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457 Breast Implant Illness, How Implants Are Causing Mystery Illnesses, Mitochondrial Disease, Detox Problems, Brain Fog, Hormone Dysregulation, and Autoimmune Disease, Sarah Phillipe, RN, Certified Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® Practitioner

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Content provided by Ashley James. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Ashley James or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.

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Breast Implant Illness: Signs, Symptoms, Treatment & More!

https://www.learntruehealth.com/breast-implant-illness-signs-symptoms-treatment

Highlights:

  • Silicone is a neurotoxin
  • Breast implants can cause issues with the mitochondria
  • Importance of removing breast implants properly
  • Different sources of toxins
  • Alternatives to breast implants

Do you have breast implants or other foreign objects placed in your body? In this episode, Sarah Phillipe shares the dangers of having breast implants. Sarah enumerates different signs and symptoms of breast implant illness, the best way to remove the breast implants, and what could happen if the breast implants weren’t removed properly. She also enumerates different things that need to be addressed to recover from breast implant illness fully.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode really blew my mind even more so than I thought it would. If you’ve ever had plastic surgery or implants, you definitely want to listen. For those who haven’t, I still think you’re going to get a lot out of listening to this episode.

In this episode and in others, I’ve shared a bit about my journey, and one problem I really struggled with was detoxification. In the last five years, I’ve been focusing heavily on supporting my liver and on doing heavy metal detox because I discovered that was the underlying cause of a lot of my health issues. I want to point out a few things that really have helped me because if you have an illness that you think has stemmed from having implants, and of course, listening to today’s episode you will definitely gather more information to help you come to some really good conclusions and give you some directions that you’ll greatly benefit from.

For me, what’s really helped—actually doing this podcast has really helped because I followed a lot of the advice of my guests. When I interviewed Dr. Klinghardt—that’s a really good episode to go back to. He specializes in helping people who have difficulty detoxing for those, for example, who are on the spectrum, for those who suffer from mitochondrial disease, from Lyme disease, from heavy metal toxicity. He discusses a few things that we can do on a daily basis to support the body’s ability to remove heavy metals and toxins and support the liver and the emunctory systems of the body.

I began to implement what he recommended and found I had fantastic results. So one is doing almost daily sauna therapy, and I chose to invest in a Sunlighten Sauna. They do have a payment plan program, and I opted in for that. It’s like a credit card payment, and they ship you a sauna. You can get a wooden one, it’s about the size of a closet. It fits into a corner of a room, or you can get the portable one that folds up. You can tuck it away under the bed or in a closet. I did actually interview the founder of Sunlighten Sauna, so you can go back and listen to that episode.

The reason why I chose Sunlighten is they have a fantastic track record for being 100% non-toxic, and also they have a full spectrum system. So it is not just far-infrared, it’s near-infrared and mid-infrared, which shows that there are so many other benefits. For example, a decrease in pain and an increase in collagen production and elastin. There’s a youthful look that we can achieve by using the Sunlighten Sauna. But for me, it was about the heavy metal detox, which I’ve had fantastic results working with, and also decrease inflammation in my body.

The next was the Platinum Energy System, and I have interviewed Kellyann Andrews several times. Of course, you can listen to those episodes. The Platinum Energy System allows us to pull out heavy metals from our feet, which I know sounds so crazy, but she sends the water off to the labs and has graphs and charts and shows that it does pull things out. What’s really neat is I’ve given treatments to my friends, and the sludge that comes out of people when they’re in this system smells like the chemicals they’ve been using to clean with.

Someone who’s a swimmer in a Platinum Energy System and the water will smell like chlorine, will smell like pool water. It’s really crazy. But what’s awesome is anytime I feel sluggish, down, sort of toxic, I jump in the Platinum Energy System and within 30 minutes, I feel amazing. So I’ve had a great experience with it, so have my friends and my family. So you could check out those episodes with Kellyann Andrews and learn more about the Platinum Energy System.

And then the third thing I learned from Dr. Klinghardt is eating chlorella and spirulina, specifically chlorella because chlorella will naturally and very safely—in a gentle way—chelate, bind to heavy metals in the body. Now he does discuss how to eat them. Chlorella is a crop, not a supplement, so people think oh, I don’t want to overdose. Are you going to overdose on broccoli? Yes, to a certain point. You wouldn’t want to eat 20 pounds of broccoli. That’s too much. But you’re not going to overdose by having two cups of broccoli, right? You’ll feel full, but you’re not going to overdose.

So for chlorella, they dehydrate it, press it into little tablets, and you chew it. In our family, we call it the green crackers. But you want to take 30 of them at a time. So you can put them in your smoothie, or you can chew them and drink water. You do that ideally before a sauna, but you can do it every day, and that helps the body chelate these heavy metals. If you don’t eat enough of them, there becomes a problem because it kind of stirs up the toxins, and there’s not enough to bind to it. So you actually want to eat more, not less. So between 30 and 60 of these little tablets, and they also are a great source of amino acids and other nutrients.

I interviewed the founder of ENERGYbits, Catharine Arnston, who has a wonderful story about how her sister used chlorella and spirulina as part of her holistic protocol to recover from breast cancer. That’s what had Catharine Arnston start ENERGYbits because she saw that out there, most of the chlorella and spirulina in the market is tainted with heavy metals and lead. That’s why I really don’t want you to go to some website like Amazon or some store and just buy it because most of the brands out there are toxic. If you look at the bag and somewhere on the bag it says California regulation says this can cause cancer, well that’s because there’s lead in it because of how they very cheaply process the chlorella.

There are only two companies I know of on the planet that processes their chlorella and spirulina so purely that there are no heavy metals in it, and the one that I like better because I think it tastes better is ENERGYbits.

Now all these companies I mentioned I’ve asked them to give a discount to our listeners. So Sunlighten Sauna, which I absolutely love Sunlighten. Definitely give them a call and get more information from them if you want to support your daily detoxification. By the way, their benefits to sauna are amazing. Type sauna into learntruehealth.com to see the episodes or hear the episodes on that. I did have a cardiologist on, Dr. Kahn, who talks about how much he loves Sunlighten Sauna because it helps to tonify the cardiovascular system and will lower high blood pressure. That’s just one of the amazing factors. I happened to do it because I wanted to support my body in detoxification, losing inflammation, and weight loss. But other people do it for other reasons like a reduction of pain and inflammation or to support the cardiovascular system.

When you do call Sunlighten, you can mention that you heard about them through learntruehealth.com, through the Ashley James podcast.

When you talk to Kellyann Andrews about the Platinum Energy System, make sure that you mention my name because she does give a fantastic discount to those who are getting the Platinum Energy System. And then as far as the ENERGYbits, use the coupon code LTH and you will get the discount that they give for the listeners as well.

If you have any questions about this, and of course, those are my three biggest things but I do other stuff on a daily basis to support my emunctory systems, but those are my big three.

The fourth one I could throw in is on a daily basis I do take the supplements from takeyoursupplements.com. Those supplements turned my life around. I’ve been taking them for 10 years. I was very sick. I had many, many health issues, and that was the biggest turning point for me. I had been on all kinds of supplements before, never saw a difference until I got on the supplements from takeyoursupplements.com. It’s all about quality. It’s all about giving your body the raw building blocks it needs in the bioavailability it needs. So you can go to takeyoursupplements.com and check them out. They will talk to you for free and help you. Their health coaches will talk to you absolutely for free and help you get on the right protocol.

So those are my four big tips for detoxification, but if you do have any more questions about that you can always reach out to me. You can go to our Facebook group. Join the Facebook group. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook and ask away. I’m there every day answering questions. Other guests that have been on the show are actually in the group as well answering questions, other holistic health practitioners, health coaches are there, and just passionate people like you and me who are out seeking true health through holistic means. We’re all there to support each other.

I just hope that you get so much out of this episode because truly, this information is not in the mainstream and it should, but luckily it’s here. Enjoy today’s episode. Please share it with those you care about so that we can continue to spread this information and help as many people as possible to learn true health.

[00:09:54] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 457. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Sarah Phillipe on the show. Her website is reversingbreastimplantillness.com. Now, if you don’t have any breast implants I still think you should listen, even if you’re a man—we got a lot of great male listeners—you should still listen because this is such an important topic when it comes to understanding the immune system’s response to materials placed in the body.

I interviewed Kristen Bowen and I’ve had her on the show a few times. She’s the one that created my favorite magnesium soak, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. I talk about it all the time. The coupon code is LTH for those who want to get that magnesium soak. She went down to 97 pounds, having 30 seizures a day, in a wheelchair because they put things in her body when she had surgery, and they said these things were harmless. Now we know years later that we could have an autoimmune response to even what is thought to be inert items. I’m sure Sarah is going to educate us on that.

Obviously, the person who would benefit the most from listening to this is someone who’s had plastic surgery performed on them. However, I think everyone should listen because understanding what the body goes through when we’ve had surgery and if something’s been left inside us is so important, and then how to recover from that. Sarah, welcome to the show.

[00:11:36] Sarah Phillipe: Thank you so much, Ashley. I’m really happy to be here and to be sharing this really important information with your audience.

[00:11:44] Ashley James: Absolutely. I had a listener reach out and say that you’re amazing and that we absolutely had to interview you. Now, before we get into learning about this, I had never heard of breast implant illness, although I’ve heard of autoimmune responses to objects being placed in the body. I have a dear friend—my best friend’s wife—has had issues with not breast implants but with other plastic surgery items being placed in the body. The doctors guaranteed it was safe and absolutely nothing wrong would happen and she almost died.

So it’s one of those stories that you just don’t know until it happens. The thing is that what you’re going to teach us is that it can be something where it creates a chronic illness not something sudden but someone can have it for years and not realize that it has to do with the breast implants. Before we get into that though, can you tell us about your past, about your history? What happened both personally and professionally in your life that led you to want to be an expert in this topic, illuminating this topic, and helping us better understand it?

[00:12:58] Sarah Phillipe: Sure. It was a place going from a place of pain to purpose really for me like a lot of us who are in the holistic health space, right? We have experienced something, a decline in our health for a particular reason or a multitude of reasons, and modern medicine hasn’t been able to help. So that leads us down this functional medicine or holistic health path of just wanting to discover the root cause.

For me, I had always wanted larger breasts. I mean, this really came from childhood, which is interesting. You don’t always think about a desire like that coming from childhood, but it really started in this pivotal moment in my life when I was a young girl. Someone really important to me—and I don’t think she had ill intentions, of course, but—unknowingly said to me you’re going to be 4’11” just like me, but don’t worry, you’re going to have the Johnson boobs. So it was that really pivotal moment for me where I just realized how important breasts are, and I had no understanding of that before that moment.

That really stuck with me and it really shaped my perception about my body as I matured and didn’t get the Johnson boobs. I put a lot of worth into the physical appearance. I didn’t really realize who I was on the inside, not just who I was on the outside and. I think there were some driving factors there that led me to make that decision to get my breast implants placed.

I had them placed in 2011. Prior to that, I was working in a very busy teaching hospital, night shift—very hard on my body. I was pushing my body to the brink at the gym. Tons and tons of heavy weight lifting, cardio, cyclical dieting, and just really a lot of stress. When I got the breast implants placed, that for me I believe was really the straw that broke the camel’s back. Everything else had kind of set the stage for the fall. That was just my tipping point. That just overflowed my bucket.

Within six months I started developing symptoms, symptoms that I had never had before. I didn’t have a symptom to speak of before that. So while my body may not have been healthy, it wasn’t expressing itself in symptoms yet. But within six months, I had all kinds of symptoms. I was developing chronic fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, I had brain fog, difficulty concentrating, poor word retrieval, memory loss. I would have to read something probably 10 or 15 times to really absorb the information and be able to tell you what I read. Muscle aches and pains, joint pain, hair loss, weight gain, temperature intolerance, low libido, heart palpitations, shortness of breath. I had night sweats. I had insomnia. My mind would just race and race and race all night long. I had hormone imbalances.

I ended up getting diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. My thyroid was low, my thyroid hormone was low. I was very sensitive to light, sound, and chemical smells. I had lots of GI symptoms, so gas and bloating, loose stool, really painful abdomen. The more I ate the more my belly hurt. I knew there was something wrong. Lots of food intolerances, these things were never a problem before.

So I went down this path of trying to figure out what was going on. I went to medical doctors who always told me, your labs look fine. Maybe you need counseling or maybe you should spice up your sex life.

[00:16:52] Ashley James: Wait a second, wait a second. You had a doctor say that to you?

[00:16:55] Sarah Phillipe: Yes.

[00:16:56] Ashley James: You had this whole host of symptoms. You were suffering daily and you had a doctor—was it a male doctor?

[00:17:04] Sarah Phillipe: Yes.

[00:17:05] Ashley James: And he said to you, you just need more sex.

[00:17:07] Sarah Phillipe: Well, yeah. I mean, with the low sex drive complaints and low hormone, he was just thinking maybe I needed to spice it up a bit.

[00:17:16] Ashley James: Oh, so it’s your fault that you have low hormones and low libido, and if you just spiced it up and were more active in the bedroom, that would raise your hormones. I wonder what medical journal he got that from.

[00:17:29] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, very interesting.

[00:17:33] Ashley James: I had a doctor say that to me once actually. This is why I want to just emphasize, it’s so frustrating as a woman to have all these symptoms, all these medical problems, and not be taken seriously. the hubris of the MDs training. Anytime I get on my soapbox where I talk about MDs, there’s a lot of them that are really well-intentioned, right? But we’re talking about the ones that you saw. You went to so many specialists and they were like well it’s in your head, you just need to have more sex, or whatever. I mean, all this is just ridiculous.

They’re just making stuff up, and the hubris of their training is that they can’t be wrong and they can’t say I don’t know what it is. Let me go find the answers for you. Let me go peer through medical journals. Let me go think about things that it could be that I don’t have training around. Most of them don’t do that. Most of them just are listening to symptoms to give you a drug, to send you on your way, and not looking to heal the root cause. This is my biggest frustration. You want a doctor that’s a detective. You want a doctor that’s holistic, that’s going to look at you your whole life and go okay, why is this happening? And not blame you. It’s your fault. You’re not having enough sex, or it’s all in your head. You just need to go for a walk and see a counselor or whatever. I mean, that’s ridiculous.

You had all these symptoms that gradually started over time after your breast implants, and a really good diagnostician would have traced it back and seen okay yes, you were working really hard long hours and that deteriorated your health. But then, what was that one point where it all exacerbated, right? So what happened in your story that you clued in that it was your breast implants, or was it a specialist that finally figured it out?

[00:19:37] Sarah Phillipe: No, you know it’s interesting because I even eventually went down the path of looking for more functional medicine types of physicians. So I worked with a functional medicine doctor that I found locally and was diagnosed with SIBO and treated for that. That didn’t get better, of course. Multiple rounds of rifaximin and still no results.

Then I found a holistic health practitioner who was a chiropractor working with a lot of people with Lyme, mold illness, and just different really chronic conditions, and so I thought this would be the perfect person for me. I point-blank asked him do you think that my breast implants are a problem? Do you think they could be creating all of these symptoms and the reason why I’m not getting better having done all these things because I had done a lot. I’ve made a lot of dietary changes, a lot of lifestyle changes. I’d really been trying to figure out how I could recover my health, and he said no. I think that if we can get Lyme under control because he had anecdotally kind of diagnosed me with Lyme. If we get the lime under control, then you’re going to be fine. The breast implants won’t be a problem.

[00:20:49] Ashley James: I have a question. Why did you think it could possibly be your breast implants?

[00:20:55] Sarah Phillipe: I think I just had this gut instinct, I had this intuition. At the time, I mean this was a long time ago. Nobody was talking about this back then. There were no Facebook groups, no websites, no podcast interviews where anyone was talking about breast implant illness. So it was just kind of this little voice in the back of my head or just in my gut telling me that it could be the breast implants and just having that medical background, I understood that something inside of me that doesn’t belong there maybe could possibly make me sick and cause all this downstream dysfunction.

At the time though, I didn’t have enough concrete evidence. That wasn’t enough for me to just go on a hunch to have them removed. It took me a long time to get to the point of deciding to have them removed. I mean, many years of going down this rabbit hole. So, yes, I had the intuition, but I didn’t trust my intuition initially.

[00:21:52] Ashley James: This is so interesting because this is a very similar story. We’ve had many people come on the show and share, many practitioners come on the show—these are professionals, these are scientists, these are doctors—and they too have a similar story where they were sick and when no one else knew what it was, their intuition was sort of whispering I feel like it’s this. Then they would second-guess it, and how often do we do that? How often do we second-guess? If your intuition says bring an umbrella and it’s a sunny day, or bring a sweater and it’s a warm day, how often do we second-guess that first voice? That first voice is the quietest, but that’s the truth. That is our truth.

We have to quiet our mind, stop second-guessing ourselves, listen to that gut instinct, and then find practitioners that’ll listen to us and listen to what our gut is saying. So then what happened? It took many years. What happened that had you go, wow, I think I’m right?

[00:22:58] Sarah Phillipe: I’m pretty grateful for the whole experience that I went through because it really ended up leading me down this journey of becoming a health detective, so to speak, becoming a holistic health practitioner so that I could try to figure out what was wrong with me and how to fix myself.

I was no longer really in alignment with modern medicine or conventional medicine because I saw that they couldn’t help me, they weren’t helping me, and they didn’t understand why I was not doing well, why I had all these symptoms. So I knew I had to take a different approach.

That led me down this road of becoming a holistic health practitioner, completely changing everything about my life and the way that I was living. I did a lot of work on myself. I did a lot of detox work, addressing the gut, and working on all these different things that we do in holistic health in general because a lot of these things, regardless of what the source, is there’s only really a handful of things that create chronic illness in today’s world. So they tend to be fairly similar across the board, it’s just what is the source, right?

So for me, it got to the point where my husband and I were trying to get pregnant, and we had been trying for a couple of years without success. I had ended up going to a gynecologist who specializes in endometriosis because I also had a hunch that I had endometriosis. Four or five years before that I had an ultrasound and they couldn’t find anything and sent me on my way. This particular specialist did an MRI and we discovered it was stage four. So I had bowel involvement, I had vaginal wall involvement, I had my left fallopian tube completely blocked. So there was a lot of inflammation in my pelvic floor and just my uterus, ovaries, and all of that.

So I just knew like I had been really thinking about it a lot and kind of in my mind mentally preparing myself for it and also talking about it out loud with my husband just to prepare him for it because I knew I was going to make that decision. So it came down to the fact that I wasn’t able to get pregnant, and I had been thinking in my mind if these implants are this toxic to me and causing all this dysfunction in my own body, what are they going to do? Even if I do get pregnant, what are they going to do to a growing child in me, in my uterus? What kind of problems could that pose to a growing baby, and what about breastfeeding? Am I going to pass all these toxins along to a baby who’s breastfeeding? I just didn’t want that for my future children, and it was really that whole experience with infertility that led me to finally making the decision to explant.

So I did. Once I made that decision, I had my implants out about two months later.it was really quick once I finally committed to it.

[00:26:05] Ashley James: Well I take it they put you under to take them out, you weren’t awake during the procedure, right?

[00:26:15] Sarah Phillipe: Right.

[00:26:16] Ashley James: So when you woke up, did you notice the difference right away?

[00:26:21] Sarah Phillipe: I wouldn’t say that I had much of a difference right away. I mean, I had definitely made a fair amount of improvement, which is the work that I had been doing before my explant. So for me, I feel like I probably felt a little bit more alive, happier, just my outlook in life was improved. I felt lighter and brighter, and everyone else could see that in me. They just felt like when they were having a conversation with me, that I just came off a bit different. I just came off less intense, just calmer, more peaceful. Probably that’s because I didn’t have this chronic source of toxic exposure just overwhelming my detox pathways that can definitely create a lot of irritability, anxiety, and rage even—I’ve seen that as well. So a lot of different symptoms can come from toxic overload.

So those things I noticed right away, but I did a lot of work post explant as well. It wasn’t just this miraculous healing story for me. I had to actually go and do a lot of detox work, a lot of gut work, dealing with infections things like that because there’s the downstream effect of having breast implants, and it’s not just about removing the source. There’s more work to be done after that.

So over time, I would say it took me about a year of work before I felt pretty darn good, but I also needed to have a second surgery in between that time. So I did decide to go ahead and have a laparoscopy for that endometriosis. That surgery was a far more difficult recovery than the explant. It was a six-month recovery because I had to have a bowel resection, part of my vaginal wall was cut out. I had a fallopian tube removed and a lot of clean-up there. It was an eight-hour surgery. So that recovery was quite challenging, but I’ve never felt better and I’m really glad I did it. I wouldn’t say that excision for endometriosis is appropriate for every situation, but for mine, it was just so invasive and it had taken over so many different organs that it really needed to be done.

So after those two surgeries and doing a lot of work, I would say about a year after that is when I felt quite good. And then about two years afterward is when I really hit the point where I felt better than I had in over a decade.

[00:28:55] Ashley James: Amazing. May I ask you a personal question?

[00:29:00] Sarah Phillipe: Mhmm.

[00:29:01] Ashley James: Have you guys had kids?

[00:29:03] Sarah Phillipe: We haven’t had kids yet, we have been trying, and it’s been a long time. We’ve been trying for probably four or five years now. I’ve lost count. But for me, the interesting part that was a huge blocking factor for me was my mindset, just my beliefs about what my body was capable of. Going into a fertility specialist or an endometriosis specialist like I did, it can be really disheartening to hear really discouraging words like your chances of getting pregnant are this, then your age, and then you’re only having one fallopian tube now because we had to take it out, here are your chances. So I think that was such a mental block for me.

So over the past year, I’ve actually done a lot of mental-emotional work—working on healing past traumas, working on my belief about what my body’s capable of, and shifting that belief. And I know I’m going to get pregnant. I know my baby’s coming, but I didn’t know that before. I had doubts, disbelief. Even when I would say out loud, I know it’ll happen at the right time, I don’t think I really truly believed that. Our thoughts are so powerful. Even if we don’t speak it out loud, our cells are listening to whatever our thoughts are and responding as if it’s true.

[00:30:37] Ashley James: You’re a nurse and you’re a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. You have many credentials. You work with clients, but you’re also working on yourself. When I hear that of a practitioner, that’s the practitioner I want to see. I want to go to the practitioner who is working on themselves mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, energetically. Who acknowledges that emotional, mental health is as important as physical health. Spiritual health and energetic health play a role in overall health and vitality.

Now, I got to tell you, I was told by an endocrinologist that I would never have kids, never—0% chance that I would have kids, and my husband I tried for six years. So I just want to let you know absolutely, 100% possible. And it was holistic medicine alone that helped me to become fertile. My issue is not yours. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, not what you had. However, I’ve seen so many women with so many different complications using a really holistic approach to be able to conceive healthfully.

Once we got everything in order with our diet, nutrition, lifestyle, mental, emotional health—when we got all of it together, and for us the last step was adding just some Chinese herbs that our Naturopath was like, okay, these are the last thing. We’re just going to put this in place. Then we had to decide to watch for ovulation because, in the past, I didn’t ever track it because I was told I never had it to begin with.

When we saw ovulation, we’re like, oh my gosh. We did it. We’re ovulating. Our very first detection of ovulation we conceived our son, and now we’re pregnant again. We’re having a daughter. And it was both on the first tries. For that to go from six years of really trying but also not having a regular cycle, not having everything lined up, but using supplements, diet, herbs, and all that.

I love that you’re looking at every aspect, and the belief system is so important because if I didn’t believe, then I would have never even gone as far as to ask my Naturopath for help in that area, for herbs, and I would have never even been conscious ever looking for when I ovulated. It’s like our belief system has us look for the evidence, has us look for the evidence that something is possible that we then can act upon. That’s why it’s so important to work on our belief system and to clean up past traumas so that we can believe in ourselves and we can believe in our own body’s ability to heal itself.

My understanding of your situation with breast implants is that it was a toxic accumulation over time that affected all the systems. Is that because what is leaching into our bodies when we have a breast implant are endocrine disruptors? Can you maybe explain what kind of chemicals are slowly leeching into our body?

[00:34:11] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. Breast implants are a stressor on a couple of different levels, and one of them is that they’re a chemical stressor. It’s not just silicone breast implants, it’s saline also. Saline breast implants most people think are safer because well it’s just water, it’s just saline water. But it’s not true. The shell of the saline breast implants are made of silicone, and so silicone in and of itself is a neurotoxin.

There is evidence that it chelates neurotransmitters in the brain. We’re exposed to a lot of different sources of silicone these days. If you think about different kitchen utensils, all of the silicone that is in our personal care products, our makeup, our skincare, and things like that. There’s a lot of silicone out there, and there is one researcher who believes that it’s actually silicone toxicity that we’re dealing with when we have breast implants. That it’s a cumulative effect of not just the breast implants but all the different sources of silicone that we’re exposed to. And of course, breast implants are a pretty significant source of exposure, and they’re living in the body.

But beyond that, there’s a lot of different cytotoxic, neurotoxic, carcinogenic chemicals, and heavy metals that are really inflammatory to our cells, tissues, and organs that are in silicone breast implants specifically. So there are 37+ different toxic chemicals and heavy metals in silicone breast implants. This means things like methyl ethyl ketone, cyclohexane, acetone, xylene, phenol—these are all neurotoxins. And then they contain things like dichloromethane, toluene, benzene—those things are carcinogens. And then you have things like talcum powder, formaldehyde, lacquer thinner, printing ink, and metal cleaning acid.

What are these things doing in breast implants? And then you have heavy metals like aluminum, tin, lead, and platinum. I actually developed some kind of reaction to my platinum wedding rings and I could no longer wear them. My finger just was like on fire every time I put it on. When I got my breast implants removed, that never happened again.

[00:36:35] Ashley James: Wow.

[00:36:36] Sarah Phillipe: So, that was a really interesting correlation there.

[00:36:40] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. So wait, have you ever taken these breast implants and had them analyzed by a lab to read out all of the heavy metals that are leaching into our body from them and all the chemicals? Is that information available for people to see? I bake with silicone, like it’s safe. Wait a second.

[00:37:02] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly. It’s not non-stick Teflon, right?

[00:37:06] Ashley James: Yeah, well exactly. I’ve always had that little intuitive voice we talked about, that little voice which I told it to shut up because I wanted the silicone baking pans because I thought they were so cool. I didn’t have to use oil. I’m like, look, they’re so much easier to clean. Oh my gosh, that little voice my heart was like this does not sound healthy. This sounds like it leeches stuff. Come on, don’t go for the silicone. Don’t buy into it. So, man, my little intuitive voice was right, my gut was right. The stuff we use in our baking in our kitchen that’s made of silicone, are you saying that this is also off-gassing or releasing chemicals into our food?

[00:37:55] Sarah Phillipe: I haven’t looked at studies on that, but I would say it’s a safe bet to assume so.

[00:38:01] Ashley James: Well I mean, if medical-grade silicone that they put in women is leeching stuff, can you imagine what the non-medical grade stuff in our kitchen’s doing?

[00:38:09] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly. There have never been like studies in humans examining what happens at body temperature with these implants, right? But there have been some animal studies that have shown that when the implants are heated to body temperature, that they do bleed out into the body. It’s called gel bleed. So, yes, they are a solid material but when they’re heated up, they do bleed into the body and the breast area is so full of dense lymphatic tissue that it’s like a highway for these chemicals to start traveling throughout different parts of the body. Not only is silicone toxic to the body, but there are some researchers out there that believe that it is considered an adjuvant connected to certain autoimmune conditions.

So basically, it’s a trigger that can trigger certain autoimmune conditions. Autoimmunity is also partly genetic. It can trigger whatever your genetic susceptibility is. It can look different from person to person. It’s not always going to be the same autoimmune condition.

[00:39:12] Ashley James: You’re touching on exactly my next question to you, which is some women swear they have no problems with their breast implants. I have a friend, I was surprised to hear that she had breast implants because I honestly thought they were natural. She’s so gorgeous, but she was like are you kidding me? I was flat as pancakes. She said she breastfed successfully with them. She’s very happy with them. I knew my interview with you was coming up so I started asking her questions. I’m like, how’s your health? Do you think you’ve had any negative impacts?

Well, I know she’s been focusing with her doctor—she sees a Naturopath—on brain fog, and she is a night owl. She has insomnia, and she cannot handle any stimulants. So even a little bit of coffee would drive her nuts, but I don’t know if that was how it was before the breast implants. But she says other than that, she’s in really good health, nothing to complain about. I thought, man, what if the accumulation of toxins being solely released is just exacerbating those issues?

[00:40:24] Sarah Phillipe: I get this question a lot of the time about will everyone get sick who has breast implants, and I tend to think of them as a ticking time bomb. From my perspective, why wait until your health spirals downhill because, usually, what I see is one of a couple of scenarios. Either someone has had a lot of different sources of toxic exposure as a child, kind of like a long history of toxic exposure. Maybe mercury amalgam fillings in the mouth, maybe they were born via a C-section and not breastfed, or maybe had a lot of antibiotics as a child and then they have amalgam fillings placed. Maybe they get breast implants and the breast implants are just that thing that overflows the bucket.

And then I see another scenario where someone maybe had a pretty healthy, pretty uneventful childhood. Not a lot of toxic exposure, a healthy diet, not sick a lot. Maybe they got breast implants and have had no problems, and it’s been decades and they’re thriving. And then maybe later on in life, they experience divorce, loss of a loved one, or a car accident. And then maybe they have root canals and end up developing cavitations, which are infections in the jaw, and something ends up becoming the tipping point.

So there’s a lot of these different types of stressors that accumulate, build up in the body, and tax the body’s ability to cope with more. At some point, there can be something that becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and then someone develops a lot of symptoms. Symptoms don’t happen early on when there’s dysfunction occurring. They’re one of the last things to occur. And when symptoms start happening, it’s usually that the body has been breaking down for quite some time and the symptoms are just the body’s way of communicating to you that it is time to start waking up and paying attention to what’s going on.

[00:42:25] Ashley James: What about MTHFR? How much does that play a role in this? I have a friend who has just the most severe form of MTHFR. I tried to say to her, there are phases of it, or I was trying to explain that you could have different snips like the 25%, 25% on each side, or 50% on each side, or 75% percent, and she has 100% which means she says her body only can methylate 23% and everything affects her. That she walked into a store and inhaled some perfume, she’d have a migraine. Anything that her body has to detox something, she’s down and out for the count. So she has to lead the cleanest lifestyle.

Do you have something like that where their liver cannot process phase one and phase two of detoxification properly? Everything gets backed up because of that. So someone who knows that they have any variant of MTHFR would definitely not be a candidate for having anything implanted in their body, which could then slowly over time increase toxicity, that it would just put this added stressor on the liver. Have you seen a link between those with MTHFR and breast implant illness?

[00:44:03] Sarah Phillipe: I have, and I think I’m a little biased though because the women that come to me that I work with are women who are quite ill even after their explant surgery. So I tend to see women who do have a lot of struggle regaining their health after having their explant. Usually, there is an MTHFR gene mutation or two. Well, I’m heterozygous for C677T, but I don’t have a really, really down-regulated methylation activity in the body. My body is methylating fine.

So in my mind, it goes back to the difference between what your body is able to handle versus what you’re exposed to. I kind of liken it to either a two- or a four-lane highway at rush hour, which one is going to be moving more traffic? Obviously, if you have more lanes, the traffic’s going to flow better. And if you have fewer lanes, the traffic’s going to get jammed up a lot more easily.

So I think it’s not all about the MTHFR. It’s really about the fact that we’re living in a very, very toxic world dealing with far more than our bodies were ever designed to cope with, and then we add something like breast implants on top of that and it can be devastating. I don’t think it’s just our genes, it’s how the environment is interacting with our genes.

[00:45:34] Ashley James: I hesitate to use the word mental illness because there’s such a stigma around it, but what kind of emotional problems arise in women who have had breast implants who are experiencing this toxic load? We talked about insomnia and brain fog. Does it increase depression, anxiety? You talked about anger. Can we talk about the emotional aspects because women who are more likely to get breast implants are more likely to see a doctor for emotional issues and then be put on drugs for that as well further increasing the toxic load? I love that highway analogy.

Based on how much you’re methylating, based on how much you’re able to detox, let’s say you only have two lanes, the breast implants are adding more cars. Any pharmaceutical drug is adding more cars. Even some herbs the body has to then process adding more cars, right? What’s in our air, what’s in our water, what’s off-gassing from our carpets, right? If you go get your nails done, your hair did, and whatever kind of cosmetic products you use—all these chemicals. There are over 80,000 man-made chemicals made in the last 50 years that our bodies were not designed to have to handle, and here we are having to handle it. It’s all adding more cars to the highway, thus slowing it down, causing a backup, causing a toxic load in the body.

We need to start, obviously, removing those loads. But for someone who begins to have that load build, they may not recognize physical symptoms as a problem. For you, someone said you have Hashimoto’s, you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, you have this problem, you have this physical problem, you have this physical problem. So they were addressing them. You have Lyme disease, and all these different doctors, because they’re looking for what they specialize in and they’re seeing symptoms. Oh, these symptoms match so we’re going to treat you for this. It doesn’t seem as obviously connected to the breast implants.

But what about emotional issues? If you’re someone who’s never really been prone to anxiety or maybe just minor anxiety and all of a sudden you have panic attacks to the point where you’re being put on anxiety meds, or you have depression, or you have insomnia, or these emotional issues come up. Can you talk about the emotional side effects of breast implant illness?

[00:48:09] Sarah Phillipe: Absolutely. It’s very, very common. I see a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety, a lot of panic attacks, and a lot of feelings of overwhelm like you just can’t handle any kind of stress whatsoever. To me, that really signals the fact that your body is completely overloaded, and any kind of stimulation just is overwhelming for your body to try to cope with. Any kind of stress whatsoever triggers that stress response.

For me, I experienced this pretty significantly. It started off with just a very irritated nervous system to where when I would go down into the garage to do my workouts, I had to have complete silence like no music. I cannot work out with my husband in the garage because his heavy breathing irritated me. In between my sets, I would have to sit down and gather myself because it was so incredibly stressful on my body. Any kind of additional stress was just throwing me over the edge. It made me very irritable, really hard to recover from stress, and even a difficult conversation, I couldn’t handle that. I would blow up and start screaming and yelling because I couldn’t handle one more thing.

So for me, the anxiety, the anger outbursts, heart palpitations, symptoms of anxiety, of chest tightness, feeling like I couldn’t take a deep breath. When I would go out into public, that was really hard for me because any stimulation from a crowd would just send me into this downward spiral. And even just being around family, if they were being loud and rambunctious. I have a husband with triplet brothers, so you can imagine there’s a lot of wrestling going on and stuff like that, a lot of competition. When we would all get together, I sometimes would just have to leave the house because I couldn’t handle even the audible stimulation. That to me was overwhelming.

So those types of things that I experienced are really, really common. No one understood what the heck was going on with me. People thought I was crazy.

[00:50:34] Ashley James: Well, this makes so much sense because it’s almost like inflammation on the brain. It’s inflammation of the nervous system having to handle this toxic load. But at the same time, a lot of what you just shared sounds like the autonomic nervous system being stuck in the sympathetic mode of fight or flight. There are ways of measuring that. We can look at heart rate variability now.

I’m just curious. Let’s say breast implants, if having them puts the body in a state of stress like just triggers the autonomic nervous system so that we’re in fight or flight, which would then easily explain why would people have insomnia, why would they have that irritability, why would they have outbursts, why would they be on edge? And then you’re being told by a doctor it’s all in your head, you’ve got to go see a counselor.

Well, no. The root is in the body. Our physical body and our emotional body are connected. So when we have emotions, yes, of course, sometimes we get to come at it from healing traumas. We also have to come at it from looking at what’s going on in the body that’s putting us in this state, and it sounds like you were in fight or flight. Have you been able to measure that at all or look into that at all with your clients to see if they are kind of stuck in fight or flight?

[00:52:02] Sarah Phillipe: Well, when I did my own testing back when I was really, really sick, my neurotransmitters were completely tanked. I didn’t really produce a whole lot of neurotransmitters, which when you’re dealing with a lot of different sources of stress, you need norepinephrine and epinephrine in order to cope with that. That gives your body energy and the ability to either fight or flee, and I didn’t have that ability. I didn’t have those neurotransmitters at the adequate level that I needed them, which of course resulted in a lot of symptoms.

My heart rate variability—and this is true for a lot of my clients—was very low. It was like a deep parasympathetic more than a fight or flight. I think a lot of us that are stuck with these chronic symptoms and not getting better, it’s more of this deep parasympathetic that we’re just not coming out of. And it’s more of a result of the mitochondrial function and how the mitochondria are really just going to bat for you rather than producing energy for you. So they go into this battleship mode rather than energy production mode, and that takes away from your cells and their ability to function, which your organs are made up of cells so you have different organs not functioning as well as they should. Hormone production takes a back burner, neurotransmitters take a back burner, things like that that are just required for someone to feel good, right?

So that’s really a lot more common than fight or flight. I think the longer you’re dealing with chronic illness the more your body just goes into this deep parasympathetic mode and your mitochondria are just shut down. It’s like hibernation.

[00:53:48] Ashley James: Right, total exhaustion. That makes sense. I had chronic adrenal fatigue and I can relate to that. It’s like you’re walking dead. The overwhelm was real. Any stimulus was overwhelming. That makes sense. So what part of the breast implant harms the mitochondria? Is it a direct causality, or is it somewhere cascading down the way?

[00:54:17] Sarah Phillipe: I think that it’s on a few different levels. I think the toxic exposure, so toxins are one stressor that can definitely shut down the mitochondria, and they’re very delicate, right? They’re the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, so they’re very easily damaged.

[00:54:37] Ashley James: Well, they’re bacteria. I mean that’s the fascinating part is that just like our gut bacteria can be easily harmed, so can our mitochondria because they’re bacteria. We really have to take care of them because they’re what keeps us alive, they’re what creates our cellular energy.

I was fascinated by interviewing the woman who cured her MS using this theory that the MS was a mitochondrial disease, and then she ate a diet full of all the nutrients the mitochondria needed and removed all the foods that could harm the mitochondria. Lo and behold, she went from practically being months away from being dead to being able to walk again, then ride a bike, and ride a horse. I am having such a brain fart right now, I’m going to blame pregnancy brain, which I can. I’m allowed to. But she’s quite amazing, Terry Wahls?

[00:55:41] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, I know Terry.

[00:55:42] Ashley James: The Wahls protocol and her TED Talk. She gave a TED Talk I believe is 2012. I love that she shows pictures of her in her special wheelchair that would have her feet higher than her head because that’s what she had to do. The doctors were basically saying that she was months away from death, and she stopped it and reversed it. She went to all the best doctors in the world for MS. They wanted to give her chemotherapy, they wanted to do all these things to her, and she just sat down one day and her goal was to live long enough to see her kids graduate high school. She sat down and thought, okay, well this is a mitochondrial problem. How do I heal my mitochondria?

Isn’t that interesting that it just takes one doctor with that detective mind we talked about to stop thinking inside the box that they’ve been trained to think in and start looking at the body and going what’s going on and how do we support the body with nutrition?

So here we have this toxic overload. You said the mitochondria is incredibly sensitive, and just the toxins from breast implants can cause some issues for the mitochondria. What else in this big picture is affecting the mitochondria?

[00:56:57] Sarah Phillipe: Well, you also have the fact that breast implants are foreign objects. They don’t belong in the body, and so that is a chronic source of immune stimulation. It’s chronic inflammation recruiting inflammatory cytokines. They’ve been able to show even through just doing cultures on the implants the fluid inside the implants if they’re saline, and then also the capsule and the fluid around the capsule in between the capsule and the implant.

They’ll do cultures for those things, and they’ve been able to show 10+ different bacteria that are growing between the breast implants and the capsule themselves. It’s like a petri dish, basically, for all these different microbes to start growing, and it can be even a low-grade growth of these microorganisms that is just this chronic source of immune stimulation. Your body really can’t get those things under control because it’s got this foreign body that is like this big distraction. Your body’s trying to go to work to address that foreign object.

That’s the reason that it creates a capsule around the implant. It’s scar tissue. It’s trying to wall that implant off so that it can protect your body from that exposure. But unfortunately, our breasts are not sterile. There’s a lot of bacteria even within the breast tissue, and it’s a perfect environment for all kinds of different microbes to grow, wreak havoc, and thrive in the body that kind of goes undetected by the immune system.

Part of that going undetected is the fact that they create biofilm around themselves to protect themselves from the immune system in general. The biofilm is the biggest problem with regards to breast implants and different infections, the causation, and the connection there. So we’ve got lots of different types of toxins coming from breast implants, which sets you up for this perfect storm situation because different unwanted microbes thrive in toxic terrain. They use toxins and heavy metals to create their biofilm, and some things like parasites will feed off of those things, will feed off of heavy metals, and candida as well will feed off of heavy metals.

So you can have a lot of downstream dysfunction going on as a result of breast implants being in place. Chronic immune stressor because they’re a foreign object, and then a chronic chemical stressor because of all the different toxins that can bleed into your body from that exposure.

[00:59:46] Ashley James: That is fascinating. The body creates scar tissue around the breast implant. I mean, any woman who’s been pregnant or breastfed knows about mastitis. The breasts are designed to make breast milk that has all these good bacteria in it. We’re giving healthy bacteria and an immune system to an infant, so of course, it’s not a sterile environment inside the breast. To think that anything skin deep, anything below the skin is sterile is silly.

Putting a foreign object there, then it creates scar tissue around it, and then there are bacteria that are growing like a bad culture that can develop in your gut. Imagine the bad cultures developing around your breast tissue, and they themselves—even if it’s a low-grade constant low-grade infection—any kind of microbial presence as they die off creates toxins. Essentially, whatever they poop out is a toxin. That’s why we feel so crummy when we’re coming off of a cold, flu, or food poisoning. It’s actually the toxins left behind the poop and also the bacteria that are dying. All the toxins left behind make us feel so horrible because it is such a stressor on the body to have to handle those toxins.

So not only is the body having to deal with that slow constant release of whatever’s in the breast implant, which you’ve mentioned some items that don’t sound too savory. And then it’s also dealing with any kind of bacteria or any kind of microbial buildup around the breast implants because it’s so hard for the body to get to that area to clear it out. And the immune system’s all kind of revving up and having to work on that.

I’m sure you’ve looked at the meta-analysis. Statistically, women with breast implants, do they have a higher likelihood of developing cancer?

[01:02:15] Sarah Phillipe: That’s an interesting topic that I haven’t delved a lot into, but I do know that there is a connection between breast and someone women who have breast implants and a higher incidence of colon cancer, which is interesting, right? Not breast cancer. The theory is because the implants are putting a lot of pressure on that area.

[01:02:38] Ashley James: The immune system looking at it.

[01:02:41] Sarah Phillipe: I tend to think about it in a different way with regards to colon cancer where a lot of the toxins we’re exposed to end up going right to the gut. That’s one of the ways we eliminate through the liver and then dump it into the gut for elimination. So I have to wonder too, how much of the toxicity component is playing a part in the development of abnormal cells in the colon?

[01:03:04] Ashley James: I had this explained very scientifically once, and I’m going to try to do it in my layman’s terms. These 80,000 chemicals that are in our environment, our food water, and our breast implants, all that, the body doesn’t recognize these. So the liver gets rid of them but then the colon will reabsorb them if we don’t poop three times a day. If we don’t have enough fiber to bind to those the toxins in the bile and let’s say you have a little bit of constipation, the body does not see the difference between bile just to reabsorb because bile is costly, so the body wants to reabsorb it and reuse it. But there are these toxins that are in it. The colon doesn’t go oh wait, I shouldn’t reabsorb these because I’m actually just reabsorbing all the toxins again.

This is why it’s so important whenever you’re doing certain detoxes and certain parasite cleanses to consume binders. People eat clay and they eat activated charcoal, or they take a lot of fiber in their diet. If you’re going to do one of those cleanses, I highly recommend doing it with a practitioner that knows what they’re doing. Don’t just randomly buy stuff.

I really like Dr. Jay Davidson. I had him on the show twice. I really recommend listening to those two episodes. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and search Jay Davidson for those two episodes. He explains a bit more about the binders and stuff, but here we have the body reabsorbing all the toxins the liver worked hard at to get rid of. So no wonder if the colon wall is being bathed and reabsorbing and bathed and reabsorbing and bathed and reabsorbing these toxins. That makes sense.

[01:04:58] Sarah Phillipe: I absolutely agree that people out there in the world should not be attempting to do detox work on their own without a trained professional. I think that’s so important. I’ve seen so many women just make themselves so much worse.

[01:05:13] Ashley James: Can you explain a bit why? Because a lot of listeners, myself included, have attempted our own detoxes because we read an article, we hear from a friend, or maybe we listen to a show, and then we just go to town and make our own version of it. Going out and getting a colonic is fine, or going out and doing sauna therapy and eating chlorella, that’s fine. But if you have, for example, Lyme disease and then you decide to take all these herbs to kill it or something and you don’t have the right dose or you’re not preparing the body, all the emunctory systems correctly beforehand. You don’t have something to break down the biofilms. I mean, there are just all these things to focus on before we go to just kill the parasite or kill the infection, which can make it much worse like you said.

Could you give an example? Maybe teach us a little bit. We have women who are listening, let’s say they have breast implants. We have some women that have breast implants, and we have women that don’t have breast implants, and maybe they’ve already had them removed. How do we recover from breast implant illness?

[01:06:29] Sarah Phillipe: Well, that’s a loaded question.

[01:06:33] Ashley James: Give us the starting point. Where should we set ourselves up mentally? What should we start really looking into focusing on doing because you’re a detox expert? You’re an expert on breast implant illness, so let’s talk about the women who do have breast implants first. So they have breast implants, you’ve now opened their eyes to the possibility that this may be putting a major stressor. They can’t pinpoint exactly, oh it’s definitely causing this, or it’s definitely causing that. They’re starting to hear all these things that it could be causing, now you’ve got their interest. What can we do to support their health?

[01:07:16] Sarah Phillipe: With regards to healing in any situation, with regards to any root cause, I think the very first step is removing the source. We can do a lot to support our body with good clean water, clean food, good nutrition, exercise movements, good sleep, and things like that, but without removing the source, we can never really truly heal.

Removing the source means getting the breast implants removed, and there’s a very specific way that needs to be done to protect you. So I would look for a surgeon who has lots and lots of experience with explants, ideally even a surgeon who no longer places breast implants because they’re more likely to believe what you’re going through is real, believe that the breast implants are a problem, and do everything in their power to remove them properly so that you have the best chance at recovering your health.

[01:08:23] Ashley James: When you say remove them properly should they also remove that scar tissue capsule the body has built around them?

[01:08:29] Sarah Phillipe: Yep, absolutely because within that matrix of the capsule is going to be a lot of the different toxins that are found in breast implants because they bleed into that capsule, and also biofilm, bacteria, maybe even mold, mycotoxins, and things like that. So really important to get that source out. That’s what I mean when I say properly is that ideally, it would be done on block which means that the implants on the capsule are removed together as one unit rather than cutting the capsule open and taking the implant out first. A lot of really reputable explant surgeons who’ve been doing this for years and years will be able to remove your implants on block.

The ones who say it’s not necessary or I’m not comfortable with that, I’ll probably look elsewhere because you don’t know if you have a rupture until you’re in there. It doesn’t even matter if it’s saline or silicone, especially with silicone, you don’t know if you have a rupture until you’re in there. With saline, you tend to have an idea because it’ll start shrinking, or it’ll just go flat. But you can have a slow leak and it can change in size a little bit but not significantly enough to notice.

You don’t want to have that capsule cut open and risk whatever contents are in there spilling out into your chest cavity and then getting into the lymphatic system and traveling throughout the body. So that’s why it’s important to have them removed on block so that we’re protecting you from that exposure. And then if they can’t be removed on block or if any speck of capsule is left behind, the surgeon should go in and remove every tiny piece of capsule that’s in there. Sometimes that means scraping the ribs, sometimes that means removing a little bit of your own tissue to get it out, but that’s an important piece.

Having any capsule left behind is just going to be a chronic source of immune stimulation. It’s a little bit harder to recover from. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible because I don’t like absolutes, but it’s definitely more challenging.

And then once the implants are out, once you give your body enough time to heal from that surgery, I think that’s important to allow your body to rest, recover, and heal from that generally for about a month. As long as there are no complications, no hematomas, no seromas, no infections, no wound dehiscence, and things like that. As long as everything heals properly, then about a month after that, you can start doing some work on detoxing your body, addressing infections, and things like that.

How I like to look at each unique person, and you could do this on your own, is I have people write me a self-narrative of their life from birth until now. It doesn’t have to be a long novel. It can be really a timeline of you plotting every different type of stressor you’ve encountered in life starting from birth. It can be physical, it can be chemical, it can be mental, emotional, it can be structural, it can be any type of stressor. I like to have people do that because it’s really helpful for me to be able to see how you got here, and then we can work backward with trying to figure out how we’re going to start incorporating some of these things into the plan for how we’re going to address them.

And then I always think that functional lab work is helpful to look for other hidden stressors because not only are there going to be downstream effects of having breast implants like different types of microbial imbalances and toxicity. There are also going to be potentially other different types of hidden stressors in the body that may be unrelated. Maybe you had some health issues prior to the breast implants going in. Maybe you had ulcerative colitis, SIBO, candida overgrowth, or things like that. Those things also have to be taken into consideration.

A lot of hidden things that people most people don’t think about or don’t even know exist to know to think about or look for are hidden infections in the jaw. If you’ve ever had any tooth pulled or a root canal, there is a significant chance that you have cavitation in the jaw, which is an infection in the jaw. That’s another source of low-grade chronic inflammation stimulating the immune system. We discuss to release their own toxins into your body that travel throughout the bloodstream. That can be one thing that keeps people sick. Amalgam fillings, silver fillings in the mouth—that’s another chronic source of toxic exposure.

We have to look for other sources beyond breast implants because it’s a cumulative effect. As far as healing goes, I think it’s important to always start with supporting the downstream detoxification pathways, which means you have to be pooping two to three times a day—that’s a priority. If you’re not pooping, you’re not detoxing. Dr. Jay Davidson talks about this a lot, you have to think about the detox pathways as a funnel. The bottom of the funnel is the gut. You need to be removing your bowels regularly, that’s waste, that’s toxic waste. The more it sits there, the more it’s going to be reabsorbed back into circulation.

The next above that is going to be your kidneys and liver and then your lymph above that. So if you’re someone who’s going out and getting lymphatic massages but you’re not pooping every day, how are those toxins going to get out? You’re probably going to feel a lot worse after a lymphatic massage. That’s the order of things and making sure those are well-supported and functioning the way that they should, proper hydration and minerals.

When the body is ready, I think you can start addressing more of the gut—working on balancing the gut. Whether that looks like just introducing probiotics that can help balance the gut or whether that looks like going after specific pathogens like parasites, fungal overgrowth, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth—whatever that looks like for you, it’s going to be different from person to person. But addressing the gut I think is a helpful place to start after that because when you get into deeper detox work, you’re going to be dumping toxins into the gut and that can be very irritating to the gut. We want the gut to be in a good place before we start doing that.

And then I think the next step—from my approach anyway—is oral chelation. Using true binders, strong binders that are able to get past the gut lining, get into your cells, and bind onto toxins strongly and long enough to be able to get them out of the body. So a lot of the binders that people are using out there, a lot of the time I see people using one product like a zeolite and nothing else. That’s their detox. If all you’re doing is using something like zeolite, yeah, that will bind toxins but you also have to think about the source.

Some zeolites are not tested for heavy metals, and that’s another source of toxic exposure to you because that’s a natural curator in the environment and so it can be contaminated and adding to the level of toxicity. And then if all you’re doing is binding and you’re not supporting other pathways, you’re going to burn out, you’re going to crash. You’re going to burn through your methyl groups, you’re going to burn through glutathione. That’s assuming that your detox pathways are open and working well.

[01:16:09] Ashley James: How do you test—as a practitioner—your clients’ detox pathways?

[01:16:16] Sarah Phillipe: It can be a little tricky to test for those things because we don’t have a really solid test that says, yes, you’re methylating really well or you’re glutathione stores are adequate. But I generally look at a comprehensive blood panel. There are some clues we can pick up on there about methylation and glutathione. I like the organic acids test as well. There are some clues there we can look at for methylation activity, glutathione, and things like that.

As far as kidneys and liver, you’re not going to see anything show up abnormal on blood work until there’s pathology, until there’s a disease, so you won’t usually see that. I generally go by just how someone is feeling overall. If they’re feeling unwell, generally speaking, the detox pathways are not well supported. They’re probably congested. Usually, once we start supporting those pathways, people feel quite a bit better pretty quickly just being able to eliminate things.

[01:17:28] Ashley James: So you’re listening to people instead of telling them it’s in their head, they need more sex. You’re listening to how they’re feeling, and that’s very important. That’s why I like going to naturopaths over medical doctors because naturopaths will look at the same labs but they have a totally different way of analyzing the labs.

If you go to an MD, you’re lucky to spend 15 minutes with them. If you go to a Naturopath—a good one, I mean there’s bound to be good and bad doctors out there regardless of whether holistic or not. Find a good Naturopath that’s been practicing for a long time, and they sit down with you to six for 60 to 90 minutes to go over your comprehensive labs. They’re looking for, are you out of optimal ranges, and how can we get you back in optimal ranges? So their sensitivity to the lab. So if they look at kidney function, they’re looking, are you even remotely nearing towards not optimal? The red warning bells are going to go off in their head if they see signs that you are even in low normal.

Whereas an MD is waiting for you to be so sick they can put you on a drug because they don’t have any other tools until you’re sick enough for them to give you a drug to “manage,” not cure your symptoms. Whereas going to a holistic practitioner like yourself, a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, going to a good Naturopathic physician have so many tools. They’ve got diet, herbs, lifestyle, all these things that scientifically are backed and proven to support the body to get back into optimal ranges. But we have to look at the labs differently. We have to look at them from the standpoint of are you in optimal health, are you creeping out of optimal health?

And then of course listen to the client and believe them when they say, I feel this way, I feel this way, I feel this way. Believe them and go, okay, and take that into account along with the labs for understanding the whole picture about the person. That’s why I like going to like yourself, a functional medicine practitioner or a Naturopath, that spends enough time with you that they can really get the full picture of what’s going on in your life and they can do that detective work.

I know almost every episode of my show, over 450 episodes, has been kind of a commercial for seeing holistic practitioners because I spent years beating my head against a wall seeing medical doctors just being given drug after drug and I was so sick. If I stayed in that world, if I stayed in mainstream medicine, I don’t even know if I’d be alive. But if I stayed in mainstream medicine, I’d still be on monthly antibiotics, I would still be infertile, my weight was out of control so I imagine I’d probably be one of those people on gurneys. My type 2 diabetes was completely out of control. I had really bad polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, and adrenal exhaustion so bad I could barely function. It was getting worse and worse and worse, and that was in my 20s.

If I had stayed that way and kept seeing MDs, I would just keep getting worse and keep being put on more and more drugs. I don’t even know if I’d be here. I’m so grateful for holistic medicine and for just snapping out of it and going I reject this entire system. I will gladly go to an ER if I need emergency medicine like I have a broken arm or something, or I have an infection that I can’t handle. I would gladly go to an ER—allopathic, reductionistic medicine when they take you apart, look at your little organs, and don’t look at you as a whole. That is fantastic for saving your life if you’re in a state of life or death. That’s where they shine. I don’t want to go to a Naturopath if I have a broken bone that needs to be reset and put in a cast or whatever.

But when it comes to chronic illness, that system of medicine is causing more chronic illness than healing. It perpetuates chronic illness, and it also perpetuates the idea that if you have, for example, an autoimmune problem, you will always have it. I was told I’d always have diabetes. I was told I’d always have polycystic ovarian syndrome. I’m sure you were always told that you would have the conditions that they diagnosed you with. And all of our listeners who have been to enough MDs who have had enough health problems have been told, oh, it’s because of your genetics. You will always have this. Or it’s because of your age or because of whatever. They tell you with such hubris that you will always have this condition.

Here we have Sarah teaching us that you can go see her and she’s going to look at your labs in a different way. She’s going to listen to you, listen to your symptoms, and she’s going to help you completely change your lifestyle, your diet in a good way. Sometimes that’s a little overwhelming and scary for people, but holding your hand doing it. I’m a health coach so I know. I’m not going to throw the kitchen sink at you but get your body to the point where your body is so healthy you feel the healthiest you’ve ever felt in your life.

You can’t get that from MD medicine. You can’t get that from pharmaceutical-based medicine to feel the healthiest you’ve ever felt in your entire life from causing more toxins to the body. It all starts with the mindset, and I believe you talked about this before. It really does start with the mindset. We have to change our mindset, completely rewire our mindset to go into this new way of thinking. Believe the body can heal itself and then act accordingly.

[01:23:50] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, absolutely. And I believe that the body was designed with this God-given innate intelligence to self-heal if we take responsibility for our health and take the actionable steps needed to get it back. That mindset component is so huge, and I think it even bleeds into how we think about our condition and how it happened.

With women with breast implants, I think this is so important because a lot of women with breast implants who are sick and they discover breast implant illness, the feelings—initially can become chronic—are of shame, guilt, regret, and then also anger towards the medical system. Why didn’t I know about this? Why wasn’t I told? There’s a lot of anger towards doctors and the medical model, and I think that’s not a healing mindset. We have to get out of the victim mentality in order to heal.

[01:24:59] Ashley James: I think it’s good to bring that up. I think it’s good to address. Anger, if held on to, is toxic. But anger that is processed is healthy because if we bury it, we don’t process it, or if we just try to stick it somewhere without really processing, working through it, healing it, that’s also holding on to a toxin. I know because that was me. But actually facing the anger, being with it because there are two forms of anger. You can take a negative emotion, it’s a negative emotion about the past.

For every time you’ve been hurt by someone you felt angry about it, that’s a gestalt in your neurology that you’re holding on to. That’s a chain of all of the events from your past, and that’s incredibly toxic because that gets reanimated inside our neurology every time we relive something that brings up anger. But anger in the moment about something that’s happening, let’s say, to us which I understand I don’t want to go into victim mode either, but something that’s happening that is violating our boundaries.

Anger is our body and our mind’s way of saying my boundaries are being violated. You got to do something about it. And if we take action to stop our boundaries from being violated and then process the anger, work through it, heal it, release it, and don’t hold on to it, don’t stay in it, but acknowledge it. Acknowledge, yes, my boundaries are being violated.

Once we take action towards not allowing our boundaries to be violated like firing the MDs that no longer help you and hiring new doctors and new practitioners that are going to serve you. That is an actionable step because if you’re staying in victim mode, you’re going to stay with your captors, you’re going to stay with the people who victimized you. But taking all the actions to ensure that your boundaries are healthfully enforced. When anger comes up go ask yourself, is this anger because my boundaries have been violated, or is it anger from the past? And work through it.

Getting to that point, I think anger is healthy when it allows us to see that we have been down a path that’s hurt us, and now we’re seeing all the things that did hurt us. As long as we can go, okay, I’m going to enforce my communication, my boundaries, my research, everything. My mindset is now shifting. I am asserting myself, I am advocating for myself, and I will only put medical professionals on my team that is in alignment with my values and my boundaries, and just acknowledging that that anger was a motivation to get you there.

But don’t stay in it. Don’t say in victim mode because like you said, that shame, guilt, and that anger—we turn it inwards and start beating ourselves up, why did I do this to myself? Why did I let this happen to me? That is really unhealthy, so we have to let it go. I love that you’re acknowledging that because I think there’s so much emotional process work we have to do if we’re coming to terms with a choice we made in our past that has led us down this really negative route and now we’re looking to reverse it. So we also have to reverse and heal all the emotions associated with it.

And then what about everything that led up to a woman choosing breast implants? I know it’s unique for each woman, and I don’t have breast implants so I can only imagine that for me to choose to get breast implants, I would have had such an insecurity—and this was just me, I’m not saying all women—that I needed to get them so that I would stop feeling that way about myself. Do you also look at that and look at what happened emotionally that had you want to get them, and is there anything to heal there?

[01:29:11] Sarah Phillipe: Certainly. I think there’s a lot of reasons why people get breast implants, and it’s not always vanity. For some people, it is a decision after having a mastectomy from breast cancer. For other people, they went in to have a lift after they were done having children and the doctor convinced them that they needed to have breast implants.

[01:29:37] Ashley James: Good salesmen. He had a boat payment.

[01:29:42] Sarah Phillipe: And then for other people, they were like me and just really had a lot of insecurity. The breast implants made them feel a lot more beautiful, sexy, or worthy. I think there’s a lot to think about, and I think it really just takes doing a bit of digging, reflecting, and processing everything that has happened. I really don’t think that this kind of thing happens to us. I really think that it happens for us. Personally, I can’t speak for everyone but for me, I really feel like I went through this partially to really discover who I really am inside as a person, as a human being beyond just the physical appearance. There’s so much growth that happened as a result of that, and I will say I’m probably not the same person that I was 10 years ago.

Secondly, I think it really has taught me how I should be living just to maintain my health, to keep my health for life and rather than just struggle through life with a lot of symptoms and bounce around from doctor to doctor, this surgery and that surgery, and all these different prescriptions like most Americans. But it taught me how I should be living in order to really live a healthful vibrant life full of joy that we deserve.

I think that we can take this experience and really learn a lot about ourselves, about who we are, and about how we should be living. It can be a positive experience once we can get to that place of going through those emotions of whether it be anger, sadness, regret, shame, or whatever, and acknowledging those things, and then letting them go, moving on, moving forward, and not looking back. Continuing to take the next right step each day towards your future.

[01:31:51] Ashley James: I’m sure you’ve been asked this, is there a safe alternative to breast implants? Wave your magic wand.

[01:32:02] Sarah Phillipe: I’m sure they’re working on those things as we speak just based on the uproar that’s going on with women right now with regards to breast implants and how they’ve contributed to poor health. So I know there are probably things in the work that we don’t know about, but one other thing that I do know is there is always the option of having a fat graft. There are a couple of different techniques that I know of. One is a fat flap technique basically where they take fat from underneath the armpit or potentially underneath the breast and rotate it around to make a breast out of it.

I think that’s a great option, however, with regards to breast cancer patients, I don’t know if that’s a safe option. We don’t have any long-term studies showing that that’s safe. And then there’s liposuction with fat transfer to the breasts. That also has its own wrists. It’s an aggressive surgery. The cannula that they use—if you’ve ever seen a video of liposuction, it’s pretty darn aggressive and it’s superficial layers that they’re working with. How much does that disrupt the lymphatic system, how much is that impacting your ability to detoxify and remove waste products, and how and how much is that impacting your ability to get nutrients to the cells?

I think that there are an upside and a downside to any option. Personally, I will say, I did have liposuction with fat transfer at the time of explant. Had I known now what I didn’t know then about lymphatic and how it really can impact the lymphatic system, I probably would have made a different decision. It didn’t really even stick for me, so my breasts are pretty much the same size they were as before I had my implants placed. That’s the other downside of it is that you don’t know if it’s going to stick because once you remove the blood supply of the fat, the fat dies. So whether or not it reestablishes the blood supply quickly enough in its new place is a whole nother story.

So I’ve just gotten to a place where I’ve learned to love and accept myself for how I was created, and see the beauty in that. So that’s my hope for most people so that we stop trying to alter our appearance and realizing that you are beautiful just the way you are, and you don’t need to alter your body to be beautiful.

[01:34:37] Ashley James: Yeah. Do the emotional work to get to the point where you love your body. You love every square inch of it. There’s no such thing as perfection. There’s so much healing to take place. Look at what a damaging society it is that as girls growing up, we are developing these belief systems about what we should look like. This is not a new discussion. If we look at fashion through history, we can see that we have been subjected to basically being cattle for men but also for society and for other women for the acceptance of society. How we appear externally is going to determine whether we’re accepted or not. This is of course the mind of a child, the mind of a little girl analyzing the world.

I believe that at our core, we have this need to be accepted because that’s part of how we survived, however long we’ve been here. Thousands upon thousands of years, we are a tribal people, and if you got exiled from the tribe, that was death. Being part of the tribe and being accepted and loved, and the first acceptance is being accepted into your family when you’re born. Feeling as part of a family, then part of a community, part of a school system, part of a church system, or whatever you are in growing up. If you are bullied, if you are judged, if you are pushed aside, if you’re feeling unworthy, unloved—all these things are processed in the mind of a girl growing up thinking that her physical appearance played a role in the rejection, and the hurt and the trauma from that.

If only I put on makeup, do my hair, and look as sexy as I can, and spend all of my waking moments up making myself look good and appear nice, then I will be accepted. This is what the media tells us. Really, the most beautiful thing about a woman is true confidence. You kind of get to that point, I’m 40 now. Somewhere around 35, 36, right after I gave birth I kind of went screw this. I am not playing this game. I’m living for me. I’m living for my loved ones. I’m not living to look good for anyone. I’ve lost shallow friends over it, great. I’ve made some deeper friends because of it.

I know that there are women who are in industries where they have to look good in order to get a raise, in order to get a promotion. This is the sad part about society, but we need to analyze how we grew up, analyze the world and realize that we internalized this idea that our looks need to be perfect in order to be loved and accepted, and then we do something like give ourselves implants or do plastic surgery causing further harm.

I love that right at the beginning of the show, you brought up that this is as much of a physical healing journey as it is in a mental and emotional one, and to work on all aspects of it.

[01:38:29] Sarah Phillipe: Right. Women today, young girls today, gosh, I would hate to have grown up in today’s world as a younger girl. When we were young we had magazines, billboards, commercials, movies, and things like that. But now, everywhere you look it’s in your face all over social media. Having a constant connection to social media the way people do today is a recipe for disaster for young girls. We’re in the midst of this body positivity movement and loving and accepting all different shapes and sizes. But at the same time, we have that message, we have the other side of a different message, which leads us to do all of the things that we do that leads us to have our eyebrows tattooed on our face and have eyelash extensions, get breast implants, get Botox, get lip injections, get cheek implants, chin implants, and butt implants. We’re trying to create this body or this look that doesn’t really exist in real life naturally.

[01:39:47] Ashley James: Right, and Hollywood and the media have done us no justice. I read an article recently, really interesting about young children. It was doing a cross-section of the young children who are questioning whether they were born in the right body. What I found interesting—and I really didn’t know this because I thought maybe just from what we see in the media—that it’s more skewed towards boys wanting to be girls. But in fact, the statistic was something crazy like closer to 90% of these children were girls who felt more like they were boys. They’re all in the questioning phase, but no wonder. No wonder In this world where we have to achieve this level of perfection.

If I was a girl now, I’d rather be a boy than have to live up to this idea of what it looks like to be a woman. It’s a total false, it’s made up, it’s not real. That’s not what it is to be a woman. But it just seems a lot safer, it just looks a lot easier to live life as a boy, right? No wonder there’s so much confusion. The way society is, the way the media is, the way social media is, we’re making it impossible for women to feel comfortable in their own skin, unless they do their own work. Unless they go within, they reject the external input, and they go with it and they love who they are on the inside, how they were born, and just be with themselves. Instead of trying to change who they are, just go within and do the emotional work.

I just thought that it was really interesting that this level of confusion like very young children. I see that it makes sense that we’re trying to falsify what it is to really be a woman. Not us but the media making it very confusing.

I love the work that you do. You’re exposing something that allows us to analyze our entire life and our body image, and then support ourselves on a level of detox, emotionally and physically. So tell us about how people can work with you. What does it look like to work with you as a practitioner? Obviously, you do it through Zoom or Skype. What does it look like to work with you?

[01:42:33] Sarah Phillipe: I’ve worked with women all over the world, and that’s really thanks to technology today. The women that I’ve worked with, it’s always been one-on-one. We work together for a minimum of six months. It really involves teaching women the tools that they need to heal themselves, and I think that’s really empowering because you can take that information and use it to help your family and keep your family healthy. So it’s not just about how it’s helping or impacting you, it’s about even the next generation. Teaching people how they should be living for a healthy body and a healthy life.

Once dysfunction has occurred, how to restore function. What things we need to look into, what things we should address and what order, how to go about it, and all of that. I’m teaching women these things. I’m not doing the work for them. I can give someone the best plan in the world, but if they can’t implement it or if they’re not able to implement it, then they’re not going to get well. I think education is the most valuable thing because they can use that information for the rest of their lives.

Soon, mid-year or so, probably around June, I’ll be shifting how I work with women and it’s going to be done in a group setting. We’ll be doing an online group program.

[01:44:02] Ashley James: That’s great.

[01:44:04] Sarah Phillipe: It’ll still be the same exact thing that I do now, it’ll just be in a group and a lot more connection and shared experience. I think that’ll be really valuable for people to go through things like this together. Because a lot of women who are going through this don’t feel like anyone really understands them. No one understands, no one gets it, people think I’m crazy, people don’t believe me. This is really great to connect with other women who are going through it at the same time that you are and be able to connect on that level and have that shared experience. Know that there are other people that you can talk to that get it and that understand what you’re going through. That’s what I’m working on putting together now. It’s basically my brain in an online program.

[01:44:48] Ashley James: I love it. Would people still be able to like do labs with you and get a consult?

[01:44:53] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. The way I’m setting it up is we’ll have weekly or bi-weekly group calls and then there will be an option to have a one-on-one call scheduled with me.

[01:45:06] Ashley James: Great. Awesome. Is there anything else that people or women should know? I mean, men can get implants too. I was surprised that there are calf implants for men because they’ll work out in the gym forever but they don’t get that definition of their calf that they really wanted, and so they’ll get basically the silicone implants or something put in their calves to make them look more muscular. There would be a percentage of men that would be experiencing all these same issues but to male physiology. Is there anything else though that future students and clients should know when it comes to working with you about this program?

[01:45:51] Sarah Phillipe: One thing that I’m always telling potential clients is that you have to be mentally and emotionally mindset-wise prepared for the work. You have to be willing to do whatever it takes because usually, the people that come to me are the people who’ve gone from doctor to doctor to doctor, no one has been able to help them, and I’m kind of like their last resort. I ask a lot of my clients. It’s not always easy. There’s going to be bumps in the road. Healing is never a straight path, so you have to expect that it’s going to be challenging and it’s going to sometimes require that you step outside of your comfort zone because the way that we heal the body is not the way that you’ve been taught by modern medicine.

[01:46:47] Ashley James: And when you have those bumps in the road that’s feedback, that’s actually good. When you feel bad that’s good because you bring that to Sarah and then she goes, oh okay, then we need to make these tweaks. She understands, but you have to be vocal about how you’re feeling.

That’s something that happened to me. I was doing methylcobalamin injections back in December. My B12 plummeted and then my iron plummeted as a result during the pregnancy, and so I took some methylcobalamin injections. I was feeling great for the first three injections, I was amazing. It was like two a week. I was like, oh wow, I feel normal again. I feel good. This is great.

And then about two or three weeks into the injections, they would make it so I was totally out for the whole day. I was in bed. I’m like, what is going on? I talked to my midwife who’s amazing. Absolutely amazing, she’s been my midwife for over 20 years. She looks at me and she goes well, Dr. Ben Lynch, and I’ve had him on the show by the way so I was just really impressed that she starts off by quoting him. “Well, Dr. Ben Lynch says that methylcobalamin shares the same pathways as insulin, and if you don’t need any more methylcobalamin, then it’s actually reducing your capacity for your body to use the insulin.” She’s going on and on about all the pathways and I’m looking at her like I should have you on the show.

So she told me, okay, I want you to do this instead. I went from I felt good but then I started feeling really bad, then she adjusted it, and I felt even better. That’s the thing is you have to be in communication with your practitioner. The practitioner—a good one like Sarah—who knows what to do with that information.

So yes, it’s challenging, but it’s also then on the other side of the challenges is incredible rewards. But they have to be willing to put the work in. If you say stop eating gluten, they have to stop eating gluten. Or if you say you have to stop eating sugar, you have to stop drinking coffee, or whatever like some vices. You probably are going to have to give up some vices, but on the other side of it is how much do you want that amazing health, that vitality?

[01:48:55] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly, and I think that leads to another really important point is that people need to have a strong enough why. They really need to get in tune, in touch with their why. What is the reason that you want to get your health back? What’s the reason you want to work together? When someone says because I want to be healthy, that’s not a why. Why do you want to be healthy? What is the driving force that keeps you motivated to take the next right step each day in your healing journey? What do you want to be doing with your life that you are not able to currently do because of your symptoms, because of how much you’re struggling?

For most people, it’s a struggle just to get out of bed every day. All the other things that they want to be doing with their life they’re not doing.

[01:49:43] Ashley James: Yeah, and the guilt and the shame that builds up from that. I want to live a life free of guilt and shame and be able to get out of bed. You’re like, yeah. Okay, great. Now do everything I tell you to do.

[01:50:00] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. So I think that’s important because it keeps you motivated even when things get hard.

[01:50:05] Ashley James: Absolutely. Sarah, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Your website is reversingbreastimplantillness.com. Are there any resources you want to send us to or homework you’d like to leave us with to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:50:27] Sarah Phillipe: Well, I have one resource that I find really valuable. It’s something that I use with all of my clients to just assess where they’re at and assess progress. It’s my neurotoxic questionnaire. It’s divided up into four different categories, each of them looking at a different type of toxicity. The first section looks at heavy metals, the second section looks at symptoms connected to general chemical toxins, the third category looks at some connected biotoxins and mycotoxins. Those are toxins that come from living organisms like mold, bad bacteria, parasites, and things like that. And then the fourth category is looking at symptoms that are connected to a combination of heavy metals and general chemical toxins. That’s really helpful.

And then your total score you can look at where you fall into the range of mild, moderate, or severe neurotoxicity, which is important in determining whether it may be the thing that helps you make the decision to explant, or it may help you assess that even after explant you have some work to do. And then it helps you reassess progress as you go through your journey.

[01:51:44] Ashley James: How can they find that?

[01:51:46] Sarah Phillipe: I can share that link with you to share with your audience, or you can also find it on my website.

[01:51:55] Ashley James: Awesome. I’ll make sure the link is in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Thank you Sarah for being on the show today. It’s been such a pleasure, and I’d love for you to come back when new exciting information comes out about breast implant illness. You’re welcome. I know you’ve got your ear to the ground. When really interesting stuff comes out that we all need to learn more about, please come back on the show.

[01:52:27] Sarah Phillipe: Of course, I’d be happy to, and thank you so much for having me, Ashley. It was such a pleasure and I really enjoyed our conversation.

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You Are the Placebo by Joe Dispenza

https://reversingbreastimplantillness.com

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Breast Implant Illness: Signs, Symptoms, Treatment & More!

https://www.learntruehealth.com/breast-implant-illness-signs-symptoms-treatment

Highlights:

  • Silicone is a neurotoxin
  • Breast implants can cause issues with the mitochondria
  • Importance of removing breast implants properly
  • Different sources of toxins
  • Alternatives to breast implants

Do you have breast implants or other foreign objects placed in your body? In this episode, Sarah Phillipe shares the dangers of having breast implants. Sarah enumerates different signs and symptoms of breast implant illness, the best way to remove the breast implants, and what could happen if the breast implants weren’t removed properly. She also enumerates different things that need to be addressed to recover from breast implant illness fully.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode really blew my mind even more so than I thought it would. If you’ve ever had plastic surgery or implants, you definitely want to listen. For those who haven’t, I still think you’re going to get a lot out of listening to this episode.

In this episode and in others, I’ve shared a bit about my journey, and one problem I really struggled with was detoxification. In the last five years, I’ve been focusing heavily on supporting my liver and on doing heavy metal detox because I discovered that was the underlying cause of a lot of my health issues. I want to point out a few things that really have helped me because if you have an illness that you think has stemmed from having implants, and of course, listening to today’s episode you will definitely gather more information to help you come to some really good conclusions and give you some directions that you’ll greatly benefit from.

For me, what’s really helped—actually doing this podcast has really helped because I followed a lot of the advice of my guests. When I interviewed Dr. Klinghardt—that’s a really good episode to go back to. He specializes in helping people who have difficulty detoxing for those, for example, who are on the spectrum, for those who suffer from mitochondrial disease, from Lyme disease, from heavy metal toxicity. He discusses a few things that we can do on a daily basis to support the body’s ability to remove heavy metals and toxins and support the liver and the emunctory systems of the body.

I began to implement what he recommended and found I had fantastic results. So one is doing almost daily sauna therapy, and I chose to invest in a Sunlighten Sauna. They do have a payment plan program, and I opted in for that. It’s like a credit card payment, and they ship you a sauna. You can get a wooden one, it’s about the size of a closet. It fits into a corner of a room, or you can get the portable one that folds up. You can tuck it away under the bed or in a closet. I did actually interview the founder of Sunlighten Sauna, so you can go back and listen to that episode.

The reason why I chose Sunlighten is they have a fantastic track record for being 100% non-toxic, and also they have a full spectrum system. So it is not just far-infrared, it’s near-infrared and mid-infrared, which shows that there are so many other benefits. For example, a decrease in pain and an increase in collagen production and elastin. There’s a youthful look that we can achieve by using the Sunlighten Sauna. But for me, it was about the heavy metal detox, which I’ve had fantastic results working with, and also decrease inflammation in my body.

The next was the Platinum Energy System, and I have interviewed Kellyann Andrews several times. Of course, you can listen to those episodes. The Platinum Energy System allows us to pull out heavy metals from our feet, which I know sounds so crazy, but she sends the water off to the labs and has graphs and charts and shows that it does pull things out. What’s really neat is I’ve given treatments to my friends, and the sludge that comes out of people when they’re in this system smells like the chemicals they’ve been using to clean with.

Someone who’s a swimmer in a Platinum Energy System and the water will smell like chlorine, will smell like pool water. It’s really crazy. But what’s awesome is anytime I feel sluggish, down, sort of toxic, I jump in the Platinum Energy System and within 30 minutes, I feel amazing. So I’ve had a great experience with it, so have my friends and my family. So you could check out those episodes with Kellyann Andrews and learn more about the Platinum Energy System.

And then the third thing I learned from Dr. Klinghardt is eating chlorella and spirulina, specifically chlorella because chlorella will naturally and very safely—in a gentle way—chelate, bind to heavy metals in the body. Now he does discuss how to eat them. Chlorella is a crop, not a supplement, so people think oh, I don’t want to overdose. Are you going to overdose on broccoli? Yes, to a certain point. You wouldn’t want to eat 20 pounds of broccoli. That’s too much. But you’re not going to overdose by having two cups of broccoli, right? You’ll feel full, but you’re not going to overdose.

So for chlorella, they dehydrate it, press it into little tablets, and you chew it. In our family, we call it the green crackers. But you want to take 30 of them at a time. So you can put them in your smoothie, or you can chew them and drink water. You do that ideally before a sauna, but you can do it every day, and that helps the body chelate these heavy metals. If you don’t eat enough of them, there becomes a problem because it kind of stirs up the toxins, and there’s not enough to bind to it. So you actually want to eat more, not less. So between 30 and 60 of these little tablets, and they also are a great source of amino acids and other nutrients.

I interviewed the founder of ENERGYbits, Catharine Arnston, who has a wonderful story about how her sister used chlorella and spirulina as part of her holistic protocol to recover from breast cancer. That’s what had Catharine Arnston start ENERGYbits because she saw that out there, most of the chlorella and spirulina in the market is tainted with heavy metals and lead. That’s why I really don’t want you to go to some website like Amazon or some store and just buy it because most of the brands out there are toxic. If you look at the bag and somewhere on the bag it says California regulation says this can cause cancer, well that’s because there’s lead in it because of how they very cheaply process the chlorella.

There are only two companies I know of on the planet that processes their chlorella and spirulina so purely that there are no heavy metals in it, and the one that I like better because I think it tastes better is ENERGYbits.

Now all these companies I mentioned I’ve asked them to give a discount to our listeners. So Sunlighten Sauna, which I absolutely love Sunlighten. Definitely give them a call and get more information from them if you want to support your daily detoxification. By the way, their benefits to sauna are amazing. Type sauna into learntruehealth.com to see the episodes or hear the episodes on that. I did have a cardiologist on, Dr. Kahn, who talks about how much he loves Sunlighten Sauna because it helps to tonify the cardiovascular system and will lower high blood pressure. That’s just one of the amazing factors. I happened to do it because I wanted to support my body in detoxification, losing inflammation, and weight loss. But other people do it for other reasons like a reduction of pain and inflammation or to support the cardiovascular system.

When you do call Sunlighten, you can mention that you heard about them through learntruehealth.com, through the Ashley James podcast.

When you talk to Kellyann Andrews about the Platinum Energy System, make sure that you mention my name because she does give a fantastic discount to those who are getting the Platinum Energy System. And then as far as the ENERGYbits, use the coupon code LTH and you will get the discount that they give for the listeners as well.

If you have any questions about this, and of course, those are my three biggest things but I do other stuff on a daily basis to support my emunctory systems, but those are my big three.

The fourth one I could throw in is on a daily basis I do take the supplements from takeyoursupplements.com. Those supplements turned my life around. I’ve been taking them for 10 years. I was very sick. I had many, many health issues, and that was the biggest turning point for me. I had been on all kinds of supplements before, never saw a difference until I got on the supplements from takeyoursupplements.com. It’s all about quality. It’s all about giving your body the raw building blocks it needs in the bioavailability it needs. So you can go to takeyoursupplements.com and check them out. They will talk to you for free and help you. Their health coaches will talk to you absolutely for free and help you get on the right protocol.

So those are my four big tips for detoxification, but if you do have any more questions about that you can always reach out to me. You can go to our Facebook group. Join the Facebook group. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook and ask away. I’m there every day answering questions. Other guests that have been on the show are actually in the group as well answering questions, other holistic health practitioners, health coaches are there, and just passionate people like you and me who are out seeking true health through holistic means. We’re all there to support each other.

I just hope that you get so much out of this episode because truly, this information is not in the mainstream and it should, but luckily it’s here. Enjoy today’s episode. Please share it with those you care about so that we can continue to spread this information and help as many people as possible to learn true health.

[00:09:54] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 457. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Sarah Phillipe on the show. Her website is reversingbreastimplantillness.com. Now, if you don’t have any breast implants I still think you should listen, even if you’re a man—we got a lot of great male listeners—you should still listen because this is such an important topic when it comes to understanding the immune system’s response to materials placed in the body.

I interviewed Kristen Bowen and I’ve had her on the show a few times. She’s the one that created my favorite magnesium soak, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. I talk about it all the time. The coupon code is LTH for those who want to get that magnesium soak. She went down to 97 pounds, having 30 seizures a day, in a wheelchair because they put things in her body when she had surgery, and they said these things were harmless. Now we know years later that we could have an autoimmune response to even what is thought to be inert items. I’m sure Sarah is going to educate us on that.

Obviously, the person who would benefit the most from listening to this is someone who’s had plastic surgery performed on them. However, I think everyone should listen because understanding what the body goes through when we’ve had surgery and if something’s been left inside us is so important, and then how to recover from that. Sarah, welcome to the show.

[00:11:36] Sarah Phillipe: Thank you so much, Ashley. I’m really happy to be here and to be sharing this really important information with your audience.

[00:11:44] Ashley James: Absolutely. I had a listener reach out and say that you’re amazing and that we absolutely had to interview you. Now, before we get into learning about this, I had never heard of breast implant illness, although I’ve heard of autoimmune responses to objects being placed in the body. I have a dear friend—my best friend’s wife—has had issues with not breast implants but with other plastic surgery items being placed in the body. The doctors guaranteed it was safe and absolutely nothing wrong would happen and she almost died.

So it’s one of those stories that you just don’t know until it happens. The thing is that what you’re going to teach us is that it can be something where it creates a chronic illness not something sudden but someone can have it for years and not realize that it has to do with the breast implants. Before we get into that though, can you tell us about your past, about your history? What happened both personally and professionally in your life that led you to want to be an expert in this topic, illuminating this topic, and helping us better understand it?

[00:12:58] Sarah Phillipe: Sure. It was a place going from a place of pain to purpose really for me like a lot of us who are in the holistic health space, right? We have experienced something, a decline in our health for a particular reason or a multitude of reasons, and modern medicine hasn’t been able to help. So that leads us down this functional medicine or holistic health path of just wanting to discover the root cause.

For me, I had always wanted larger breasts. I mean, this really came from childhood, which is interesting. You don’t always think about a desire like that coming from childhood, but it really started in this pivotal moment in my life when I was a young girl. Someone really important to me—and I don’t think she had ill intentions, of course, but—unknowingly said to me you’re going to be 4’11” just like me, but don’t worry, you’re going to have the Johnson boobs. So it was that really pivotal moment for me where I just realized how important breasts are, and I had no understanding of that before that moment.

That really stuck with me and it really shaped my perception about my body as I matured and didn’t get the Johnson boobs. I put a lot of worth into the physical appearance. I didn’t really realize who I was on the inside, not just who I was on the outside and. I think there were some driving factors there that led me to make that decision to get my breast implants placed.

I had them placed in 2011. Prior to that, I was working in a very busy teaching hospital, night shift—very hard on my body. I was pushing my body to the brink at the gym. Tons and tons of heavy weight lifting, cardio, cyclical dieting, and just really a lot of stress. When I got the breast implants placed, that for me I believe was really the straw that broke the camel’s back. Everything else had kind of set the stage for the fall. That was just my tipping point. That just overflowed my bucket.

Within six months I started developing symptoms, symptoms that I had never had before. I didn’t have a symptom to speak of before that. So while my body may not have been healthy, it wasn’t expressing itself in symptoms yet. But within six months, I had all kinds of symptoms. I was developing chronic fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, I had brain fog, difficulty concentrating, poor word retrieval, memory loss. I would have to read something probably 10 or 15 times to really absorb the information and be able to tell you what I read. Muscle aches and pains, joint pain, hair loss, weight gain, temperature intolerance, low libido, heart palpitations, shortness of breath. I had night sweats. I had insomnia. My mind would just race and race and race all night long. I had hormone imbalances.

I ended up getting diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. My thyroid was low, my thyroid hormone was low. I was very sensitive to light, sound, and chemical smells. I had lots of GI symptoms, so gas and bloating, loose stool, really painful abdomen. The more I ate the more my belly hurt. I knew there was something wrong. Lots of food intolerances, these things were never a problem before.

So I went down this path of trying to figure out what was going on. I went to medical doctors who always told me, your labs look fine. Maybe you need counseling or maybe you should spice up your sex life.

[00:16:52] Ashley James: Wait a second, wait a second. You had a doctor say that to you?

[00:16:55] Sarah Phillipe: Yes.

[00:16:56] Ashley James: You had this whole host of symptoms. You were suffering daily and you had a doctor—was it a male doctor?

[00:17:04] Sarah Phillipe: Yes.

[00:17:05] Ashley James: And he said to you, you just need more sex.

[00:17:07] Sarah Phillipe: Well, yeah. I mean, with the low sex drive complaints and low hormone, he was just thinking maybe I needed to spice it up a bit.

[00:17:16] Ashley James: Oh, so it’s your fault that you have low hormones and low libido, and if you just spiced it up and were more active in the bedroom, that would raise your hormones. I wonder what medical journal he got that from.

[00:17:29] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, very interesting.

[00:17:33] Ashley James: I had a doctor say that to me once actually. This is why I want to just emphasize, it’s so frustrating as a woman to have all these symptoms, all these medical problems, and not be taken seriously. the hubris of the MDs training. Anytime I get on my soapbox where I talk about MDs, there’s a lot of them that are really well-intentioned, right? But we’re talking about the ones that you saw. You went to so many specialists and they were like well it’s in your head, you just need to have more sex, or whatever. I mean, all this is just ridiculous.

They’re just making stuff up, and the hubris of their training is that they can’t be wrong and they can’t say I don’t know what it is. Let me go find the answers for you. Let me go peer through medical journals. Let me go think about things that it could be that I don’t have training around. Most of them don’t do that. Most of them just are listening to symptoms to give you a drug, to send you on your way, and not looking to heal the root cause. This is my biggest frustration. You want a doctor that’s a detective. You want a doctor that’s holistic, that’s going to look at you your whole life and go okay, why is this happening? And not blame you. It’s your fault. You’re not having enough sex, or it’s all in your head. You just need to go for a walk and see a counselor or whatever. I mean, that’s ridiculous.

You had all these symptoms that gradually started over time after your breast implants, and a really good diagnostician would have traced it back and seen okay yes, you were working really hard long hours and that deteriorated your health. But then, what was that one point where it all exacerbated, right? So what happened in your story that you clued in that it was your breast implants, or was it a specialist that finally figured it out?

[00:19:37] Sarah Phillipe: No, you know it’s interesting because I even eventually went down the path of looking for more functional medicine types of physicians. So I worked with a functional medicine doctor that I found locally and was diagnosed with SIBO and treated for that. That didn’t get better, of course. Multiple rounds of rifaximin and still no results.

Then I found a holistic health practitioner who was a chiropractor working with a lot of people with Lyme, mold illness, and just different really chronic conditions, and so I thought this would be the perfect person for me. I point-blank asked him do you think that my breast implants are a problem? Do you think they could be creating all of these symptoms and the reason why I’m not getting better having done all these things because I had done a lot. I’ve made a lot of dietary changes, a lot of lifestyle changes. I’d really been trying to figure out how I could recover my health, and he said no. I think that if we can get Lyme under control because he had anecdotally kind of diagnosed me with Lyme. If we get the lime under control, then you’re going to be fine. The breast implants won’t be a problem.

[00:20:49] Ashley James: I have a question. Why did you think it could possibly be your breast implants?

[00:20:55] Sarah Phillipe: I think I just had this gut instinct, I had this intuition. At the time, I mean this was a long time ago. Nobody was talking about this back then. There were no Facebook groups, no websites, no podcast interviews where anyone was talking about breast implant illness. So it was just kind of this little voice in the back of my head or just in my gut telling me that it could be the breast implants and just having that medical background, I understood that something inside of me that doesn’t belong there maybe could possibly make me sick and cause all this downstream dysfunction.

At the time though, I didn’t have enough concrete evidence. That wasn’t enough for me to just go on a hunch to have them removed. It took me a long time to get to the point of deciding to have them removed. I mean, many years of going down this rabbit hole. So, yes, I had the intuition, but I didn’t trust my intuition initially.

[00:21:52] Ashley James: This is so interesting because this is a very similar story. We’ve had many people come on the show and share, many practitioners come on the show—these are professionals, these are scientists, these are doctors—and they too have a similar story where they were sick and when no one else knew what it was, their intuition was sort of whispering I feel like it’s this. Then they would second-guess it, and how often do we do that? How often do we second-guess? If your intuition says bring an umbrella and it’s a sunny day, or bring a sweater and it’s a warm day, how often do we second-guess that first voice? That first voice is the quietest, but that’s the truth. That is our truth.

We have to quiet our mind, stop second-guessing ourselves, listen to that gut instinct, and then find practitioners that’ll listen to us and listen to what our gut is saying. So then what happened? It took many years. What happened that had you go, wow, I think I’m right?

[00:22:58] Sarah Phillipe: I’m pretty grateful for the whole experience that I went through because it really ended up leading me down this journey of becoming a health detective, so to speak, becoming a holistic health practitioner so that I could try to figure out what was wrong with me and how to fix myself.

I was no longer really in alignment with modern medicine or conventional medicine because I saw that they couldn’t help me, they weren’t helping me, and they didn’t understand why I was not doing well, why I had all these symptoms. So I knew I had to take a different approach.

That led me down this road of becoming a holistic health practitioner, completely changing everything about my life and the way that I was living. I did a lot of work on myself. I did a lot of detox work, addressing the gut, and working on all these different things that we do in holistic health in general because a lot of these things, regardless of what the source, is there’s only really a handful of things that create chronic illness in today’s world. So they tend to be fairly similar across the board, it’s just what is the source, right?

So for me, it got to the point where my husband and I were trying to get pregnant, and we had been trying for a couple of years without success. I had ended up going to a gynecologist who specializes in endometriosis because I also had a hunch that I had endometriosis. Four or five years before that I had an ultrasound and they couldn’t find anything and sent me on my way. This particular specialist did an MRI and we discovered it was stage four. So I had bowel involvement, I had vaginal wall involvement, I had my left fallopian tube completely blocked. So there was a lot of inflammation in my pelvic floor and just my uterus, ovaries, and all of that.

So I just knew like I had been really thinking about it a lot and kind of in my mind mentally preparing myself for it and also talking about it out loud with my husband just to prepare him for it because I knew I was going to make that decision. So it came down to the fact that I wasn’t able to get pregnant, and I had been thinking in my mind if these implants are this toxic to me and causing all this dysfunction in my own body, what are they going to do? Even if I do get pregnant, what are they going to do to a growing child in me, in my uterus? What kind of problems could that pose to a growing baby, and what about breastfeeding? Am I going to pass all these toxins along to a baby who’s breastfeeding? I just didn’t want that for my future children, and it was really that whole experience with infertility that led me to finally making the decision to explant.

So I did. Once I made that decision, I had my implants out about two months later.it was really quick once I finally committed to it.

[00:26:05] Ashley James: Well I take it they put you under to take them out, you weren’t awake during the procedure, right?

[00:26:15] Sarah Phillipe: Right.

[00:26:16] Ashley James: So when you woke up, did you notice the difference right away?

[00:26:21] Sarah Phillipe: I wouldn’t say that I had much of a difference right away. I mean, I had definitely made a fair amount of improvement, which is the work that I had been doing before my explant. So for me, I feel like I probably felt a little bit more alive, happier, just my outlook in life was improved. I felt lighter and brighter, and everyone else could see that in me. They just felt like when they were having a conversation with me, that I just came off a bit different. I just came off less intense, just calmer, more peaceful. Probably that’s because I didn’t have this chronic source of toxic exposure just overwhelming my detox pathways that can definitely create a lot of irritability, anxiety, and rage even—I’ve seen that as well. So a lot of different symptoms can come from toxic overload.

So those things I noticed right away, but I did a lot of work post explant as well. It wasn’t just this miraculous healing story for me. I had to actually go and do a lot of detox work, a lot of gut work, dealing with infections things like that because there’s the downstream effect of having breast implants, and it’s not just about removing the source. There’s more work to be done after that.

So over time, I would say it took me about a year of work before I felt pretty darn good, but I also needed to have a second surgery in between that time. So I did decide to go ahead and have a laparoscopy for that endometriosis. That surgery was a far more difficult recovery than the explant. It was a six-month recovery because I had to have a bowel resection, part of my vaginal wall was cut out. I had a fallopian tube removed and a lot of clean-up there. It was an eight-hour surgery. So that recovery was quite challenging, but I’ve never felt better and I’m really glad I did it. I wouldn’t say that excision for endometriosis is appropriate for every situation, but for mine, it was just so invasive and it had taken over so many different organs that it really needed to be done.

So after those two surgeries and doing a lot of work, I would say about a year after that is when I felt quite good. And then about two years afterward is when I really hit the point where I felt better than I had in over a decade.

[00:28:55] Ashley James: Amazing. May I ask you a personal question?

[00:29:00] Sarah Phillipe: Mhmm.

[00:29:01] Ashley James: Have you guys had kids?

[00:29:03] Sarah Phillipe: We haven’t had kids yet, we have been trying, and it’s been a long time. We’ve been trying for probably four or five years now. I’ve lost count. But for me, the interesting part that was a huge blocking factor for me was my mindset, just my beliefs about what my body was capable of. Going into a fertility specialist or an endometriosis specialist like I did, it can be really disheartening to hear really discouraging words like your chances of getting pregnant are this, then your age, and then you’re only having one fallopian tube now because we had to take it out, here are your chances. So I think that was such a mental block for me.

So over the past year, I’ve actually done a lot of mental-emotional work—working on healing past traumas, working on my belief about what my body’s capable of, and shifting that belief. And I know I’m going to get pregnant. I know my baby’s coming, but I didn’t know that before. I had doubts, disbelief. Even when I would say out loud, I know it’ll happen at the right time, I don’t think I really truly believed that. Our thoughts are so powerful. Even if we don’t speak it out loud, our cells are listening to whatever our thoughts are and responding as if it’s true.

[00:30:37] Ashley James: You’re a nurse and you’re a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. You have many credentials. You work with clients, but you’re also working on yourself. When I hear that of a practitioner, that’s the practitioner I want to see. I want to go to the practitioner who is working on themselves mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, energetically. Who acknowledges that emotional, mental health is as important as physical health. Spiritual health and energetic health play a role in overall health and vitality.

Now, I got to tell you, I was told by an endocrinologist that I would never have kids, never—0% chance that I would have kids, and my husband I tried for six years. So I just want to let you know absolutely, 100% possible. And it was holistic medicine alone that helped me to become fertile. My issue is not yours. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, not what you had. However, I’ve seen so many women with so many different complications using a really holistic approach to be able to conceive healthfully.

Once we got everything in order with our diet, nutrition, lifestyle, mental, emotional health—when we got all of it together, and for us the last step was adding just some Chinese herbs that our Naturopath was like, okay, these are the last thing. We’re just going to put this in place. Then we had to decide to watch for ovulation because, in the past, I didn’t ever track it because I was told I never had it to begin with.

When we saw ovulation, we’re like, oh my gosh. We did it. We’re ovulating. Our very first detection of ovulation we conceived our son, and now we’re pregnant again. We’re having a daughter. And it was both on the first tries. For that to go from six years of really trying but also not having a regular cycle, not having everything lined up, but using supplements, diet, herbs, and all that.

I love that you’re looking at every aspect, and the belief system is so important because if I didn’t believe, then I would have never even gone as far as to ask my Naturopath for help in that area, for herbs, and I would have never even been conscious ever looking for when I ovulated. It’s like our belief system has us look for the evidence, has us look for the evidence that something is possible that we then can act upon. That’s why it’s so important to work on our belief system and to clean up past traumas so that we can believe in ourselves and we can believe in our own body’s ability to heal itself.

My understanding of your situation with breast implants is that it was a toxic accumulation over time that affected all the systems. Is that because what is leaching into our bodies when we have a breast implant are endocrine disruptors? Can you maybe explain what kind of chemicals are slowly leeching into our body?

[00:34:11] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. Breast implants are a stressor on a couple of different levels, and one of them is that they’re a chemical stressor. It’s not just silicone breast implants, it’s saline also. Saline breast implants most people think are safer because well it’s just water, it’s just saline water. But it’s not true. The shell of the saline breast implants are made of silicone, and so silicone in and of itself is a neurotoxin.

There is evidence that it chelates neurotransmitters in the brain. We’re exposed to a lot of different sources of silicone these days. If you think about different kitchen utensils, all of the silicone that is in our personal care products, our makeup, our skincare, and things like that. There’s a lot of silicone out there, and there is one researcher who believes that it’s actually silicone toxicity that we’re dealing with when we have breast implants. That it’s a cumulative effect of not just the breast implants but all the different sources of silicone that we’re exposed to. And of course, breast implants are a pretty significant source of exposure, and they’re living in the body.

But beyond that, there’s a lot of different cytotoxic, neurotoxic, carcinogenic chemicals, and heavy metals that are really inflammatory to our cells, tissues, and organs that are in silicone breast implants specifically. So there are 37+ different toxic chemicals and heavy metals in silicone breast implants. This means things like methyl ethyl ketone, cyclohexane, acetone, xylene, phenol—these are all neurotoxins. And then they contain things like dichloromethane, toluene, benzene—those things are carcinogens. And then you have things like talcum powder, formaldehyde, lacquer thinner, printing ink, and metal cleaning acid.

What are these things doing in breast implants? And then you have heavy metals like aluminum, tin, lead, and platinum. I actually developed some kind of reaction to my platinum wedding rings and I could no longer wear them. My finger just was like on fire every time I put it on. When I got my breast implants removed, that never happened again.

[00:36:35] Ashley James: Wow.

[00:36:36] Sarah Phillipe: So, that was a really interesting correlation there.

[00:36:40] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. So wait, have you ever taken these breast implants and had them analyzed by a lab to read out all of the heavy metals that are leaching into our body from them and all the chemicals? Is that information available for people to see? I bake with silicone, like it’s safe. Wait a second.

[00:37:02] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly. It’s not non-stick Teflon, right?

[00:37:06] Ashley James: Yeah, well exactly. I’ve always had that little intuitive voice we talked about, that little voice which I told it to shut up because I wanted the silicone baking pans because I thought they were so cool. I didn’t have to use oil. I’m like, look, they’re so much easier to clean. Oh my gosh, that little voice my heart was like this does not sound healthy. This sounds like it leeches stuff. Come on, don’t go for the silicone. Don’t buy into it. So, man, my little intuitive voice was right, my gut was right. The stuff we use in our baking in our kitchen that’s made of silicone, are you saying that this is also off-gassing or releasing chemicals into our food?

[00:37:55] Sarah Phillipe: I haven’t looked at studies on that, but I would say it’s a safe bet to assume so.

[00:38:01] Ashley James: Well I mean, if medical-grade silicone that they put in women is leeching stuff, can you imagine what the non-medical grade stuff in our kitchen’s doing?

[00:38:09] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly. There have never been like studies in humans examining what happens at body temperature with these implants, right? But there have been some animal studies that have shown that when the implants are heated to body temperature, that they do bleed out into the body. It’s called gel bleed. So, yes, they are a solid material but when they’re heated up, they do bleed into the body and the breast area is so full of dense lymphatic tissue that it’s like a highway for these chemicals to start traveling throughout different parts of the body. Not only is silicone toxic to the body, but there are some researchers out there that believe that it is considered an adjuvant connected to certain autoimmune conditions.

So basically, it’s a trigger that can trigger certain autoimmune conditions. Autoimmunity is also partly genetic. It can trigger whatever your genetic susceptibility is. It can look different from person to person. It’s not always going to be the same autoimmune condition.

[00:39:12] Ashley James: You’re touching on exactly my next question to you, which is some women swear they have no problems with their breast implants. I have a friend, I was surprised to hear that she had breast implants because I honestly thought they were natural. She’s so gorgeous, but she was like are you kidding me? I was flat as pancakes. She said she breastfed successfully with them. She’s very happy with them. I knew my interview with you was coming up so I started asking her questions. I’m like, how’s your health? Do you think you’ve had any negative impacts?

Well, I know she’s been focusing with her doctor—she sees a Naturopath—on brain fog, and she is a night owl. She has insomnia, and she cannot handle any stimulants. So even a little bit of coffee would drive her nuts, but I don’t know if that was how it was before the breast implants. But she says other than that, she’s in really good health, nothing to complain about. I thought, man, what if the accumulation of toxins being solely released is just exacerbating those issues?

[00:40:24] Sarah Phillipe: I get this question a lot of the time about will everyone get sick who has breast implants, and I tend to think of them as a ticking time bomb. From my perspective, why wait until your health spirals downhill because, usually, what I see is one of a couple of scenarios. Either someone has had a lot of different sources of toxic exposure as a child, kind of like a long history of toxic exposure. Maybe mercury amalgam fillings in the mouth, maybe they were born via a C-section and not breastfed, or maybe had a lot of antibiotics as a child and then they have amalgam fillings placed. Maybe they get breast implants and the breast implants are just that thing that overflows the bucket.

And then I see another scenario where someone maybe had a pretty healthy, pretty uneventful childhood. Not a lot of toxic exposure, a healthy diet, not sick a lot. Maybe they got breast implants and have had no problems, and it’s been decades and they’re thriving. And then maybe later on in life, they experience divorce, loss of a loved one, or a car accident. And then maybe they have root canals and end up developing cavitations, which are infections in the jaw, and something ends up becoming the tipping point.

So there’s a lot of these different types of stressors that accumulate, build up in the body, and tax the body’s ability to cope with more. At some point, there can be something that becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and then someone develops a lot of symptoms. Symptoms don’t happen early on when there’s dysfunction occurring. They’re one of the last things to occur. And when symptoms start happening, it’s usually that the body has been breaking down for quite some time and the symptoms are just the body’s way of communicating to you that it is time to start waking up and paying attention to what’s going on.

[00:42:25] Ashley James: What about MTHFR? How much does that play a role in this? I have a friend who has just the most severe form of MTHFR. I tried to say to her, there are phases of it, or I was trying to explain that you could have different snips like the 25%, 25% on each side, or 50% on each side, or 75% percent, and she has 100% which means she says her body only can methylate 23% and everything affects her. That she walked into a store and inhaled some perfume, she’d have a migraine. Anything that her body has to detox something, she’s down and out for the count. So she has to lead the cleanest lifestyle.

Do you have something like that where their liver cannot process phase one and phase two of detoxification properly? Everything gets backed up because of that. So someone who knows that they have any variant of MTHFR would definitely not be a candidate for having anything implanted in their body, which could then slowly over time increase toxicity, that it would just put this added stressor on the liver. Have you seen a link between those with MTHFR and breast implant illness?

[00:44:03] Sarah Phillipe: I have, and I think I’m a little biased though because the women that come to me that I work with are women who are quite ill even after their explant surgery. So I tend to see women who do have a lot of struggle regaining their health after having their explant. Usually, there is an MTHFR gene mutation or two. Well, I’m heterozygous for C677T, but I don’t have a really, really down-regulated methylation activity in the body. My body is methylating fine.

So in my mind, it goes back to the difference between what your body is able to handle versus what you’re exposed to. I kind of liken it to either a two- or a four-lane highway at rush hour, which one is going to be moving more traffic? Obviously, if you have more lanes, the traffic’s going to flow better. And if you have fewer lanes, the traffic’s going to get jammed up a lot more easily.

So I think it’s not all about the MTHFR. It’s really about the fact that we’re living in a very, very toxic world dealing with far more than our bodies were ever designed to cope with, and then we add something like breast implants on top of that and it can be devastating. I don’t think it’s just our genes, it’s how the environment is interacting with our genes.

[00:45:34] Ashley James: I hesitate to use the word mental illness because there’s such a stigma around it, but what kind of emotional problems arise in women who have had breast implants who are experiencing this toxic load? We talked about insomnia and brain fog. Does it increase depression, anxiety? You talked about anger. Can we talk about the emotional aspects because women who are more likely to get breast implants are more likely to see a doctor for emotional issues and then be put on drugs for that as well further increasing the toxic load? I love that highway analogy.

Based on how much you’re methylating, based on how much you’re able to detox, let’s say you only have two lanes, the breast implants are adding more cars. Any pharmaceutical drug is adding more cars. Even some herbs the body has to then process adding more cars, right? What’s in our air, what’s in our water, what’s off-gassing from our carpets, right? If you go get your nails done, your hair did, and whatever kind of cosmetic products you use—all these chemicals. There are over 80,000 man-made chemicals made in the last 50 years that our bodies were not designed to have to handle, and here we are having to handle it. It’s all adding more cars to the highway, thus slowing it down, causing a backup, causing a toxic load in the body.

We need to start, obviously, removing those loads. But for someone who begins to have that load build, they may not recognize physical symptoms as a problem. For you, someone said you have Hashimoto’s, you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, you have this problem, you have this physical problem, you have this physical problem. So they were addressing them. You have Lyme disease, and all these different doctors, because they’re looking for what they specialize in and they’re seeing symptoms. Oh, these symptoms match so we’re going to treat you for this. It doesn’t seem as obviously connected to the breast implants.

But what about emotional issues? If you’re someone who’s never really been prone to anxiety or maybe just minor anxiety and all of a sudden you have panic attacks to the point where you’re being put on anxiety meds, or you have depression, or you have insomnia, or these emotional issues come up. Can you talk about the emotional side effects of breast implant illness?

[00:48:09] Sarah Phillipe: Absolutely. It’s very, very common. I see a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety, a lot of panic attacks, and a lot of feelings of overwhelm like you just can’t handle any kind of stress whatsoever. To me, that really signals the fact that your body is completely overloaded, and any kind of stimulation just is overwhelming for your body to try to cope with. Any kind of stress whatsoever triggers that stress response.

For me, I experienced this pretty significantly. It started off with just a very irritated nervous system to where when I would go down into the garage to do my workouts, I had to have complete silence like no music. I cannot work out with my husband in the garage because his heavy breathing irritated me. In between my sets, I would have to sit down and gather myself because it was so incredibly stressful on my body. Any kind of additional stress was just throwing me over the edge. It made me very irritable, really hard to recover from stress, and even a difficult conversation, I couldn’t handle that. I would blow up and start screaming and yelling because I couldn’t handle one more thing.

So for me, the anxiety, the anger outbursts, heart palpitations, symptoms of anxiety, of chest tightness, feeling like I couldn’t take a deep breath. When I would go out into public, that was really hard for me because any stimulation from a crowd would just send me into this downward spiral. And even just being around family, if they were being loud and rambunctious. I have a husband with triplet brothers, so you can imagine there’s a lot of wrestling going on and stuff like that, a lot of competition. When we would all get together, I sometimes would just have to leave the house because I couldn’t handle even the audible stimulation. That to me was overwhelming.

So those types of things that I experienced are really, really common. No one understood what the heck was going on with me. People thought I was crazy.

[00:50:34] Ashley James: Well, this makes so much sense because it’s almost like inflammation on the brain. It’s inflammation of the nervous system having to handle this toxic load. But at the same time, a lot of what you just shared sounds like the autonomic nervous system being stuck in the sympathetic mode of fight or flight. There are ways of measuring that. We can look at heart rate variability now.

I’m just curious. Let’s say breast implants, if having them puts the body in a state of stress like just triggers the autonomic nervous system so that we’re in fight or flight, which would then easily explain why would people have insomnia, why would they have that irritability, why would they have outbursts, why would they be on edge? And then you’re being told by a doctor it’s all in your head, you’ve got to go see a counselor.

Well, no. The root is in the body. Our physical body and our emotional body are connected. So when we have emotions, yes, of course, sometimes we get to come at it from healing traumas. We also have to come at it from looking at what’s going on in the body that’s putting us in this state, and it sounds like you were in fight or flight. Have you been able to measure that at all or look into that at all with your clients to see if they are kind of stuck in fight or flight?

[00:52:02] Sarah Phillipe: Well, when I did my own testing back when I was really, really sick, my neurotransmitters were completely tanked. I didn’t really produce a whole lot of neurotransmitters, which when you’re dealing with a lot of different sources of stress, you need norepinephrine and epinephrine in order to cope with that. That gives your body energy and the ability to either fight or flee, and I didn’t have that ability. I didn’t have those neurotransmitters at the adequate level that I needed them, which of course resulted in a lot of symptoms.

My heart rate variability—and this is true for a lot of my clients—was very low. It was like a deep parasympathetic more than a fight or flight. I think a lot of us that are stuck with these chronic symptoms and not getting better, it’s more of this deep parasympathetic that we’re just not coming out of. And it’s more of a result of the mitochondrial function and how the mitochondria are really just going to bat for you rather than producing energy for you. So they go into this battleship mode rather than energy production mode, and that takes away from your cells and their ability to function, which your organs are made up of cells so you have different organs not functioning as well as they should. Hormone production takes a back burner, neurotransmitters take a back burner, things like that that are just required for someone to feel good, right?

So that’s really a lot more common than fight or flight. I think the longer you’re dealing with chronic illness the more your body just goes into this deep parasympathetic mode and your mitochondria are just shut down. It’s like hibernation.

[00:53:48] Ashley James: Right, total exhaustion. That makes sense. I had chronic adrenal fatigue and I can relate to that. It’s like you’re walking dead. The overwhelm was real. Any stimulus was overwhelming. That makes sense. So what part of the breast implant harms the mitochondria? Is it a direct causality, or is it somewhere cascading down the way?

[00:54:17] Sarah Phillipe: I think that it’s on a few different levels. I think the toxic exposure, so toxins are one stressor that can definitely shut down the mitochondria, and they’re very delicate, right? They’re the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, so they’re very easily damaged.

[00:54:37] Ashley James: Well, they’re bacteria. I mean that’s the fascinating part is that just like our gut bacteria can be easily harmed, so can our mitochondria because they’re bacteria. We really have to take care of them because they’re what keeps us alive, they’re what creates our cellular energy.

I was fascinated by interviewing the woman who cured her MS using this theory that the MS was a mitochondrial disease, and then she ate a diet full of all the nutrients the mitochondria needed and removed all the foods that could harm the mitochondria. Lo and behold, she went from practically being months away from being dead to being able to walk again, then ride a bike, and ride a horse. I am having such a brain fart right now, I’m going to blame pregnancy brain, which I can. I’m allowed to. But she’s quite amazing, Terry Wahls?

[00:55:41] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, I know Terry.

[00:55:42] Ashley James: The Wahls protocol and her TED Talk. She gave a TED Talk I believe is 2012. I love that she shows pictures of her in her special wheelchair that would have her feet higher than her head because that’s what she had to do. The doctors were basically saying that she was months away from death, and she stopped it and reversed it. She went to all the best doctors in the world for MS. They wanted to give her chemotherapy, they wanted to do all these things to her, and she just sat down one day and her goal was to live long enough to see her kids graduate high school. She sat down and thought, okay, well this is a mitochondrial problem. How do I heal my mitochondria?

Isn’t that interesting that it just takes one doctor with that detective mind we talked about to stop thinking inside the box that they’ve been trained to think in and start looking at the body and going what’s going on and how do we support the body with nutrition?

So here we have this toxic overload. You said the mitochondria is incredibly sensitive, and just the toxins from breast implants can cause some issues for the mitochondria. What else in this big picture is affecting the mitochondria?

[00:56:57] Sarah Phillipe: Well, you also have the fact that breast implants are foreign objects. They don’t belong in the body, and so that is a chronic source of immune stimulation. It’s chronic inflammation recruiting inflammatory cytokines. They’ve been able to show even through just doing cultures on the implants the fluid inside the implants if they’re saline, and then also the capsule and the fluid around the capsule in between the capsule and the implant.

They’ll do cultures for those things, and they’ve been able to show 10+ different bacteria that are growing between the breast implants and the capsule themselves. It’s like a petri dish, basically, for all these different microbes to start growing, and it can be even a low-grade growth of these microorganisms that is just this chronic source of immune stimulation. Your body really can’t get those things under control because it’s got this foreign body that is like this big distraction. Your body’s trying to go to work to address that foreign object.

That’s the reason that it creates a capsule around the implant. It’s scar tissue. It’s trying to wall that implant off so that it can protect your body from that exposure. But unfortunately, our breasts are not sterile. There’s a lot of bacteria even within the breast tissue, and it’s a perfect environment for all kinds of different microbes to grow, wreak havoc, and thrive in the body that kind of goes undetected by the immune system.

Part of that going undetected is the fact that they create biofilm around themselves to protect themselves from the immune system in general. The biofilm is the biggest problem with regards to breast implants and different infections, the causation, and the connection there. So we’ve got lots of different types of toxins coming from breast implants, which sets you up for this perfect storm situation because different unwanted microbes thrive in toxic terrain. They use toxins and heavy metals to create their biofilm, and some things like parasites will feed off of those things, will feed off of heavy metals, and candida as well will feed off of heavy metals.

So you can have a lot of downstream dysfunction going on as a result of breast implants being in place. Chronic immune stressor because they’re a foreign object, and then a chronic chemical stressor because of all the different toxins that can bleed into your body from that exposure.

[00:59:46] Ashley James: That is fascinating. The body creates scar tissue around the breast implant. I mean, any woman who’s been pregnant or breastfed knows about mastitis. The breasts are designed to make breast milk that has all these good bacteria in it. We’re giving healthy bacteria and an immune system to an infant, so of course, it’s not a sterile environment inside the breast. To think that anything skin deep, anything below the skin is sterile is silly.

Putting a foreign object there, then it creates scar tissue around it, and then there are bacteria that are growing like a bad culture that can develop in your gut. Imagine the bad cultures developing around your breast tissue, and they themselves—even if it’s a low-grade constant low-grade infection—any kind of microbial presence as they die off creates toxins. Essentially, whatever they poop out is a toxin. That’s why we feel so crummy when we’re coming off of a cold, flu, or food poisoning. It’s actually the toxins left behind the poop and also the bacteria that are dying. All the toxins left behind make us feel so horrible because it is such a stressor on the body to have to handle those toxins.

So not only is the body having to deal with that slow constant release of whatever’s in the breast implant, which you’ve mentioned some items that don’t sound too savory. And then it’s also dealing with any kind of bacteria or any kind of microbial buildup around the breast implants because it’s so hard for the body to get to that area to clear it out. And the immune system’s all kind of revving up and having to work on that.

I’m sure you’ve looked at the meta-analysis. Statistically, women with breast implants, do they have a higher likelihood of developing cancer?

[01:02:15] Sarah Phillipe: That’s an interesting topic that I haven’t delved a lot into, but I do know that there is a connection between breast and someone women who have breast implants and a higher incidence of colon cancer, which is interesting, right? Not breast cancer. The theory is because the implants are putting a lot of pressure on that area.

[01:02:38] Ashley James: The immune system looking at it.

[01:02:41] Sarah Phillipe: I tend to think about it in a different way with regards to colon cancer where a lot of the toxins we’re exposed to end up going right to the gut. That’s one of the ways we eliminate through the liver and then dump it into the gut for elimination. So I have to wonder too, how much of the toxicity component is playing a part in the development of abnormal cells in the colon?

[01:03:04] Ashley James: I had this explained very scientifically once, and I’m going to try to do it in my layman’s terms. These 80,000 chemicals that are in our environment, our food water, and our breast implants, all that, the body doesn’t recognize these. So the liver gets rid of them but then the colon will reabsorb them if we don’t poop three times a day. If we don’t have enough fiber to bind to those the toxins in the bile and let’s say you have a little bit of constipation, the body does not see the difference between bile just to reabsorb because bile is costly, so the body wants to reabsorb it and reuse it. But there are these toxins that are in it. The colon doesn’t go oh wait, I shouldn’t reabsorb these because I’m actually just reabsorbing all the toxins again.

This is why it’s so important whenever you’re doing certain detoxes and certain parasite cleanses to consume binders. People eat clay and they eat activated charcoal, or they take a lot of fiber in their diet. If you’re going to do one of those cleanses, I highly recommend doing it with a practitioner that knows what they’re doing. Don’t just randomly buy stuff.

I really like Dr. Jay Davidson. I had him on the show twice. I really recommend listening to those two episodes. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and search Jay Davidson for those two episodes. He explains a bit more about the binders and stuff, but here we have the body reabsorbing all the toxins the liver worked hard at to get rid of. So no wonder if the colon wall is being bathed and reabsorbing and bathed and reabsorbing and bathed and reabsorbing these toxins. That makes sense.

[01:04:58] Sarah Phillipe: I absolutely agree that people out there in the world should not be attempting to do detox work on their own without a trained professional. I think that’s so important. I’ve seen so many women just make themselves so much worse.

[01:05:13] Ashley James: Can you explain a bit why? Because a lot of listeners, myself included, have attempted our own detoxes because we read an article, we hear from a friend, or maybe we listen to a show, and then we just go to town and make our own version of it. Going out and getting a colonic is fine, or going out and doing sauna therapy and eating chlorella, that’s fine. But if you have, for example, Lyme disease and then you decide to take all these herbs to kill it or something and you don’t have the right dose or you’re not preparing the body, all the emunctory systems correctly beforehand. You don’t have something to break down the biofilms. I mean, there are just all these things to focus on before we go to just kill the parasite or kill the infection, which can make it much worse like you said.

Could you give an example? Maybe teach us a little bit. We have women who are listening, let’s say they have breast implants. We have some women that have breast implants, and we have women that don’t have breast implants, and maybe they’ve already had them removed. How do we recover from breast implant illness?

[01:06:29] Sarah Phillipe: Well, that’s a loaded question.

[01:06:33] Ashley James: Give us the starting point. Where should we set ourselves up mentally? What should we start really looking into focusing on doing because you’re a detox expert? You’re an expert on breast implant illness, so let’s talk about the women who do have breast implants first. So they have breast implants, you’ve now opened their eyes to the possibility that this may be putting a major stressor. They can’t pinpoint exactly, oh it’s definitely causing this, or it’s definitely causing that. They’re starting to hear all these things that it could be causing, now you’ve got their interest. What can we do to support their health?

[01:07:16] Sarah Phillipe: With regards to healing in any situation, with regards to any root cause, I think the very first step is removing the source. We can do a lot to support our body with good clean water, clean food, good nutrition, exercise movements, good sleep, and things like that, but without removing the source, we can never really truly heal.

Removing the source means getting the breast implants removed, and there’s a very specific way that needs to be done to protect you. So I would look for a surgeon who has lots and lots of experience with explants, ideally even a surgeon who no longer places breast implants because they’re more likely to believe what you’re going through is real, believe that the breast implants are a problem, and do everything in their power to remove them properly so that you have the best chance at recovering your health.

[01:08:23] Ashley James: When you say remove them properly should they also remove that scar tissue capsule the body has built around them?

[01:08:29] Sarah Phillipe: Yep, absolutely because within that matrix of the capsule is going to be a lot of the different toxins that are found in breast implants because they bleed into that capsule, and also biofilm, bacteria, maybe even mold, mycotoxins, and things like that. So really important to get that source out. That’s what I mean when I say properly is that ideally, it would be done on block which means that the implants on the capsule are removed together as one unit rather than cutting the capsule open and taking the implant out first. A lot of really reputable explant surgeons who’ve been doing this for years and years will be able to remove your implants on block.

The ones who say it’s not necessary or I’m not comfortable with that, I’ll probably look elsewhere because you don’t know if you have a rupture until you’re in there. It doesn’t even matter if it’s saline or silicone, especially with silicone, you don’t know if you have a rupture until you’re in there. With saline, you tend to have an idea because it’ll start shrinking, or it’ll just go flat. But you can have a slow leak and it can change in size a little bit but not significantly enough to notice.

You don’t want to have that capsule cut open and risk whatever contents are in there spilling out into your chest cavity and then getting into the lymphatic system and traveling throughout the body. So that’s why it’s important to have them removed on block so that we’re protecting you from that exposure. And then if they can’t be removed on block or if any speck of capsule is left behind, the surgeon should go in and remove every tiny piece of capsule that’s in there. Sometimes that means scraping the ribs, sometimes that means removing a little bit of your own tissue to get it out, but that’s an important piece.

Having any capsule left behind is just going to be a chronic source of immune stimulation. It’s a little bit harder to recover from. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible because I don’t like absolutes, but it’s definitely more challenging.

And then once the implants are out, once you give your body enough time to heal from that surgery, I think that’s important to allow your body to rest, recover, and heal from that generally for about a month. As long as there are no complications, no hematomas, no seromas, no infections, no wound dehiscence, and things like that. As long as everything heals properly, then about a month after that, you can start doing some work on detoxing your body, addressing infections, and things like that.

How I like to look at each unique person, and you could do this on your own, is I have people write me a self-narrative of their life from birth until now. It doesn’t have to be a long novel. It can be really a timeline of you plotting every different type of stressor you’ve encountered in life starting from birth. It can be physical, it can be chemical, it can be mental, emotional, it can be structural, it can be any type of stressor. I like to have people do that because it’s really helpful for me to be able to see how you got here, and then we can work backward with trying to figure out how we’re going to start incorporating some of these things into the plan for how we’re going to address them.

And then I always think that functional lab work is helpful to look for other hidden stressors because not only are there going to be downstream effects of having breast implants like different types of microbial imbalances and toxicity. There are also going to be potentially other different types of hidden stressors in the body that may be unrelated. Maybe you had some health issues prior to the breast implants going in. Maybe you had ulcerative colitis, SIBO, candida overgrowth, or things like that. Those things also have to be taken into consideration.

A lot of hidden things that people most people don’t think about or don’t even know exist to know to think about or look for are hidden infections in the jaw. If you’ve ever had any tooth pulled or a root canal, there is a significant chance that you have cavitation in the jaw, which is an infection in the jaw. That’s another source of low-grade chronic inflammation stimulating the immune system. We discuss to release their own toxins into your body that travel throughout the bloodstream. That can be one thing that keeps people sick. Amalgam fillings, silver fillings in the mouth—that’s another chronic source of toxic exposure.

We have to look for other sources beyond breast implants because it’s a cumulative effect. As far as healing goes, I think it’s important to always start with supporting the downstream detoxification pathways, which means you have to be pooping two to three times a day—that’s a priority. If you’re not pooping, you’re not detoxing. Dr. Jay Davidson talks about this a lot, you have to think about the detox pathways as a funnel. The bottom of the funnel is the gut. You need to be removing your bowels regularly, that’s waste, that’s toxic waste. The more it sits there, the more it’s going to be reabsorbed back into circulation.

The next above that is going to be your kidneys and liver and then your lymph above that. So if you’re someone who’s going out and getting lymphatic massages but you’re not pooping every day, how are those toxins going to get out? You’re probably going to feel a lot worse after a lymphatic massage. That’s the order of things and making sure those are well-supported and functioning the way that they should, proper hydration and minerals.

When the body is ready, I think you can start addressing more of the gut—working on balancing the gut. Whether that looks like just introducing probiotics that can help balance the gut or whether that looks like going after specific pathogens like parasites, fungal overgrowth, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth—whatever that looks like for you, it’s going to be different from person to person. But addressing the gut I think is a helpful place to start after that because when you get into deeper detox work, you’re going to be dumping toxins into the gut and that can be very irritating to the gut. We want the gut to be in a good place before we start doing that.

And then I think the next step—from my approach anyway—is oral chelation. Using true binders, strong binders that are able to get past the gut lining, get into your cells, and bind onto toxins strongly and long enough to be able to get them out of the body. So a lot of the binders that people are using out there, a lot of the time I see people using one product like a zeolite and nothing else. That’s their detox. If all you’re doing is using something like zeolite, yeah, that will bind toxins but you also have to think about the source.

Some zeolites are not tested for heavy metals, and that’s another source of toxic exposure to you because that’s a natural curator in the environment and so it can be contaminated and adding to the level of toxicity. And then if all you’re doing is binding and you’re not supporting other pathways, you’re going to burn out, you’re going to crash. You’re going to burn through your methyl groups, you’re going to burn through glutathione. That’s assuming that your detox pathways are open and working well.

[01:16:09] Ashley James: How do you test—as a practitioner—your clients’ detox pathways?

[01:16:16] Sarah Phillipe: It can be a little tricky to test for those things because we don’t have a really solid test that says, yes, you’re methylating really well or you’re glutathione stores are adequate. But I generally look at a comprehensive blood panel. There are some clues we can pick up on there about methylation and glutathione. I like the organic acids test as well. There are some clues there we can look at for methylation activity, glutathione, and things like that.

As far as kidneys and liver, you’re not going to see anything show up abnormal on blood work until there’s pathology, until there’s a disease, so you won’t usually see that. I generally go by just how someone is feeling overall. If they’re feeling unwell, generally speaking, the detox pathways are not well supported. They’re probably congested. Usually, once we start supporting those pathways, people feel quite a bit better pretty quickly just being able to eliminate things.

[01:17:28] Ashley James: So you’re listening to people instead of telling them it’s in their head, they need more sex. You’re listening to how they’re feeling, and that’s very important. That’s why I like going to naturopaths over medical doctors because naturopaths will look at the same labs but they have a totally different way of analyzing the labs.

If you go to an MD, you’re lucky to spend 15 minutes with them. If you go to a Naturopath—a good one, I mean there’s bound to be good and bad doctors out there regardless of whether holistic or not. Find a good Naturopath that’s been practicing for a long time, and they sit down with you to six for 60 to 90 minutes to go over your comprehensive labs. They’re looking for, are you out of optimal ranges, and how can we get you back in optimal ranges? So their sensitivity to the lab. So if they look at kidney function, they’re looking, are you even remotely nearing towards not optimal? The red warning bells are going to go off in their head if they see signs that you are even in low normal.

Whereas an MD is waiting for you to be so sick they can put you on a drug because they don’t have any other tools until you’re sick enough for them to give you a drug to “manage,” not cure your symptoms. Whereas going to a holistic practitioner like yourself, a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, going to a good Naturopathic physician have so many tools. They’ve got diet, herbs, lifestyle, all these things that scientifically are backed and proven to support the body to get back into optimal ranges. But we have to look at the labs differently. We have to look at them from the standpoint of are you in optimal health, are you creeping out of optimal health?

And then of course listen to the client and believe them when they say, I feel this way, I feel this way, I feel this way. Believe them and go, okay, and take that into account along with the labs for understanding the whole picture about the person. That’s why I like going to like yourself, a functional medicine practitioner or a Naturopath, that spends enough time with you that they can really get the full picture of what’s going on in your life and they can do that detective work.

I know almost every episode of my show, over 450 episodes, has been kind of a commercial for seeing holistic practitioners because I spent years beating my head against a wall seeing medical doctors just being given drug after drug and I was so sick. If I stayed in that world, if I stayed in mainstream medicine, I don’t even know if I’d be alive. But if I stayed in mainstream medicine, I’d still be on monthly antibiotics, I would still be infertile, my weight was out of control so I imagine I’d probably be one of those people on gurneys. My type 2 diabetes was completely out of control. I had really bad polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, and adrenal exhaustion so bad I could barely function. It was getting worse and worse and worse, and that was in my 20s.

If I had stayed that way and kept seeing MDs, I would just keep getting worse and keep being put on more and more drugs. I don’t even know if I’d be here. I’m so grateful for holistic medicine and for just snapping out of it and going I reject this entire system. I will gladly go to an ER if I need emergency medicine like I have a broken arm or something, or I have an infection that I can’t handle. I would gladly go to an ER—allopathic, reductionistic medicine when they take you apart, look at your little organs, and don’t look at you as a whole. That is fantastic for saving your life if you’re in a state of life or death. That’s where they shine. I don’t want to go to a Naturopath if I have a broken bone that needs to be reset and put in a cast or whatever.

But when it comes to chronic illness, that system of medicine is causing more chronic illness than healing. It perpetuates chronic illness, and it also perpetuates the idea that if you have, for example, an autoimmune problem, you will always have it. I was told I’d always have diabetes. I was told I’d always have polycystic ovarian syndrome. I’m sure you were always told that you would have the conditions that they diagnosed you with. And all of our listeners who have been to enough MDs who have had enough health problems have been told, oh, it’s because of your genetics. You will always have this. Or it’s because of your age or because of whatever. They tell you with such hubris that you will always have this condition.

Here we have Sarah teaching us that you can go see her and she’s going to look at your labs in a different way. She’s going to listen to you, listen to your symptoms, and she’s going to help you completely change your lifestyle, your diet in a good way. Sometimes that’s a little overwhelming and scary for people, but holding your hand doing it. I’m a health coach so I know. I’m not going to throw the kitchen sink at you but get your body to the point where your body is so healthy you feel the healthiest you’ve ever felt in your life.

You can’t get that from MD medicine. You can’t get that from pharmaceutical-based medicine to feel the healthiest you’ve ever felt in your entire life from causing more toxins to the body. It all starts with the mindset, and I believe you talked about this before. It really does start with the mindset. We have to change our mindset, completely rewire our mindset to go into this new way of thinking. Believe the body can heal itself and then act accordingly.

[01:23:50] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, absolutely. And I believe that the body was designed with this God-given innate intelligence to self-heal if we take responsibility for our health and take the actionable steps needed to get it back. That mindset component is so huge, and I think it even bleeds into how we think about our condition and how it happened.

With women with breast implants, I think this is so important because a lot of women with breast implants who are sick and they discover breast implant illness, the feelings—initially can become chronic—are of shame, guilt, regret, and then also anger towards the medical system. Why didn’t I know about this? Why wasn’t I told? There’s a lot of anger towards doctors and the medical model, and I think that’s not a healing mindset. We have to get out of the victim mentality in order to heal.

[01:24:59] Ashley James: I think it’s good to bring that up. I think it’s good to address. Anger, if held on to, is toxic. But anger that is processed is healthy because if we bury it, we don’t process it, or if we just try to stick it somewhere without really processing, working through it, healing it, that’s also holding on to a toxin. I know because that was me. But actually facing the anger, being with it because there are two forms of anger. You can take a negative emotion, it’s a negative emotion about the past.

For every time you’ve been hurt by someone you felt angry about it, that’s a gestalt in your neurology that you’re holding on to. That’s a chain of all of the events from your past, and that’s incredibly toxic because that gets reanimated inside our neurology every time we relive something that brings up anger. But anger in the moment about something that’s happening, let’s say, to us which I understand I don’t want to go into victim mode either, but something that’s happening that is violating our boundaries.

Anger is our body and our mind’s way of saying my boundaries are being violated. You got to do something about it. And if we take action to stop our boundaries from being violated and then process the anger, work through it, heal it, release it, and don’t hold on to it, don’t stay in it, but acknowledge it. Acknowledge, yes, my boundaries are being violated.

Once we take action towards not allowing our boundaries to be violated like firing the MDs that no longer help you and hiring new doctors and new practitioners that are going to serve you. That is an actionable step because if you’re staying in victim mode, you’re going to stay with your captors, you’re going to stay with the people who victimized you. But taking all the actions to ensure that your boundaries are healthfully enforced. When anger comes up go ask yourself, is this anger because my boundaries have been violated, or is it anger from the past? And work through it.

Getting to that point, I think anger is healthy when it allows us to see that we have been down a path that’s hurt us, and now we’re seeing all the things that did hurt us. As long as we can go, okay, I’m going to enforce my communication, my boundaries, my research, everything. My mindset is now shifting. I am asserting myself, I am advocating for myself, and I will only put medical professionals on my team that is in alignment with my values and my boundaries, and just acknowledging that that anger was a motivation to get you there.

But don’t stay in it. Don’t say in victim mode because like you said, that shame, guilt, and that anger—we turn it inwards and start beating ourselves up, why did I do this to myself? Why did I let this happen to me? That is really unhealthy, so we have to let it go. I love that you’re acknowledging that because I think there’s so much emotional process work we have to do if we’re coming to terms with a choice we made in our past that has led us down this really negative route and now we’re looking to reverse it. So we also have to reverse and heal all the emotions associated with it.

And then what about everything that led up to a woman choosing breast implants? I know it’s unique for each woman, and I don’t have breast implants so I can only imagine that for me to choose to get breast implants, I would have had such an insecurity—and this was just me, I’m not saying all women—that I needed to get them so that I would stop feeling that way about myself. Do you also look at that and look at what happened emotionally that had you want to get them, and is there anything to heal there?

[01:29:11] Sarah Phillipe: Certainly. I think there’s a lot of reasons why people get breast implants, and it’s not always vanity. For some people, it is a decision after having a mastectomy from breast cancer. For other people, they went in to have a lift after they were done having children and the doctor convinced them that they needed to have breast implants.

[01:29:37] Ashley James: Good salesmen. He had a boat payment.

[01:29:42] Sarah Phillipe: And then for other people, they were like me and just really had a lot of insecurity. The breast implants made them feel a lot more beautiful, sexy, or worthy. I think there’s a lot to think about, and I think it really just takes doing a bit of digging, reflecting, and processing everything that has happened. I really don’t think that this kind of thing happens to us. I really think that it happens for us. Personally, I can’t speak for everyone but for me, I really feel like I went through this partially to really discover who I really am inside as a person, as a human being beyond just the physical appearance. There’s so much growth that happened as a result of that, and I will say I’m probably not the same person that I was 10 years ago.

Secondly, I think it really has taught me how I should be living just to maintain my health, to keep my health for life and rather than just struggle through life with a lot of symptoms and bounce around from doctor to doctor, this surgery and that surgery, and all these different prescriptions like most Americans. But it taught me how I should be living in order to really live a healthful vibrant life full of joy that we deserve.

I think that we can take this experience and really learn a lot about ourselves, about who we are, and about how we should be living. It can be a positive experience once we can get to that place of going through those emotions of whether it be anger, sadness, regret, shame, or whatever, and acknowledging those things, and then letting them go, moving on, moving forward, and not looking back. Continuing to take the next right step each day towards your future.

[01:31:51] Ashley James: I’m sure you’ve been asked this, is there a safe alternative to breast implants? Wave your magic wand.

[01:32:02] Sarah Phillipe: I’m sure they’re working on those things as we speak just based on the uproar that’s going on with women right now with regards to breast implants and how they’ve contributed to poor health. So I know there are probably things in the work that we don’t know about, but one other thing that I do know is there is always the option of having a fat graft. There are a couple of different techniques that I know of. One is a fat flap technique basically where they take fat from underneath the armpit or potentially underneath the breast and rotate it around to make a breast out of it.

I think that’s a great option, however, with regards to breast cancer patients, I don’t know if that’s a safe option. We don’t have any long-term studies showing that that’s safe. And then there’s liposuction with fat transfer to the breasts. That also has its own wrists. It’s an aggressive surgery. The cannula that they use—if you’ve ever seen a video of liposuction, it’s pretty darn aggressive and it’s superficial layers that they’re working with. How much does that disrupt the lymphatic system, how much is that impacting your ability to detoxify and remove waste products, and how and how much is that impacting your ability to get nutrients to the cells?

I think that there are an upside and a downside to any option. Personally, I will say, I did have liposuction with fat transfer at the time of explant. Had I known now what I didn’t know then about lymphatic and how it really can impact the lymphatic system, I probably would have made a different decision. It didn’t really even stick for me, so my breasts are pretty much the same size they were as before I had my implants placed. That’s the other downside of it is that you don’t know if it’s going to stick because once you remove the blood supply of the fat, the fat dies. So whether or not it reestablishes the blood supply quickly enough in its new place is a whole nother story.

So I’ve just gotten to a place where I’ve learned to love and accept myself for how I was created, and see the beauty in that. So that’s my hope for most people so that we stop trying to alter our appearance and realizing that you are beautiful just the way you are, and you don’t need to alter your body to be beautiful.

[01:34:37] Ashley James: Yeah. Do the emotional work to get to the point where you love your body. You love every square inch of it. There’s no such thing as perfection. There’s so much healing to take place. Look at what a damaging society it is that as girls growing up, we are developing these belief systems about what we should look like. This is not a new discussion. If we look at fashion through history, we can see that we have been subjected to basically being cattle for men but also for society and for other women for the acceptance of society. How we appear externally is going to determine whether we’re accepted or not. This is of course the mind of a child, the mind of a little girl analyzing the world.

I believe that at our core, we have this need to be accepted because that’s part of how we survived, however long we’ve been here. Thousands upon thousands of years, we are a tribal people, and if you got exiled from the tribe, that was death. Being part of the tribe and being accepted and loved, and the first acceptance is being accepted into your family when you’re born. Feeling as part of a family, then part of a community, part of a school system, part of a church system, or whatever you are in growing up. If you are bullied, if you are judged, if you are pushed aside, if you’re feeling unworthy, unloved—all these things are processed in the mind of a girl growing up thinking that her physical appearance played a role in the rejection, and the hurt and the trauma from that.

If only I put on makeup, do my hair, and look as sexy as I can, and spend all of my waking moments up making myself look good and appear nice, then I will be accepted. This is what the media tells us. Really, the most beautiful thing about a woman is true confidence. You kind of get to that point, I’m 40 now. Somewhere around 35, 36, right after I gave birth I kind of went screw this. I am not playing this game. I’m living for me. I’m living for my loved ones. I’m not living to look good for anyone. I’ve lost shallow friends over it, great. I’ve made some deeper friends because of it.

I know that there are women who are in industries where they have to look good in order to get a raise, in order to get a promotion. This is the sad part about society, but we need to analyze how we grew up, analyze the world and realize that we internalized this idea that our looks need to be perfect in order to be loved and accepted, and then we do something like give ourselves implants or do plastic surgery causing further harm.

I love that right at the beginning of the show, you brought up that this is as much of a physical healing journey as it is in a mental and emotional one, and to work on all aspects of it.

[01:38:29] Sarah Phillipe: Right. Women today, young girls today, gosh, I would hate to have grown up in today’s world as a younger girl. When we were young we had magazines, billboards, commercials, movies, and things like that. But now, everywhere you look it’s in your face all over social media. Having a constant connection to social media the way people do today is a recipe for disaster for young girls. We’re in the midst of this body positivity movement and loving and accepting all different shapes and sizes. But at the same time, we have that message, we have the other side of a different message, which leads us to do all of the things that we do that leads us to have our eyebrows tattooed on our face and have eyelash extensions, get breast implants, get Botox, get lip injections, get cheek implants, chin implants, and butt implants. We’re trying to create this body or this look that doesn’t really exist in real life naturally.

[01:39:47] Ashley James: Right, and Hollywood and the media have done us no justice. I read an article recently, really interesting about young children. It was doing a cross-section of the young children who are questioning whether they were born in the right body. What I found interesting—and I really didn’t know this because I thought maybe just from what we see in the media—that it’s more skewed towards boys wanting to be girls. But in fact, the statistic was something crazy like closer to 90% of these children were girls who felt more like they were boys. They’re all in the questioning phase, but no wonder. No wonder In this world where we have to achieve this level of perfection.

If I was a girl now, I’d rather be a boy than have to live up to this idea of what it looks like to be a woman. It’s a total false, it’s made up, it’s not real. That’s not what it is to be a woman. But it just seems a lot safer, it just looks a lot easier to live life as a boy, right? No wonder there’s so much confusion. The way society is, the way the media is, the way social media is, we’re making it impossible for women to feel comfortable in their own skin, unless they do their own work. Unless they go within, they reject the external input, and they go with it and they love who they are on the inside, how they were born, and just be with themselves. Instead of trying to change who they are, just go within and do the emotional work.

I just thought that it was really interesting that this level of confusion like very young children. I see that it makes sense that we’re trying to falsify what it is to really be a woman. Not us but the media making it very confusing.

I love the work that you do. You’re exposing something that allows us to analyze our entire life and our body image, and then support ourselves on a level of detox, emotionally and physically. So tell us about how people can work with you. What does it look like to work with you as a practitioner? Obviously, you do it through Zoom or Skype. What does it look like to work with you?

[01:42:33] Sarah Phillipe: I’ve worked with women all over the world, and that’s really thanks to technology today. The women that I’ve worked with, it’s always been one-on-one. We work together for a minimum of six months. It really involves teaching women the tools that they need to heal themselves, and I think that’s really empowering because you can take that information and use it to help your family and keep your family healthy. So it’s not just about how it’s helping or impacting you, it’s about even the next generation. Teaching people how they should be living for a healthy body and a healthy life.

Once dysfunction has occurred, how to restore function. What things we need to look into, what things we should address and what order, how to go about it, and all of that. I’m teaching women these things. I’m not doing the work for them. I can give someone the best plan in the world, but if they can’t implement it or if they’re not able to implement it, then they’re not going to get well. I think education is the most valuable thing because they can use that information for the rest of their lives.

Soon, mid-year or so, probably around June, I’ll be shifting how I work with women and it’s going to be done in a group setting. We’ll be doing an online group program.

[01:44:02] Ashley James: That’s great.

[01:44:04] Sarah Phillipe: It’ll still be the same exact thing that I do now, it’ll just be in a group and a lot more connection and shared experience. I think that’ll be really valuable for people to go through things like this together. Because a lot of women who are going through this don’t feel like anyone really understands them. No one understands, no one gets it, people think I’m crazy, people don’t believe me. This is really great to connect with other women who are going through it at the same time that you are and be able to connect on that level and have that shared experience. Know that there are other people that you can talk to that get it and that understand what you’re going through. That’s what I’m working on putting together now. It’s basically my brain in an online program.

[01:44:48] Ashley James: I love it. Would people still be able to like do labs with you and get a consult?

[01:44:53] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. The way I’m setting it up is we’ll have weekly or bi-weekly group calls and then there will be an option to have a one-on-one call scheduled with me.

[01:45:06] Ashley James: Great. Awesome. Is there anything else that people or women should know? I mean, men can get implants too. I was surprised that there are calf implants for men because they’ll work out in the gym forever but they don’t get that definition of their calf that they really wanted, and so they’ll get basically the silicone implants or something put in their calves to make them look more muscular. There would be a percentage of men that would be experiencing all these same issues but to male physiology. Is there anything else though that future students and clients should know when it comes to working with you about this program?

[01:45:51] Sarah Phillipe: One thing that I’m always telling potential clients is that you have to be mentally and emotionally mindset-wise prepared for the work. You have to be willing to do whatever it takes because usually, the people that come to me are the people who’ve gone from doctor to doctor to doctor, no one has been able to help them, and I’m kind of like their last resort. I ask a lot of my clients. It’s not always easy. There’s going to be bumps in the road. Healing is never a straight path, so you have to expect that it’s going to be challenging and it’s going to sometimes require that you step outside of your comfort zone because the way that we heal the body is not the way that you’ve been taught by modern medicine.

[01:46:47] Ashley James: And when you have those bumps in the road that’s feedback, that’s actually good. When you feel bad that’s good because you bring that to Sarah and then she goes, oh okay, then we need to make these tweaks. She understands, but you have to be vocal about how you’re feeling.

That’s something that happened to me. I was doing methylcobalamin injections back in December. My B12 plummeted and then my iron plummeted as a result during the pregnancy, and so I took some methylcobalamin injections. I was feeling great for the first three injections, I was amazing. It was like two a week. I was like, oh wow, I feel normal again. I feel good. This is great.

And then about two or three weeks into the injections, they would make it so I was totally out for the whole day. I was in bed. I’m like, what is going on? I talked to my midwife who’s amazing. Absolutely amazing, she’s been my midwife for over 20 years. She looks at me and she goes well, Dr. Ben Lynch, and I’ve had him on the show by the way so I was just really impressed that she starts off by quoting him. “Well, Dr. Ben Lynch says that methylcobalamin shares the same pathways as insulin, and if you don’t need any more methylcobalamin, then it’s actually reducing your capacity for your body to use the insulin.” She’s going on and on about all the pathways and I’m looking at her like I should have you on the show.

So she told me, okay, I want you to do this instead. I went from I felt good but then I started feeling really bad, then she adjusted it, and I felt even better. That’s the thing is you have to be in communication with your practitioner. The practitioner—a good one like Sarah—who knows what to do with that information.

So yes, it’s challenging, but it’s also then on the other side of the challenges is incredible rewards. But they have to be willing to put the work in. If you say stop eating gluten, they have to stop eating gluten. Or if you say you have to stop eating sugar, you have to stop drinking coffee, or whatever like some vices. You probably are going to have to give up some vices, but on the other side of it is how much do you want that amazing health, that vitality?

[01:48:55] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly, and I think that leads to another really important point is that people need to have a strong enough why. They really need to get in tune, in touch with their why. What is the reason that you want to get your health back? What’s the reason you want to work together? When someone says because I want to be healthy, that’s not a why. Why do you want to be healthy? What is the driving force that keeps you motivated to take the next right step each day in your healing journey? What do you want to be doing with your life that you are not able to currently do because of your symptoms, because of how much you’re struggling?

For most people, it’s a struggle just to get out of bed every day. All the other things that they want to be doing with their life they’re not doing.

[01:49:43] Ashley James: Yeah, and the guilt and the shame that builds up from that. I want to live a life free of guilt and shame and be able to get out of bed. You’re like, yeah. Okay, great. Now do everything I tell you to do.

[01:50:00] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. So I think that’s important because it keeps you motivated even when things get hard.

[01:50:05] Ashley James: Absolutely. Sarah, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Your website is reversingbreastimplantillness.com. Are there any resources you want to send us to or homework you’d like to leave us with to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:50:27] Sarah Phillipe: Well, I have one resource that I find really valuable. It’s something that I use with all of my clients to just assess where they’re at and assess progress. It’s my neurotoxic questionnaire. It’s divided up into four different categories, each of them looking at a different type of toxicity. The first section looks at heavy metals, the second section looks at symptoms connected to general chemical toxins, the third category looks at some connected biotoxins and mycotoxins. Those are toxins that come from living organisms like mold, bad bacteria, parasites, and things like that. And then the fourth category is looking at symptoms that are connected to a combination of heavy metals and general chemical toxins. That’s really helpful.

And then your total score you can look at where you fall into the range of mild, moderate, or severe neurotoxicity, which is important in determining whether it may be the thing that helps you make the decision to explant, or it may help you assess that even after explant you have some work to do. And then it helps you reassess progress as you go through your journey.

[01:51:44] Ashley James: How can they find that?

[01:51:46] Sarah Phillipe: I can share that link with you to share with your audience, or you can also find it on my website.

[01:51:55] Ashley James: Awesome. I’ll make sure the link is in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Thank you Sarah for being on the show today. It’s been such a pleasure, and I’d love for you to come back when new exciting information comes out about breast implant illness. You’re welcome. I know you’ve got your ear to the ground. When really interesting stuff comes out that we all need to learn more about, please come back on the show.

[01:52:27] Sarah Phillipe: Of course, I’d be happy to, and thank you so much for having me, Ashley. It was such a pleasure and I really enjoyed our conversation.

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