Eleanor Cummins, Slate, June 9th, 2022
Robyn Towt didn’t want new boobs. But when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy at 44, friends and doctors told her she needed to “look like a woman” and feel “whole” again. Implants would help put her “back together.”
“I was talked into it,” Towt recently told me over a poolside phone call from her home in Arizona.
She quickly regretted the decision. But it wasn’t the look or feel of her new cleavage that was the problem. Rather, within days of her 2017 implant surgery, she developed strange symptoms, including severe insomnia and crippling fatigue. Nothing her doctor prescribed seemed to help. “She didn’t have any answers for me,” Towt said, adding that the doctor didn’t see a connection to the implants. Prior to the chest enhancement, Towt had walked five or more miles a day and regularly swam, golfed, and wakeboarded. Now, she couldn’t make it to the mailbox.
Robyn Towt didn’t want new boobs. But when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy at 44, friends and doctors told her she needed to “look like a woman” and feel “whole” again. Implants would help put her “back together.”
“I was talked into it,” Towt recently told me over a poolside phone call from her home in Arizona.
She quickly regretted the decision. But it wasn’t the look or feel of her new cleavage that was the problem. Rather, within days of her 2017 implant surgery, she developed strange symptoms, including severe insomnia and crippling fatigue. Nothing her doctor prescribed seemed to help. “She didn’t have any answers for me,” Towt said, adding that the doctor didn’t see a connection to the implants. Prior to the chest enhancement, Towt had walked five or more miles a day and regularly swam, golfed, and wakeboarded. Now, she couldn’t make it to the mailbox.
Like many desperate patients, Towt turned to the internet, where she trawled cancer recovery forums for insight. Towt found that many women experienced symptoms similar to hers, but most wrote it off as side effects from chemotherapy or radiation—two treatments Towt hadn’t undergone for breast cancer. She tried their recommendations, too, for essential oils and nighttime baths, but they didn’t work, either. Then a woman messaged Towt privately and pointed her in a new direction: “Look into your breast implants,” she said. What Towt found surprised her.
Over the past decade or so, more than 350,000 people in the U.S. have reported adverse events related to silicone gel breast implants to the FDA. Their complaints range from autoimmune symptoms to a rare cancer called breast implant–associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma. Despite the number and severity of the issues described, the experiences of such patients have long been ignored by physicians, manufacturers, and regulators. The famous among them land in the pages of Page Six and People. Bachelorette star Clare Crawley saysher implants caused “crazy health problems,” while Danica Patrick reported hair breakage and heavy metal toxicity; both documented their removal surgeries on Instagram. But for many, the confusion around what’s now called “breast implant illness,” or BII, has left them to suffer alone.
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But the problems with silicone implants have been apparent to some for decades. Since 1982, patients had been suing implant manufacturers in court, with millions of dollars awarded in damages. In June 1988, cancer patient–turned–consumer advocate Sybil Goldrich wrote about her “Restoration Drama” in an essay for Ms. magazine, helping to bring what would eventually be called BII to national attention. Following two mastectomies, Goodrich’s body rejected multiple implants in increasingly painful ways. “I was no closer to restoration than when I had started,” she wrote. “I simply had several more glaring scars on my disfigured torso.”
Goldrich’s case piqued the interest of Diana Zuckerman, currently president of the nonprofit National Center for Health Research, and at the time, an investigator of federal health programs and policies for the U.S. Congress. Zuckerman asked the FDA to turn over all of its safety and effectiveness data on breast implants. She was shocked by how little there was. “They had a few studies that had been submitted to them with rabbits or dogs or rats,” she told me. The animals had been injected with silicone directly. Not one study involved actual implants in actual human beings.
A congressional hearing ensued in December 1990—and the whole world was watching, as evidenced by extensive coverage on TV news and newspaper write-ups over the course of the decade. “The manufacturers are sweating bullets right now,” one anonymous congressional aide told the New York Times in 1992. That year, the FDA instituted what would become a 14-year moratorium on silicone breast implants, during which time they planned to collect and review the evidence. One major manufacturer, Dow Corning, eventually stopped making implants for good after a $3.2 billion product liability settlement (though it continues to produce the silicone used in other companies’ implants). But the industry ultimately came out on top.