No one is going to tell you it’s OK to not follow your doctors recommendations or to not take medication’s. A doctor has prescribed for you. Giving such a recommendation would be highly inappropriate. I certainly wouldn’t want another doctor to tell my patients to do something different than my prescribed Postoperative instructions or management. Each provider will have their own post operative protocol for the use of antibiotics. Anytime we’re dealing with implants or insertion of a foreign body sterility and minimizing. The chance of infections is taken very seriously. It takes very little bacteria to contaminate a breast implant and cause an infection. If a patient develops an infection around an implant, the consequence is devastating. When placing implants, I personally would insist inpatient taking antibiotics. That said the only thing that has been proven to reduce postoperative infections is a single dose of antibiotics immediately before surgery. The great majority of plastic surgeons use antibiotics after surgery and I would venture to guess that almost all plastic surgeons use them postoperatively when placing implants especially. If you have concerns about the treatment plan and the correct person to bring this up with is your surgeon. In the end, lots of patients don’t follow our recommendations and do whatever they want to. Whether that is smart is a different conversation. There’s a reason why your doctor wants you to take antibiotics. As doctors, we know if there is a risk to the use of antibiotics including G.I. upset, developing diarrhea, vaginal yeast infections, creating antibiotic resistance and potentially much worse. Doctors rely on scientific validation and proof for what is used. The scientific literature is not strong and supporting the use of postoperative antibiotics. Doctors also need to rely on something called community standards, which is sort of following the herd or doing what everybody else does. This means if a patient develops an infection and the surgeon did not prescribe antibiotics. A lawyer can easily win a lawsuit because all the other plastic surgeons in the community do prescribe antibiotics. I don’t think this is why we prescribe antibiotics but following community standards is something doctors are aware of and are expected to follow to some degree. The infection rate for breast augmentation is relatively low, but when infections happen, they are as I mentioned previously quite devastating. Talk to your provider if you have questions or concerns. It’s not wrong to have a follow up visit or a pre op appointment if your questions have not been addressed. Good luck with your upcoming procedure. Best, Mats Hagstrom MD