Actor Christina Applegate has Been Through It in recent years. First, she got breast cancer all the way back in 2008, and went through a double mastectomy! Then she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021. She spent years speaking out about her condition after her diagnosis, offering tips and support for others who are also navigating the autoimmune disease in a podcast.
Then she got un-diagnosed! And now, she thinks the clue might be in those reconstructed breasts.
MS is a chronic disorder that causes the immune system to attack myelin, the protective covering of nerve cells, causing all sorts of pain and cognitive issues and loss of balance. As with most autoimmune syndromes, it can be managed or even go into remission, but there is no cure.
Unless, of course, your diagnosis is in error, like Applegate’s apparently was.
“I’ve gone through a great depression because of it. But I lost everything. I lost my job. I lost — I’m sorry. What do you say to someone who’s been living with this for six years — God, I’m so sorry — because it stopped my life,” she said on [the MeSsy podcast]. “I still have to use wheelchairs when I go to the doctor’s office. I can’t walk from the car to the room. I’m still in this. Nothing magical happened when she said, ‘You don’t have MS.’ Nothing magical happened.”
That had to have been a huge a relief for her, but at the same time, it has to be incredibly frustrating to be told that while you don’t have the progressive incurable disease you thought you had, it’s probably just some other progressive incurable disease. Getting un-diagnosed doesn’t make the symptoms go away!
But now she has a new theory: Breast implant illness, or BII, which is a real, but not very well-known, syndrome that has only begun to be recognized in the last few years. Awareness of the syndrome remains patchy. A 2019 article from BreastCancer.org (which was updated in September 2026) goes into what it can look and feel like.
Many of the symptoms of BII are the same as those of autoimmune and connective tissue disorders, such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. However, only some people who have BII get diagnosed with a specific autoimmune or connective tissue disorder. BII isn’t well understood and isn’t officially recognized as a medical condition, but some experts say it’s likely to be related to an autoimmune reaction to the implants.
Yes, your titties can make you sick!
Among the systemic symptoms described from 2002 to 2020, the most frequent patient-reported symptoms noted by the FDA include fatigue, joint pain (arthralgia), hair loss, and/or a hypersensitivity/rash. Most of the reports received listed multiple patient problems in each report. Recently, many women also developed autoimmune inflammatory diseases, which include inflammatory arthritis, Sjögren’s syndrome, systemic sclerosis, and lupus-like syndromes.
The Food and Drug Administration finally recognized BII as an illness in 2021, and now requires informed consent before patients receive implants — long after Applegate received her implants following her 2008 double mastectomy, though, which she said she is “way overdue” to have replaced.
“I’ve been thinking this for years: breast implant poisoning,” she said. “I actually had my double mastectomy in 2008, and I am way overdue for having them replaced, and I swear over the last five years or whatever I thought, ‘What if it’s — seriously — what if they’re leaking and they’re poisoning me?”
There’s a lot of crossover with the symptoms she’s been suffering from.
“I don’t know what’s going on in my joints, but I can’t move my right shoulder, like, at all now. I can’t lift my arm,” she added. “I’ve got all sorts of other things going on. […] [I]t takes me 10 minutes at least to even sit up and get out of my bed, because I just hurt all over. And I don’t know if I’m doing that to myself by sleeping too much.”
Not everybody who gets implants has to deal with BII, leaving a lot of room for denialism, which is one of the reasons it took years to get the federal government to act. (But not the only reason, of course!)
Good luck, Christina! You’re a great lady and I hope you are able to figure out what’s going on and please keep us all posted, because you seem to have done a lot of good with your MS podcast!
The funny thing is, breast implants haven’t been much of a national topic over the last couple of years, since a lot of other shit has gone down since 2021, but just last week, weird antivaxxer Jenny McCarthy and her tits were in the news for a similar experience, but with a very different outcome:
Jenny McCarthy has thrown out 30 years’ worth of clothes, abandoned her furniture, and even gotten rid of her husband Donnie Wahlberg’s entire wardrobe because she feared mold contamination. But there’s one thing the self-described “toxic-phobic” actress isn’t ready to part with: her breast implants.
Jenny McCarthy is married to Donnie Wahlberg? How long has this been going on? Anyway, she added she’s been diagnosed with mold and has to take a hundred pills a day and live in a tent out in the yard on account of all the toxins, but she won’t consider getting rid of her implants yet, because she doesn’t want “zucchini titties,” which makes perfect sense because being pretty is much more important than being healthy!
“A lot of people — because I’m toxic-phobic — make fun of me like, ‘Oh, but you’ve got implants. You’ve got implants,’” McCarthy said. “Yeah, touché. You are correct.”
Well, yeah! What the fuck? She said she had years of bone infections and growths on her eyes and all sorts of other physical and mental disturbances. She’s still a conspiracy theorist though!
“I do worry about chemtrails, and also sprinklers,” she admitted, so she added a rainproof cover to her temporary home. […]
The mold and mycotoxin poisoning diagnosis explained why McCarthy’s immune system had been “so under attack,” she explained. It also helped her stop feeling “like a freaking paranoid schizophrenic. I thought everything was poisoning me at this point, because look at me, I was a freaking hot mess, okay?”
Except for her sweet, non-zucchini-shaped titties!!
I dunno, Jenny. Throwing out all your husband’s things? Moving into a tent in the backyard? I’m not a doctor, but I am a woman about your age, and I already know that’s just kind of how it goes for the next ten or so years! Embrace it!
But definitely go see a doctor about those implants.
I think I figured out why Microsoft Office 360 went down worldwide.
Microsoft was running it on European supermarket refrigerators . . .
There are other unknown diseases. In 2018 my immune system attacked the myelin in the lumbar region of my spinal column. I was paralyzed from the navel down. A month in hospital, they never found a cause but it wasn't viral or bacterial. With treatment, 5 changes of my blood plasma, and a lot of physical therapy I learned to walk again.
I still don't have full feeling or function below the navel. My diagnosis is still "Spinal Myelitis, cause unknown".