Kris Pickel, AZ Family: May 4, 2017.

It wasn’t a decision Karen McDougal took lightly.

As a former Playboy Playmate of the Year, her career is built on beauty and fitness, but McDougal says her health deteriorated to the point she felt like she was going to die.

In January, McDougal made the decision to explant & have her breast implants removed.

McDougal says she battled health problems – issues she now believes stemmed from her implants — for more than a decade. Her health issues began eight years after she got her implants.  McDougal said she would get sick for six to eight weeks at a time, get better for a month or two and then get sick again.

It became a running joke among McDougal’s family and friends that she was the “healthiest sick person.”

For a decade, doctors failed to diagnose the cause of her sickness.  She said one doctor told her she was suffering from depression. Another told her that her implants looked great there was no need to replace them. […]

I talked to Dr. Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Center for Health Research in Washington, D.C. She has a long history on breast implant safety.

“From 1983 to 1993, Dr. Zuckerman worked as a Congressional staffer in the U.S. Congress, working for the House subcommittee that has oversight jurisdiction over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including the FDA,” according to her biography on BreastImplantInfo.org. “She was responsible for more than a dozen Congressional investigations and hearings on a wide range of health issues, including the first Congressional hearings on breast implants. It was Dr. Zuckerman’s congressional investigation of breast implants that first raised questions about the lack of safety data, which led to the FDA requiring safety studies of silicone gel implants in 1991. When the companies did not provide evidence that implants are safe, the FDA restricted their availability in 1992.”

Zuckerman said many studies over the years have been funded by organizations representing plastic surgeons and implant makers, all of which have a financial interest in making implants look safe.

She says the companies and organizations sometimes help shape studies with results that are not scientifically valid.

Zuckerman also said some studies might have been manipulated in a number of ways.

“I’ve spoken with some of the women in some of the studies who said as soon as they started complaining to their plastic surgeon about how sick they were feeling, suddenly they stopped hearing from the plastic surgeon about coming in to continue the study,” she said. “Suddenly, they weren’t in the study anymore. One very effective way to have studies proving that a product is safe is to just get rid of the patients in the study who aren’t feeling well — just stop talking to them and stop asking them how they are.”

Zuckerman said there are additional problems with some studies, including basing data on hospital records when most symptoms of chronic illnesses, such as fatigue and hair loss, do not require hospital stays. Also, many studies are done over short periods of time, between two and five years after the implant surgery, when illness may not start showing until several years later.

Zuckerman says if a woman decides to have her implants removed, there is a specific procedure. The implants must be removed with the scar tissue that forms around each implant, the capsule, still in place.

Read the original article here.