Conversations Unplugged
with Candice Barley
Candice Barley had breast implants for 17 years, undergoing multiple replacements after two ruptures and eventually switching from saline to silicone. With each procedure came new symptoms, but for years she never connected them to her implants. By 39, she says her liver was failing, she was experiencing full-body tremors, and she could only get out of bed for a few hours a day. After having her implants removed, Candice says her liver enzymes returned to normal within eight weeks and her tremors began to resolve. In this conversation with STEMREGEN Founder and Chief Science Officer Christian Drapeau, she shares how that experience led her into regenerative health and a mission to help other women make more informed decisions about breast implants.
Candice Barley
Candice’s experience eventually became the foundation for her work with women considering explant surgery. She attends procedures, works with explant surgeons, and wrote The Explant Book as a step-by-step guide through the process. A major part of her message is that saline implants also have silicone shells, something she believes many women do not fully understand. She attributes many of the health challenges she experienced to the body’s ongoing response to a foreign object and says her focus after explantation became supporting recovery from years of inflammation.
That is also how STEMREGEN became part of her work. Candice says she began using it with women going through the explant process as part of a broader effort to support the body’s own regenerative capacity. Christian shares a similar story he heard years earlier from a woman who had experienced liver problems following a leaking silicone implant and later used an earlier version of STEMREGEN after explant surgery. For both Candice and Christian, the larger idea is to support the body’s innate repair mechanisms rather than looking at the removal of the implant as the end of the recovery process.
Candice’s central message for women considering breast implants is straightforward: “informed consent, do your research.” She encourages women to investigate the potential risks for themselves and understand the biological implications before making a decision. She also points to fat transfer using a woman’s own tissue as an alternative for those seeking additional breast volume without an implant. Ultimately, her goal is not to make the decision for other women, but to give them information she wishes she had years earlier so they can recognize potential connections between their implants and their health instead of spending years searching for answers.
