Large breast implants are hazardous to your health! (Ep. 55)

All right, welcome back. So this is going to be a little bit of a short episode and I wanted to make this because I got a rather unusual request over Instagram the other day. Let me pull it up here and I'll, I'll put it in the video here. So if you're watching this, it'll, it'll pop up on the screen. It says, hello, doctor, allow me to write to you.
I have a curiosity. What are the largest prostheses you've ever inserted on a patient?
I thought this was an interesting question and worth a brief show because this question is dangerous in my opinion, looking for breast implants that are the absolute largest that you can possibly get is a prescription for long term problems. I've got the
I've got the in my product guide here and you can see that it has some different there's lots of different implant styles and sizes. The, uh the largest commercially available implant is an 800 CC implant. Um, and that's a massive implant. I mean, that is humongous. And typically when we're sizing implants, when I'm sizing implants implants, the primary determinant of size is diameter.
So how big around that implant goes and that And that diameter is largely almost completely influenced by how wide your chest is. So if we want to put a, as large an implant as possible, and we're confined by the diameter that we can use, breast implants, round implants are round, they're circles.
So we can't have an implant that is wider than half your chest width, normal chest widths. When you account for breast tissue above it and all of that, typically anywhere between 11 and a half and 13, 13 and a half centimeters. That is about like this. An 800 cc implant, depending on what projection you use, and we'll get into that in a minute, is anywhere between 14 and a half at the narrowest.
and about 16 at the widest, and that's pretty wide. 16 centimeter chest width is pretty wide. It is well outside the mean of most women's chest width.
But first let's talk about what the determiners of implant size are. When I'm talking to women about either primary breast augmentation, breast lift with augmentation or revision surgery, The, the concept of implant size always comes up. We talk about it in every consultation and the way that that is determined is by a combination of things.
In my practice, one is a woman's chest width, your breast dimensions. And when, when we say breast dimensions, we're also talking about skin and breast tissue. , how tight is it? How loose is it? In addition to how wide a woman's chest is from, you know, just outside of the breastplate out to your armpit.
The second determinant of implant size is So the first thing that you're going to want to do is to identify what look you're going for at the end of the day. Do you want a natural look? That's going to lead us down one path of implant choices that a very easily identified augmented look is going to take us down another pathway.
And so the combination of those two things, your measurements and breast dimensions, and then your desired outcome is going to help us to choose an implant and what size implant we end up choosing, ultimately that decision is made more or less in the operating room. So just like trying on a pair of shoes, we take those measurements, we take the variables that we know, and then we get an implant that we think is going to fit.
We try it on in the operating room with you asleep and then we can move up or down there are some times that the implant doesn't accomplish what we're looking for and we have to change the size either go up or go down, but going into a breast surgery with your heart set on a specific implant a lot of unnecessary problems afterwards.
And this is a mistake that I made early in my career. I'll, I'll fall on that sword. We went into the operating room, we were set on an implant size and ended up using an implant that was a little smaller because the
end up having to use a smaller implant size and. Um, the patient was not happy that she didn't have the, whatever it was, 300 CC implant that we had discussed. We ended up going with a two 80, 280 CC implants, almost an imperceptible difference, but she was married to that implant size. Likewise going into the operating room, set on a specific size implant.
If that implant doesn't look good, then you're stuck. You have no recourse. There's nowhere else to go. I like to talk to my patients about choosing an implant range and really being more set on the outcome than we are on how to get there.
You know, it's, it's like going to a restaurant. You want your food to taste good. How it's cooked. Is it less important? And the same thing goes here. The other problem that we talked about early on in the show with wanting to know the biggest implants available is that large implants are hard on your breast tissue.
They're hard on your skin. Any implant is going to stretch your skin and your breast tissue out. Implants that push past the elasticity, the natural elasticity or give in your skin or breast tissue are going to end up causing problems in the long term that can be very difficult if not impossible to fix.
Breasts that are stretched out, that are so thin that there really isn't much breast tissue left. If and when those implants need to be changed, that makes for a very, very difficult procedure with cosmetic outcomes that may be less than optimal.
So to wrap this short show up, choosing implants is one of those things that you need to do in conjunction with your surgeon that need to be based on very specific variables, breast tissue, skin, chest dimensions, and also What you're looking to accomplish and if you're looking to account the goal that you're looking to accomplish is one that is going to put you at risk for long term cosmetic harm.
then that is something what you really, your surgeon needs to sit with you and kind of discuss that and help choose an implant and an implant style and an outcome that's more realistic and safer in the longterm. I hope you guys have enjoyed this. If you have any show ideas or questions, Please feel free to shoot me an email media at drjasonhall.
com. You can DM me on Instagram or shoot me a comment on YouTube. Thanks for listening and we'll see you on the next show.