Aping big-ass “celebrities” like Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez, women are getting illegal injections of silicone in their buttocks, with disastrous, sometimes fatal, results.
Rachael Rettner reports for LiveScience, June 18, 2015, that the number of women getting illegal butt injections is on the rise, according to some doctors who say they’ve seen an increase in patients who’ve had the procedure.
But the silicone injections can cause a host of health complications, including:
- tissue hardening
- pain
- infections
- breathing problems
- life-threatening blood clots
- death
Just this month, a 34-year-old woman from Maryland died after receiving the illegal injections in New York, according to news reports. Another woman, named Sophelay Ouk, was hospitalized 25 times after her injections, and is now undergoing treatment in New York to have the silicone removed. Ouk experienced a blockage in her lungs, and also infections.
Sophelay Ouk
Dr. Tansar Mir, a plastic surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital, treated Ouk by cutting out the liquid silicone and attaching the woman to a machine to drain the remaining foreign substance over several days. Mir says he’s seen several dozen patients with silicon butt injections in the last 2½ years, and that these injections are dangerous and are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Most of the injections are done by nonlicensed practitioners.
Mir warns that patients often don’t know exactly what substance is being injected into them. It’s usually non-medical-grade silicone, meaning silicone that could be picked up at the hardware store and that is not sterile.
silicone caulk sold in hardware stores
There have even been reports of women who were injected with tire sealant, mineral oil, baby oil and even cement. In 2011, an unlicensed practitioner was arrested, and later sent to jail, for reportedly injecting women with cement and tire sealant, according to ABC News.
Even when actual silicone is used, it can cause problems, when the injected silicone sometimes gets into the veins and spread to other parts of the body, causing blood clots. If the blood supply to an artery becomes blocked, it can lead to limb loss.
Los Angeles hairdresser Apryl Michelle Brown had a massive infection from illegal butt injections which resulted in a quadruple amputation of her limbs.
Patients can also experience infections because the silicone injections compromise their immune systems. Mir said, “These foreign materials are not meant to be freely floating in the body. The patient’s immune system becomes comprised because the majority of the immune cells are being occupied fighting the foreign material in the buttocks.”
While not everyone experiences life-threatening symptoms from the injections, more common symptoms are pain, burning, itching and swelling in the injection area, or skin changes. Patients can experience skin hardening because the pressure and scar tissue in the area (caused by the immune system’s response) impair the blood supply to the skin. As a result of the loss of blood supply, the skin tissue can start to die.
Even if women don’t experience health problems right away, they may have problems later. Mir said he’s treated women who had symptoms 15 to 20 years after their injections.
Very few U.S. plastic surgeons will treat patients who’ve had illegal silicone buttocks injections. Many doctors are not familiar with the disease physiology, or they don’t want to take on a patient who has complications from something done by another practitioner. Some doctors treat these patients with liposuction and a laser procedure, but Mir said that in his opinion, this treatment should not be done, because it causes the silicone to spread to other areas. Instead, what is needed is surgical excision of the silicone.
~Éowyn
