How Long Does Breast Explant Surgery and Recovery Take?

There are many reasons why women undergo breast explant surgery. Although some women do breast explant because they don’t want them anymore, some opt for breast explant surgery due to health issues or complications such as capsular contracture (scar tissue tightening around the implant), rupture, infection, or chronic pain.

Knowing the expected recovery time gives people reasonable expectations regarding their healing process. It prepares them for the temporary limits and pain they may encounter during this period, which can help lessen worries. In today’s episode, we’ll be talking about how long breast explant surgery and recovery take.

Optimizing your immune system

When you undergo an operation, whether breast explant surgery, breast implant, breast reconstruction, or others, you have to ensure that your immune system is in its optimum state.

To optimize your immune pathways, we do genetic testing and saliva tests which normally take a couple of months to get the results. We also conduct urine tests to identify toxicities and inflammation.

Another thing that should be taken into consideration is the environment, as it also affects one’s immune system and recovery after a breast explant surgery. If you’re in an environment with molds, you have to be careful as these affect the air quality, which can also negatively impact your health.

Optimizing your diet and taking supplements

Having a healthy lifestyle boosts the immune system. Diet obviously plays a key role in all of these because if you can't eat and absorb nutrients, you can't recover easily.

You have to stay on track with your diet as it limits fluid accumulation by changing your oncotic pressure, which is the protein content in your blood so that you go from a leaky phase or catabolic phase after surgery to an anabolic phase or a non-leaky phase. This helps your swelling to lessen quicker.

Optimizing your diet includes an examination of food sensitivities and assessing your body’s food and nutrient absorption. We also have to check if you have bacterial, fungal, or parasitic overgrowth or leaky gut. It’s also important to ensure proper blood work and hormone balance for recovery since women have high levels of cortisol and sometimes estrogen as well, which can prolong recovery.
We carefully look into all of these factors, particularly the levels of estrogen, progesterone, and even testosterone, and optimize them through our supplements to shorten the patient’s recovery time. We also use red light therapy and lymphatic massage. Many of my clients also like to use hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Generally, it takes one to two weeks of recovery if you’ve had an explant and it’s above the muscle and a couple of weeks - depending on how hard it is to get it out from behind the muscle. However, the recovery period still depends on many factors like your genetics, diet, lifestyle, environment, and hormone balance.

If we carefully optimize these, we’ll be able to give you the possible results and decrease the time for recovery. We're also introducing new things to enhance recovery like peptide therapy because we want you to recover as efficiently as possible.

*Links and Resources *
Dr. Robert Whitfield’s Website