Dr JSK Revision Surgery Series Part 3: Fixing Breast Implants

Dr JSK Revision Surgery Series Part 3: Fixing Breast Implants

Hello, there. It’s James Southwell-Keely from Woollahra Health and Beauty talking today about revision breast surgery. We thought we’d zoom in now on breast augmentation surgery. Breast augmentation has become increasingly popular in recent years with more and more operators performing the procedure, and invariably this has led to more and more complications. Whether they’re called botched procedures or surgical mishaps, there are many unfortunate patients out there in the community who’ve had breast augmentation surgery and rather than ending up with a dream result, have ended up with sorrow, misery, sometimes pain, and dissatisfaction. To set these misadventures right takes much experience and much planning, and they can be corrected, but it’s not a simple thing. We need to take into account the patient’s tissue features, whether they’re more likely or less likely to have a recurrence at the time of revision surgery. We need to factor in the size of the implant, and was it appropriately chosen for the patient, where was the implant placed? Is it above or below the muscle? What is the muscle doing? That’s the pectoralis major muscle on the chest wall. Has it retracted? Does it need to be resuspended or dropped down? Does the implant need to be placed in a different pocket? Does a different shape implant need to be chosen? Or, do we need to start from scratch because the pocket is too wide or too low? Has there been stretching of the lower pole of the breast? Has there been distortion of the nipple areola complex? And so on and so forth. Certainly, in terms of altered sensation to the nipple areola complex, this is usually a temporary phenomenon, but it can be a permanent one in a very small percentage of patients, and this is probably the most difficult thing to attend to and really does not have a satisfactory surgical solution. To that end, we’ll continue to delve down into our revision breast surgery procedures in this series of videos, but for now I’ll sign off. That’s James Southwell-Keely saying goodbye from Woollahra Health and Beauty with the big blue building on Edgecliff Road, down the hill from Bondi Junction Station. Goodbye for now.