Each year hundreds of thousands of hernia surgeries are performed in the United States and many years ago, a product came out to the market called the “Kugel Mesh Patch.” That hernia patch was a horrific product that was made of a plastic chemical polymer and had a ring around the patch that would break and dislodge in a patient’s skin, abdomen, or intestines.

America’s Lawyer Mike Papantonio talks about medical device companies that continue to produce experimental medical devices.

To learn more about hernia mesh injuries, visit Mike Papantonio’s website Hernia Mesh Issues.

Transcript of Video:

The story about surgical mesh, this product that’s being implanted in the bodies of thousands of people every day, it isn’t a story that corporate media would ever tell you. In fact, they can’t tell you because their corporate advertisers, the people who make these products, well they won’t allow them to do investigative exposes about how dangerous surgical mesh really is. The advertising dollars are just too big.

Surgical mesh reinforcement use has become routine for hernia repair and a handful of other surgical procedures that are performed every day all over America. What most patients don’t realize is that the mesh is made up of polypropylene, and has the ability to oxidize and degrade directly into human tissue and throughout the entire body.

The first signs of this manifestation begins with things like chronic fatigue syndrome or extreme consistent rashes, and the diffused joint pain throughout the entire body. In addition to those issues with polypropylene that we’ve seen so often, the added problem is the use of experimental coatings that have been used mostly as a sales gimmick by manufacturers to sell doctors a product that has potential to degrade and migrate throughout every organ in the body.

The pitch that the companies use is that the mesh is quick and it’s fast, and anybody can do it, even without special doctor training. The sales gimmick coatings have been associated with increased infections, bowel perforations, fluid buildup within the wound, and overall failure of the device which necessitates a second, third, and sometimes a fourth surgery to correct the problem.

The most interesting part of this story though, is that mesh isn’t even necessary to do the type of tissue repair that takes place with a procedure like hernia repair. For decades doctors who are specifically trained for natural tissue repair have successfully made hernia repairs and other human body tissue repairs with natural body tissue, with no use of anything called mesh. The obvious advantage of that is that there’s no introduction of a foreign body into the procedure that has the ability to degrade and migrate throughout the body, triggering autoimmune reactions, which is what we see with the coated mesh gimmick that’s being sold to any and every doctor who wants to perform a procedure without any kind of special training.

Here’s the real stinger, though. None of these procedures have been studied before they received approval by the FDA. In fact, the only reason that these products are on the market is because of a fast-track 510K procedure that the FDA permits for these types of surgical devices. Unlike what most people believe, there is no FDA testing with in-house on these experimental meshes before they’re placed on the market, but everybody believes that’s the case, that the FDA is looking over the manufacturer’s shoulder. That just is not how it works.

As we’ve seen so many times again and again, it’s always about quick profits and big risks where it comes to so many medical devices and pharmaceuticals that have been placed on the market where patients actually become guinea pigs. In this particular story, guinea pigs are not doing well at all.