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| COHESIVE GEL BREAST IMPLANTS |
Cohesive silicone gel. Form Stable silicone. Gummy-bear implants. MemoryGel breast implants. Regular Gel. Liquid silicone. What do these terms mean? Patients are confused. Even plastic surgeons are scratching their head. This article will enable you to sift through the rhetoric and make sense of this topic.
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The problem is that there is no standard definition of terms to describe silicone gel breast implants. Some surgeons may consider a certain breast implant to be gummy bear or cohesive, while others might not.
But what is important is not what you call a breast implant – it is understanding how a certain implant is likely to perform in the body. This article will attempt to show you how to think about breast implants so that you understand how they will function, regardless of what you or anyone else chooses to call them.
One of the factors that contributes to the confusion about evaluating breast implants is that breast implant manufacturers treat silicone gel cohesivity as proprietary information, not divulging the characteristics of the gel in their breast implants. Surgeons and patients alike must learn to evaluate these silicone breast implants on their own if they hope to make sense of words like cohesive, form stable, and gummy bear breast implants.
Furthermore, once there became a buzz about the benefits of cohesive breast implants, manufacturers rushed to call their implants cohesive, even if they were not particularly cohesive. Even some surgeons, anxious to suggest to patients that they had cohesive gel implants already available, gradually started to suggest to their patients that all silicone gel implants were cohesive.
The most critical feature in evaluating a silicone breast implant is to determine whether the filler of a silicone breast implant can actually maintain a shape or whether it is amorphous and incapable of holding a shape itself. Whether you call a breast implant a cohesive implant or you do not call an implant a cohesive implant, that is the critical thing to look for. For that reason, I often use the term form stable versus non-form stable to refer to breast implants, as it brings to the fore the critical characteristic of cohesive implants.
No matter what you, your doctor, or any breast implant manufacturer calls them, this article should help you to evaluate a breast implant and understand how it is likely to function.
Continue reading about cohesive breast implants.
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