Customer Reviews

Silicone Spills: Breast Implants on Trial

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After getting breast implants I was given this book. It changed my outlook on everything. I wish I could go back and get these things as small as they used to be. As well as bringing light to the subject of sillicone leakage it also aludes to the back pains associated with artificially large breast like mine.

As Ms Stewart points out in her introduction, the studies that claim to prove that there is no relationship between breast implants and atypical autoimmune diseases prove NO SUCH THING..they were not designed to answer that question. Those often touted studies are actually flawed and biased which any researcher who understands statistical analysis will see. Ms Stewart's approach is not biased, but actually entirely upright and marked with a sense of integrity. She takes an extremely complex and overtly political issue and brings a sense of truth to it that needs to be heard. These many thousands of women are sick because toxic chemicals have been implanted and spilled into their bodies, and that is not a normal event in life. Political posturing has tainted the ugly truth in this issue because interested parties are not willing to lose their financial investment. I applaud Ms Stewart for her important work, which will probably be suppressed and discredited. That's just the way things work in this country, to the detriment of women everywhere. By the way, I had breast implants and I DID get sick from them, without a doubt whatsoever. Am I biased? No, just telling the truth as I experienced it.

Author Stewart has a PhD in Sociology, which is to say she has little or no training in epidemiology, anatomy, or medicine; she further demonstrates her ignorance of statistics in this book, which claims to dispute the findings of several peer reviewed studies showing no link between silicone and illness. She believes silicone is toxic, even though silicones have been used in tens of thousands of body implants apart from breast implants over several decades. There are few if any claims of toxic effects from non-cosmetic silicone surgical products, like esophageal stents, tissue grafts, and ear shunts. Perhaps that's simply because the trial lawyer's bar hasn't yet decided to demonize them yet.

The book gives short shrift to the many studies (Harvard, Mayo Clinic, Holland), etc.) that show that women with implants do not suffer from the diseases in question at a rate any higher than those without them. Instead she talks with the women who have these conditions (lupus, auto-immune, etc.) and allows her sympathy for them to cancel out the statistics. Although she cites some obscure newspaper articles on the issue, she nowhere cites the NY Times' Gina Kolata because of the latter's extensive unbiased reporting of the lack of evidence associating implants with these conditions.

A terribly innacurate review of the scientific literture is portrayed in this book to conclude there was ever any systemic illness associated with silicone implants. Dozens of large studies have made this book look progressively less accurate