Fearful Women Inundate O.C. Plastic Surgeons : Breast implants: Patients want to know if the devices should be removed. Several doctors say the FDA moratorium is unwarranted.

Panic-stricken patients deluged Orange County plastic surgeons with calls Monday after the federal government’s call for a moratorium on the use of silicone gel breast implants.

“I already had 30 calls from patients this morning who wanted to know what to do,” said Dr. Michael Niccole, a plastic surgeon. “They already have implants and want to know if they have dangerous devices in them and if we should take them out.”

Several doctors criticized the move, which they claimed was unwarranted and was causing some patients to cancel breast augmentations. During the 45-day moratorium, the doctors said, they will have to use breast implants filled with saline solution, which they said did not feel as natural as silicone gel implants and were more susceptible to leakage or rupture.

But the FDA decision was warmly welcomed by Marie Walsh and Marsha Chambers, Orange County women who over the past 18 months have helped to form support groups nationwide for women with diseases they blame on silicone breast implants.

“I am elated that there is a moratorium. It is good that we have been heard and the problems have been recognized,” said Walsh of Laguna Hills, who as president of the Breast Implant Information Foundation of Southern California has lobbied the FDA to have the silicone breast implants removed from the market.

“If they don’t put a permanent ban on them, it will be as if they raped us in front of millions of people,” said Walsh, who contends that she suffers chronic fatigue, lupus, scleroderma and other auto-immune diseases as a result of silicone gel leaking into her body from a series of breast implants. She said 300 women in Orange County with similar complications from the implants subscribe to her organization’s newsletter.

However, several plastic surgeons in the county, which is one of the nation’s meccas for plastic surgery, say they have used silicone gel-filled implants in thousands of women. The doctors said they knew of no one who had suffered such diseases, although they acknowledged that other more minor complications such as breast hardening sometimes occurred.

The FDA is “scaring the patients to death over nothing,” said Dr. Robert Miner, a plastic surgeon with offices in Santa Ana and Anaheim, who said he has implanted “several thousand” silicone gel breast implants in the past 20 years. “We have women who come back after they have had the implants for 10 to 15 years and want larger ones put in,” he said.

If the implants are outlawed in the United States, Miner predicted, women will go to Canada or Mexico for them.

Miner said he believes that most patients will wait out the moratorium rather than opt for the saline fluid-filled variety, which he said “feels like a bag of water” rather than like a natural breast.

Ellie Zapata, 29, of Lake Forest, one of Niccole’s patients, said Monday that she will postpone her planned breast augmentation surgery until the Food and Drug Administration makes a final decision on the safety of silicone gel implants.

“I’m not going to have it done,” she said. “My health is more important.”

Dr. Malcolm Paul, an Irvine plastic surgeon, said he knew of no “new data that gives credibility to any new concerns about the implants.” Nonetheless, he said, “I think a number of women will deny themselves because there is enough controversy to make them wonder if this is the safe thing to do.”

Paul said some patients called Monday to ask if they should have their breast prostheses removed and exchange them for the saline solution-filled kind. He said he advised them to have a mammogram to ensure that no problems have developed. Otherwise, he said, “there is no sense fixing something that is not broken.”

Paul said that even before Monday’s announced moratorium, the growing debate over the safety of breast implants had caused his breast augmentation business to fall off 40% to 50% in the past six months, although demand for implants used in reconstructive surgery for breast cancer patients remains strong.

Vicki Schomburg, a 39-year-old cancer patient from Huntington Beach, said that just two weeks ago she received a breast implant after a mastectomy.

“I don’t believe I would have gone through with the mastectomy if reconstruction hadn’t been available,” she said. “Tell us what is available and what the risks are, and let us decide.”