Robert Whitfield MD discusses his shift toward explant surgery and breast implant illness after his sister's cancer diagnosis. He works in oncologic reconstruction and has made treating BII a focus of his practice.
Marty, I should say, how did you get into the space of explant and BII and, you know, obviously that's, you know, the. The foundation of us getting introduced. Where did that come from? What was your evolution? I imagine you did implants before you did explants.
Yeah, when I was in med school. I was in med school, I think about a month, and my sister called me and told me she had breast cancer. And, you know, of course, I'm now the doctor, even though I'd been in school for like, four weeks, and to sort it out. And fortunately, that day, the. The lecture was being given by an oncologist. And afterwards, I. I asked him. I'm like, hey, my sister called me and said she has breast cancer, and she was in a different city. And he had a colleague there. He said, hey, that's. That's not a problem. I'll call my, you know, colleague and I'll set up an appointment with her. And I flew down and. And went to that appointment with her. And ultimately she went through mastectomies, reconstruction, chemotherapy, suffered some cardiac problems from chemotherapy, and lived overall a relatively long period of time. And she recently passed away of a recurrence in the. Just in the new year. And, you know, I. It's one of those things where you talk about trauma a lot, and I had always kind of put that in the back. And people asked me why I went into surgery and why I did so much oncology reconstruction, because that was my career, basically, and it was mostly about cancer reconstruction for women with breast cancer. And, you know, I never likened it to that as the sentinel event of why I did all that work and why I was so passionate about that work. But, of course, when you think about it, that's a driving force of why I did all that for so many years. So the short answer is I did oncologic reconstruction for head neck cancer, sarcomas, which are tumors of muscle and fat and soft tissues. And then I did, of course, breast cancer reconstruction, which is unfortunately, the most prevalent cancer we take care of in plastic. Plastic surgery and to implants. I was never. Somebody put in a lot of implants. I did a specific type of surgery called microsurgery, and it allowed me to do reconstruction that was your. With your own tissue. So I was seeing problems with implants from radiation and people getting infections from chemotherapy. And then I would do other procedures, taking the tissue of the abdomen or other areas of the body to reconstruct after removing those implants that it had become problematic for the patients either through those therapies or from scarring, which happens. And there are lots of issues because everybody should understand that an implant one is never a lifetime device, to be clear. And anytime you're trying to explain that risk benefit ratio to a woman who's going to go through breast cancer treatment, it's pretty complicated.
