Conversations Unplugged
with Candice Barley
Join STEMREGEN Founder and Chief Science Officer, Christian Drapeau, in a candid discussion with Candice Barley, an actress and breast implant illness advocate. In this episode of "Conversations Unplugged," they explore the seventeen years she spent sick without knowing why, what changed in the weeks after her explant, and why she now wants every woman to understand how the body responds to a foreign object.
Candice Barley
In this candid conversation, Christian Drapeau interviews Candice Barley, an actress whose seventeen years with breast implants became a story she believes many women share without recognizing it. She got her first implants at 24 and began struggling with chronic fatigue within six months, only to be told by her physician that her labs looked fine and that she simply had two children under four.
With each rupture and implant exchange her symptoms multiplied, adding restless leg and hormone disruption. Although she listed the implants on every medical form asking about prior surgeries, no one ever connected them to how she felt. By seventeen years in she had non-alcoholic fatty liver disease with rapidly rising enzymes, full-body tremors and heart palpitations, and was spending up to eighteen hours a day in bed.
After searching online and finding thousands of women describing symptoms like hers, Barley sought out a surgeon who removes implants along with the scar capsule the body forms around them. Four weeks after her explant her liver enzymes had halved; four weeks after that, both her enzymes and white blood cell count had returned to normal. Drapeau recalls an early STEMREGEN case involving a woman whose liver recovered after her leaking implants were removed.
Barley now works as an advocate and liaison, connecting women with surgeons and functional providers and supporting what she calls breast implant inflammation before and after surgery. Her message is deliberately not a directive: she wants women to know the risk is real so they can recognize what is happening and decide when to act, rather than spending seventeen years searching as she did.
