Why Women Are Choosing to Remove Breast Implants? Is it Mold? The Drive to Explant Episode 9

Welcome to this episode of the Drive. It's director Robert Whitfield. Today we're going to talk about mold. So all weekend I was at the Mindshare Summit hosted by JJ Virgin in Scottsdale. And I gave some breakout sessions and discussed my experience with and the scientific evidence behind the symptoms of breast implant illness, including a recently published paper of mine that looks at about 694 consecutive samples of scar capsule from patients. And it clarifies very, very elegantly how much bacteria are on the scar capsules of the patients experiencing those symptoms. So let's walk it back for a minute. One of the things that pissed me off this weekend was I got asked about mold all the time. So there's. Theory or hypothesis or, you know, now it's, you know, felt to be the thing on the Internet about mold and breast implants. So first of all, there are only two things when I, you know, hear this, I'm like, okay, let's break it down to a very, very simple problem. There's two kinds of implants. Basically, ones that are filled with saline, saltwater, that is sterile, placed in the oxygen operating room, and two, the others that are filled with silicone. So for the argument that implants have mold inside them, let's address the silicone. Those are pre filled implants and no, they're not going to have mold in them or mycotoxins in them. So that takes that entire number of implants completely out of the discussion. And that was the predominant form of breast augmentation from the moratorium in 1996 until re release in the 2000s and then a major bump again in the 2000s, but in the 2012-13 time frame. So, all right, let's just talk about saline implants and mold. So mold is fungi. How would we get mold inside the implant? So for those of you who fancy yourselves biohackers or who take care of yourself and get vitamin drips, you would see a bag of saline. Usually it's just salt water. And they would put the vitamins in the bag. And if you get B vitamins, it makes the bag yellow. So that's then connected to IV tubing. You get an IV placed and they run that bag in you. So that is the exact same fluid that gets placed into an implant in the operating room. It's of course sterile, just like it's sterile in the IV bag. So then sterile tubing is used to connect the, they call a fill fill valve to the implant fillet. So once again, if you just think about it, it doesn't make any sense. I know there's been implants shown on the Internet with things floating around in them. Now I'll occasionally take out saline implants that fragments in them, and sometimes it's a portion of a blue towel. A blue towel is a sterile towel used in the operating room to drape off the area where you're going to operate by a surgeon. So that could be a fiber that gets into the field that then injected in somehow when they're placing that, that tubing into the opening of the implant to fill it. So that's plausible. If tissue got stuck into the, the opening where the valve has to be closed, you could have tissue stuck in there and then obviously inside. So, but we're just thinking logically here. If you start out in a sterile environment, how do you get fungi or mycotoxins in there? So that on a whole is not a thing. I recently published a paper, as I said, of over 600 consecut samples that were tested using PCR. Everybody remembers from the pandemic you could get a COVID test either by antigen or pcr. And PCR was the most accurate because it looks for the DNA fragment of, in this case, the bacteria or the fungi. And the testing that we use looks for 150 types of bacteria and fungi and mycobacteria. So we believe the science, the evidence shows that mold is not even remotely part of the equation when it comes to what's causing symptoms. So if we look at just logically, what is happening. I'm a plastic surgeon who's done thousands of explants, taken the specimens, sent them off microgendx. The lab has tested them, and they're predominantly overwhelmingly bacteria. The two bacterial types most commonly are Cutibacterium acnes and Staph epidermidis. So let's stop trying to scare people and tell them they have mold in their implants. Many, many patients have mycotoxins. Mycotoxins you get from a number of sources in the environment. Things we eat, things we drink, and then of course, in the air, or if we have a water leak and we have mold growing in the house. So those are all very, very different, and they are not found inside of an implant. So we need to really move on from this. Follow the science, which clearly indicates this is a bacterial problem. When the bacteria come together and form colonies and bigger numbers of bacteria, those are called biofilm. That biofilm also protects the bacteria from our immune system attacking it. The interaction of bacterial biofilm now and the Breast tissue. So let's talk about that. That's interesting. So think about it this way. Everybody's seen things that are knitted or quilted and you can stretch them apart and see through them. So your scar capsule that covers the implant is like that. It's not impervious, it's not a shield. It can be, you know, communicated to the breast tissue by that bacter through the capsule because it's a woven material. It's the collagen that your body uses to form a scar. So it's woven. And that interaction between the bacteria and the breast tissue, specifically a fatty acid in the breast tissue, oleic acid, produces a molecule called oxylipin tenhome. A paper published earlier this year showed that oxylipin tinholm can be used in a animal model to test and reproduce the symptoms of breast impairment illness, including, but not limited to fatigue. So what is one of the number one things my patients complain of fatigue? In 2016, I took care of a breast cancer patient, did their explant, they had an E. Coli infection. The only symptom the patient had was fatigue. So once again, we have bacteria interacting with the breast tissue causing oxylipin 10 home production, which can lead to immune system activation and symptoms of breast implant illness. So once again, when you listen to this, this is all evidence based, scientifically shown, there is no confusion about what's causing the problem and why. So in those patients that have bacterial contamination, clear why they're having the problem. In my experience, in my paper I published, that's 29%. If you look back for the history of me doing thousands of explants, that number will vary. So what is going on in the other, you know, patients at this point is yet to be completely determined. But the interaction of the device itself can lead to immune system activation. When you look at all of the pathology on all of my patients, you'll see chronic inflammation as evidenced by the pathologist looking at the slides and seeing different cell types that show chronic inflammation. So just having that itself is immune stimulating. So more and more work will be done, research will bear out that there are other things happening, contributing to these symptoms. So if you like what I'm talking about, like and subscribe if you disagree with what I'm talking about, if you're a surgeon or a scientist and you don't believe what I'm talking about, please send me a DM so I can have a discussion with you.