Susan Kolb (born November 26, 1954) is a medical doctor in Atlanta, Georgia, and the author of The Naked Truth about Breast Impants: From Harm to Healing. Kolb's medical practice combines conventional, holistic, and integrative medicine with spiritual healing. Her area of specialization is plastic and reconstructive surgery. Kolb is a medical authority on the complications arising from breast implants, and has been an active voice in the debate about the safety of breast implant devices since 1996. She has treated over 2,000 women suffering from breast implant disease and related systemic immune disorders.
Biography
Susan Kolb was born on November 26, 1954, in Havre de Grace, Maryland. She grew up with her parents, Doris and Gene Kolb, and an older brother, Charles Kolb. As a child, she gravitated toward medicine, reading books on biology and genetics while still in grade school. She graduated from Lawrence High School in 1972 and attended Johns Hopkins University where she studied premedicine and graduated with honors in 1975. In order to continue her studies in medicine, she joined the U. S. Air Force Reserves. She attended Washington University School of Medicine and graduated in 1979 at the age of 24. She was accepted at the University of Virginia for a surgical residency, but was called into service by the Air Force before her residency at UVA began. The Air Force sent her to Wilford Hall Medical Center, a 1,000-bed Air Force hospital at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. She completed a three-year course of general surgery, followed by a plastic surgery residency. She served as the Chief of Plastic Surgery at Wright Patterson Air Force Base from 1984-88. During her time in the Air Force, she performed scar revisions, breast reductions, cosmetic surgeries, burn surgeries, hand surgeries, breast reconstructions, and body contouring surgeries. She established a craniofacial board that helped manage children with facial deformities. She helped plan the surgical hospitals that would be later used in Desert Storm, especially as they pertained to burn care.
She left the Air Force 1988 as a Major and moved to Atlanta, Georgia. She joined a private medical practice in plastic surgery where she practiced for two years. In 1990, she left her medical practice for six months to study spiritual medicine. When she returned to medicine, she incorporated holistic treatment methods. In 1995, she established Plastikos Surgery Center, where she incorporated several disciplines of holistic medicine including energy medicine, vibrational medicine, and spiritual healing. In 1998, she founded Millennium Healthcare to address a broader range of medical conditions. In 1999, she established Avatar Cancer Center to treat cancer and serious viral illnesses with integrative techniques.
Breast implant controversy
In the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of women filed claims in lawsuits against breast implant manufacturing companies, asserting that they had been injured from silicone breast implants. Juries awarded a series of multimillion-dollar settlements to women with symptoms of systemic immune disorder, connective tissue diseases or neurological disorders. A class action settlement of $4.25 billion, the largest in U.S. history, resulted in Dow Corning filing for bankruptcy.
In 1996, Kolb wrote "Doctor, Are You Listening?", an article outlining the symptoms of silicone implant disease. The article was published on various Internet sites, and her practice became known to women seeking treatment for silicone-related conditions. Many women complained that their health concerns were often dismissed or denied by the other doctors. In 2010, she documented her treatment of women with breast implant disease in her book The Naked Truth about Implants: From Harm to Healing. The book includes a detailed history of the implant controversy and a review of the major research into complications of breast implants. Dr. Douglas Shanklin, Emeritus Professor of Pathology, Laboratory Medicine, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, who along with Dr. David L. Smalley, published most of the pertinent research in silicone biochemistry, wrote the foreword. The book outlines Kolb's treatment protocols and includes stories contributed by seven of her patients, as well as her own.