Tag Archives: removal

First, Their Breast Implants Made Them Sick. Then They Were Hit with the Bill.

Catherine Guthrie, Cosmopolitan: August 18, 2020.


Annie Reynoso wanted a tummy tuck. But her doctor said no. Uterine fibroids meant she wasn’t a good candidate for abdominal surgery. He had an idea though, the doctor. If what Annie was looking for was a physical boost, there were other options out there. Like breast implants.

[…]

Then it was a few years later, and odd things started happening: Her breasts swelled to a G-cup. She had fatigue that would knock her out for days. Sudden dizzy spells made it scary for her to drive. She’d get short of breath after walking just a few steps. She had night sweats that soaked her mattress. And there were even stranger symptoms: nausea if she ate before noon, and pain in her chest, neck, ears, and jaw that felt like the worst sunburn of her life. She kept tubes of Aspercreme in her purse, coat pockets, and desk drawer. At least a dozen times a day, she had to slather herself in ointment.

[…]

That’s when something finally changed: A friend of Annie’s started feeling better after her implants were removed, and a rheumatologist told Annie some of her symptoms aligned with Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease potentially triggered by her implants. After that, all she could think about was getting them out.

Once again, she waited in a surgeon’s office. A new one this time. She’d gotten her implants in the Dominican Republic, where her family lives and they could help her through the recovery. Now she sat alone in New Jersey, consulting with a doctor about having her implants removed in a procedure called an explant. She was hopeful. Until she was told it would cost $7,500—and that insurance wasn’t likely to cover a dime.

[…]

And yet, there is evidence to suggest that breast implant illness might actually be an autoimmune disorder caused by implants. In 2018, a study in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that women with silicone breast implants had more than a 20 percent increased risk of being diagnosed with an autoimmune or rheumatic disorder.

There is also overwhelming anecdotal evidence online, in Facebook groups like Breast Implant Illness and Healing by Nicole, where hundreds of thousands of women share their stories. And of course, there are the endless comments on posts like Chrissy Teigen’s recent Instagram update about having her implants removed. Women saying they wish they could too—women saying, “Having them is making me sick.”

[…]

For sick women who are financially able to get explant surgery, it can change everything. In a July 2020 study in Annals of Plastic Surgery, researchers found that those experiencing symptoms of breast implant illness saw an improvement in their health within a month of having their implants removed. Like Lauren Dearman, who had explant surgery last November.

She was just 20 when her parents offered to pay $8,000 for her C-cup breast implants. Six years later, she began to have severe abdominal issues and chest pain, bad enough that she went to the ER. She was tired all the time and had such trouble focusing that she couldn’t even write a to-do list. She couldn’t climb the stairs to her third-floor apartment without gripping the railing. Her boyfriend told her she was out of shape. Her boyfriend, she knew, was wrong.

When she came across a Facebook group where women were talking about breast implant illness, the stories read like her own medical file. Within weeks, she made an appointment with a surgeon in Chicago who agreed that her implants could be at the root of her health issues. Lauren cried when she learned how much the surgery would cost. Her parents couldn’t pitch in financially this time, so Lauren withdrew $2,500 from savings and took out a personal loan for $6,500 so she could have the procedure. At $190 a month, she’ll be paying it off for the next three years. But she feels so much better now.

In a health care system that has no problem paying for Viagra (and Viagra overdoses), the fact that women like Lauren have to finance their medical care is infuriating, says Cari M. Schwartz, a lawyer at the firm Kantor & Kantor in California.

Schwartz is working on bringing a class-action lawsuit against insurance companies that deny explant coverage. She’s interviewed hundreds of women across the country desperate to get their implants out. In every case, insurers denied coverage, even when physicians deemed removals medically necessary. Schwartz has seen women rack up credit-card debt, borrow money, lose relationships and jobs, and go bankrupt in an effort to save their health. “Women are essentially told that their health issues are their fault,” she says, “because they chose to get implants.”

In 2019, the FDA said it was putting more effort into educating doctors and patients on the “systemic symptoms” many women with implants experience. Although they also still say they don’t have “definitive evidence demonstrating breast implants cause these symptoms.”

Doctors, too, remain reluctant to get onboard. “To recognize breast implant illness is to kill the goose that laid the golden egg,” says H. Jae Chun, MD, a Newport Beach, California, surgeon who specializes in explant surgery. “And many doctors just aren’t going to mess with the goose.”

In the meantime, one of the only options for desperate patients is the National Center for Health Research’s program to help women navigate the path to explant. They don’t give out money, but if a woman has health insurance, they’ll do what they can to coach her and her plastic surgeon through the insurance maze. Often, that means helping fill out paperwork explaining why the procedure is medically necessary. It’s a process that can take months and still results in a denial the majority of the time, says Diana Zuckerman, PhD, the group’s president. But so far, they’ve helped more than 1,500 women get the explants they need.

[…]

Read the full article here

New Study Backs Breast Implant Illness Claims by Patients

Sasha Chavkin, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: July 2, 2020


A new study in a leading plastic surgery journal offers more evidence to support the existence of breast implant illness, a malady reported by thousands of women but dismissed as scientifically unproven by many plastic surgeons and some health authorities.

The study focused on 750 women who complained of fatigue, memory loss, joint and muscle pain and other symptoms after having received breast implants. It found that as a group, the women experienced significant relief from their symptoms within 30 days of having their implants removed.

“The data speaks for itself,” said Dr. Lu-Jean Feng, a plastic surgeon and an author of the study. “It’s much more likely that the illness is due to breast implants if the improvements are within 30 days.”

The study adds to growing evidence that some women suffer systemic health problems after getting breast implants. It is well known that breast implants can lead to physical injuries such as rupture, leaking and painful tightening of scar tissue around the implant, known as capsular contracture. But many plastic surgeons have long contended that there is not enough scientific evidence to conclude that breast implants can cause health issues that affect the whole body, such as autoimmune disease and cognitive decline.

In 2018, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed that thousands of women around the world were suffering from serious illnesses after receiving breast implants as part of its Implant Files investigation.

Among the investigation’s findings were that an increasing number of studies indicated that breast implants were associated with systemic health effects such as autoimmune and connective tissue disease. These illnesses took a devastating toll on patients’ lives, often leaving them unable to work, struggling to maintain relationships and suffering severe pain.

The new study by Dr. Feng is not the first to show improvements in women’s health after they had their breast implants removed. But it has several notable elements: it has a relatively large sample size and it shows that major improvements occurred within 30 days of removal. In addition, all the patients were operated on by the same surgeon, Dr. Feng, using the same technique, eliminating the possibility that differences between doctors or methods influenced its results.

The women were surveyed before and after their breast implants were removed, and asked whether they suffered from 11 symptoms commonly associated with breast implant illness, including hair loss, joint pain, chronic fatigue and hives. Patients were asked to rate symptoms on a scale of zero to five. The mean preoperative score was 26.19; it dropped by nearly two thirds to 9.49, after removal.

The study was published in the Annals of Plastic Surgery, a peer-reviewed journal for plastic surgeons.

Diana Zuckerman, president of the health care policy think tank National Center for Health Research, said the publication was significant because it was a sign that the plastic surgery profession was beginning to accept the existence of breast implant illness.

“The plastic surgery journals have not been open to this kind of information,” Zuckerman said.

Breast implants are a crucial and lucrative product for plastic surgeons, and the breast implant business accounts for more than $1 billion in revenues each year.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has also shifted its stance on breast implant illness.

After long maintaining that there was insufficient evidence to connect breast implants and many symptoms reported by patients, the FDA now lists “Systemic symptoms Breast Implant Illness (BII)” among the risks and complications associated with breast implants, although it notes continuing scientific uncertainties.

“Symptoms such as fatigue, memory loss, rash, ‘brain fog,’ and joint pain may be associated with breast implants,” states the agency’s website.

Read the full article here

Former Playmate of the Year on Removing Breast Implants: ‘I Literally Thought I Was Dying’

Kris Pickel, AZ Family: May 4, 2017.

Karen McDougal
Karen McDougal

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.