How Your Clothes and Their Materials Shape Your Health

[This comes a ways down in the post but might be of interest. Should we take a poll?]

Pain—bras frequently cause chronic back or rib pain (which goes hand in hand with restricted breathing) along with neck, shoulder and breast pain, and as many women can attest, it feels so good to take your bra off. In turn, whenever I have a patient who complains about pain in the region of her back or rib that her bra digs into, I counsel them to consider removing the bra.

What is remarkable about this is that most women recognize this (e.g., a survey of 3000 women found that 46% of them enjoy being able to take their bras off at the end of the day, while another 3000 women survey found 52% take it off within 30 minutes of getting home) and during the pandemic many women stated they stopped wearing a bra once the lockdowns allowed them to work from home and hence not “need” one. Likewise, when 3000 women were asked to characterize their bras, 21% selected “An Enemy – I wish I had never met her,” 14% chose "A Business Partner – I put up with her" and “uncomfortable” was the most common word women shared to describe their bra.

Nonetheless, most women still wear them in public (which I feel helps to illustrate how unfair many things in our society can be—e.g., women that object to subjecting themselves to this are often trivialized as irrational “bra burning feminists”).

Note: a case can be made that many of these issues result from improperly fitted bras. However, given that every report finds the majority of women have “improperly fitted bras” (often citing an 80% figure) and this issue has been known about for years, I do not believe this is something that will ever be addressed with “better fitting.”

Breast Shape—one of the most controversial points on this subject is if wearing a bra “worsens” the shape and quality of one’s breasts. Very limited evidence exists to support this contention (e.g., that it increases sagging overtime), but the honest truth is that no one has ever wanted to formally study this in a large trial, so it’s technically “unproven.” That said, in my own observation (and that of others like this gynecologist) is that not wearing a bra is cosmetically beneficial to the breasts. I mention this because one of the most common marketing tropes for bras is that they help one maintain the breast’s youthful appearence.

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/how-your-clothes-and-their-materials