Board-Certified Plastic Surgeon

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Plastic Surgery Myths Busted - Dr. John Connors - Atlanta, GA


Hey everybody, Dr. John Connors here. We're coming to you from outside my office here in Atlanta, Georgia, I'm really excited. I had this crazy thought as I was watching television with my kids the other day. The television show MythBusters came out and we were watching it and they were blowing up a bunch of stuff on television and I thought geez I have patients ask me all the time about the safety and the ability of implants to take an impact, breast implants. Breast implants that I use every day to make patients look fantastic.

I thought one thing that would be a really cool experiment would be to take those breast implants that I use every day and run over them with my car. My car weighs about 4000 pounds, the amount of impact from, let's say, an airbag or the amount of pressure when a patient would go diving or even in an airplane when it's pressurized. We're going to see what that pressure would do to an implant intact on the driveway as I roll over it with my car. I'm really excited, I'm glad to have you here and we'll see what happens.

I have an Allergan, silicon-filled cohesive gel implant, all right. This one is 390 cc's, we're going to put this on the concrete first and we're going to roll over it with my 4000-pound car. Here we go. This is the Allergan implant, 4000 pounds, it did pretty well. I see a little shearing of the gel but otherwise, it's intact. Nicely done.

I've got a Mentor 375 cc, high profile, gel-filled implant we're going to roll over with my car, 4000 pounds of pressure, let's see how Mentor stacks up. Here we go. Mentor implant, 4000-pound car, it's intact too. Maintains its shape pretty well. A little bit of shear of the gel but it's otherwise intact. We have Silimed, which is actually Sientra, Sientra implant which is brand new to the American market, just FDA approved, which is the first shaped silicon adhesive filled cohesive implant available here in the United States. We're going to see how our 4000-pound car does with rolling over this implant. Let's see how the shell does as far as its ability to withstand some pressure here, 4000 pounds. Here we go, you ready? Silimed, with a tire mark across it, you don't see that every day. It withstood 4000 pounds of pressure and looks great.

We did some myth-busting today. The myth is that breast implants, silicone breast implants, the shell will rupture if you dive too deep in the ocean or if you're in an airplane that does not have a pressurized cabin or if you're in an accident and have an airbag deploy. The myth is that these implants will rupture. I'm here to show you that after running them over with my 4000-pound car they don't rupture. Myth busted.