know, your own body's immune system to check everything that gets introduced into the environment. Think of like a splinter. If you got a splinter stuck in your finger, it would get red and irritated around that splinter. And that's because it's not your tissue, it's foreign. If you left it in there, it would form a chronic inflammatory reaction around it, including, but not limited to a granuloma. It could get infected, it may get ulcerated, it may need to be drained. All these things can happen. That's just the simplest way to think about it. So now we're taking a foreign substance that is gotta be liquefied under heat, inject it, and then it firms up beneath the tissue. So your body's immediately gonna recognize that as foreign. And the process of extrusion of that, which is what's going to happen, your body's going to try to get rid of it. It could lead to ulceration, tissue necrosis, ultimately infection, fistulas, drainage, all sorts of problems, ultimately requiring probably not just a lumpectomy or partial mover of where that was, but it would lead to mastectomy and disfigurement because of this. So in the west, it was largely abandoned by the 1920s in terms of use as a product to inject.
