Nearly a third of the more than 289,000 women who selected breast implant surgery in 2009 were age 40 or older.
It's important for baby boomer women to be aware of the dangers of plastic surgery and be knowledgeable about recent information from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regarding increases in a rare cancer being reported in women with breast implants.
The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen has issued a statement reporting that the presidents of two plastic surgery organizations urged members to inaccurately downplay the significance of recent evidence about the risks of breast implant-related cancer when speaking to female patients.
Don’t use the word “cancer,” instead use “condition,” one of the presidents advised in webinar materials sent to Public Citizen by a concerned plastic surgeon, the group said.
Public Citizen sent a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week to inform the agency about the practice and to call for it to be stopped.
The FDA announced Jan. 26, a week before the webinar, that a growing number of cases have been reported documenting an unusual kind of cancer surrounding the breast in women with implants. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons and American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery held the webinar partly in response to the announcement.
When recommending how to respond to patients who were concerned about the growing number of cases of anaplastic large cell lymphoma or ALCL, Phil Haeck, M.D., ASPS president, said:
Yes, it’s classically a malignant tumor, but it has such a benign course that when we were discussing ways to talk to the media, we decided that we would call this a condition when we talked to the media – not a tumor, not a disease, and certainly not a malignancy … and I would recommend that you use the same terms with your patients rather than disturb them by saying this is a cancer, this is a malignancy.
The webinar also stated that “surgery [to treat the cancer] was curative,” which contradicts the evidence on ALCL, said Sidney Wolfe, M.D., director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group.
“The ASPS and the ASAPS have chosen to ignore the currently available facts from published case reports of breast implant-associated ALCL,” Wolfe said.
“These plastic surgery organizations claim that surgery cured women with ALCL, yet nearly 15 percent saw their cancer recur,” he said. “For most patients, chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy will be part of the recommended treatment plan.
“For the organizations to refer to this cancer as ‘benign’ or as a ‘condition’ misleads both patients who may have received breast implant or those who may be considering undergoing breast implant surgery and the physicians who may provide care to such patients,” Wolfe added.
Public Citizen asked the FDA to stop the effort to hide the dangers of breast implants from women so they’ll continue to ask for them.
