Mercola.com

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My New Warning: Avoid THESE Medical Treatments Whenever Possible

Posted By Dr. Mercola | May 09 2011

Women stand the greatest risk of receiving an unnecessary medical procedure. If you are a female living in the US, when it comes to healthcare, you might as well have a target on your back.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that one-third of American women have had a hysterectomy by age 60; and half of them have had one by age 65. Yet 85 percent of these surgeries are unnecessary, according to Ernst Bartsich, a clinical associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College.

This adds up to more than $17 billion a year on direct doctor and hospital charges for hysterectomies.

If you’ve had a complete hysterectomy, meaning you’ve also had your ovaries and cervix removed, you don’t need a Pap test, which examines cells scraped from your cervix. Yet, a study in 2004 showed that 10 million women a year who don’t have a cervix are still getting Pap tests consisting of a scraping of cells from their vaginal walls – when no professional organization recommends this screening for women without a cervix!

For younger women who are in their child-bearing years, the health profession has found a different way to make money off you, to the tune of an extra $3 billion a year.

Spontaneous deliveries – waiting for a baby to come on its own – can be time-consuming for modern doctors, and can test your patience if you’re the mom-to-be. That’s why today 32 percent of American births today are through Caesarean sections (C-sections).

According to Intermountain Healthcare, C-sections are costly in more ways than one:

• They are the most common surgical procedure performed in America, increasing more than 50 percent since the 1990s.
• They cost an average of $16,671, compared to $9,428 for a vaginal delivery.
• Many are being done after a pre-term, elective induction that hasn’t proceeded quickly enough.

Additionally, a New England Journal of Medicine study showed women have up to four times the risk of complications with a C-section than a vaginal birth, ranging between $2,000 and $200,000 in additional costs.

And the complications can be serious, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, putting the babies at increased risk of brain, liver, and lung development problems. Caesarean-delivered babies are also more likely to need CPR, and to have significantly higher rates of respiratory distress, sepsis and hypoglycemia.

So why are C-sections so prevalent?

It’s largely a desire for control on the part of families, physicians and hospitals, the WSJ reported.

And according to USA Today, there’s another reason: “economic incentives” for doctors and hospitals to use these procedures, including bonuses for labor inductions which add costs and increase the risks for C-sections (surprise!).

So there you have it: for the sake of economic incentives, convenience, and control over what day and even time of day the birth occurs, babies’ lives are being put in danger – at an additional annual cost of $3 billion to the U.S. health care system.

From birth through teenage years, our current health care system has a goal of maximizing each new little profit center we usher into their business model. Because that’s what the system is designed to do, put profits first at the expense of everything else, including the health of our babies.

What chance do YOU have against this system?

Educating yourself and your family to their business model and their seemingly endless tricks to maximize profits. Because an educated and healthy consumer is the worst enemy of our current “sick care” model that passes for health care in the US.

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Read the complete article and related information at Female Patients Translate into Huge Possibilities for the Bottom Line

U.S. News & World Report
Health Day

WEDNESDAY, April 6 (HealthDay News) – Compared with normal weight women, obese women are more likely to experience bleeding and infections during and after a hysterectomy, a new study indicates.

Researchers in Denmark analyzed data from 20,353 women who had a hysterectomy to treat non-cancerous conditions such as abnormal bleeding during menstruation, benign muscle tumors and pain.

Women with a body-mass index (BMI) of 30 or more were three times more likely to experience heavy bleeding during surgery than normal weight women (BMI of 20 to 25). BMI is a measurement score that takes into account a person’s height and weight.

Obese women also had a one-third increased risk for all bleeding complications (bleeding either during or after surgery, or hematoma — where bleeding has occurred and collected) and a one-half increased risk of infection.

Further investigation revealed that some of this increased risk was influenced by the type of surgery.

“We found that the increased risk of all bleeding complications and infection associated with a high BMI were only seen in women who underwent an abdominal hysterectomy, and it was not seen in those who had either a vaginal or laparoscopic hysterectomy. Obese women who had an abdominal hysterectomy had one and a half times the risk compared with women of the recommended BMI,” Merete Osler, a consultant physician and professor of clinical databases in the Research Center for Prevention and Health and Glostrup University Hospital, said in a journal news release.

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Read the complete article and related information at Weight Linked to Complications in Some Hysterectomy Patients

Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.

The Atlantic

November 2010
By David H. Freedman

In 2001, rumors were circulating in Greek hospitals that surgery residents, eager to rack up scalpel time, were falsely diagnosing hapless Albanian immigrants with appendicitis. At the University of Ioannina medical school’s teaching hospital, a newly minted doctor named Athina Tatsioni was discussing the rumors with colleagues when a professor who had overheard asked her if she’d like to try to prove whether they were true—he seemed to be almost daring her. She accepted the challenge and, with the professor’s and other colleagues’ help, eventually produced a formal study showing that, for whatever reason, the appendices removed from patients with Albanian names in six Greek hospitals were more than three times as likely to be perfectly healthy as those removed from patients with Greek names. “It was hard to find a journal willing to publish it, but we did,” recalls Tatsioni. “I also discovered that I really liked research.” Good thing, because the study had actually been a sort of audition. The professor, it turned out, had been putting together a team of exceptionally brash and curious young clinicians and Ph.D.s to join him in tackling an unusual and controversial agenda.

Last spring, I sat in on one of the team’s weekly meetings on the medical school’s campus, which is plunked crazily across a series of sharp hills. The building in which we met, like most at the school, had the look of a barracks and was festooned with political graffiti. But the group convened in a spacious conference room that would have been at home at a Silicon Valley start-up. Sprawled around a large table were Tatsioni and eight other youngish Greek researchers and physicians who, in contrast to the pasty younger staff frequently seen in U.S. hospitals, looked like the casually glamorous cast of a television medical drama. The professor, a dapper and soft-spoken man named John Ioannidis, loosely presided.

One of the researchers, a biostatistician named Georgia Salanti, fired up a laptop and projector and started to take the group through a study she and a few colleagues were completing that asked this question: were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good? Salanti ticked off data that seemed to indicate they were, but the other team members almost immediately started interrupting. One noted that Salanti’s study didn’t address the fact that drug-company research wasn’t measuring critically important “hard” outcomes for patients, such as survival versus death, and instead tended to measure “softer” outcomes, such as self-reported symptoms (“my chest doesn’t hurt as much today”). Another pointed out that Salanti’s study ignored the fact that when drug-company data seemed to show patients’ health improving, the data often failed to show that the drug was responsible, or that the improvement was more than marginal.

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Read the complete article and related information at Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

The Stir -

A Cafe Mom’s Blog

Posted by Kim Conte on March 7, 2011 at 2:41 PM

The following story reads like it was lifted directly from the script of a controversial medical drama like Grey’s Anatomy. But those shows are fictional, and, sadly, this heartbreaking story is actually true.

A cancer patient in Montana — identified only as L.K. — refused to undergo a hysterectomy as treatment for her cancer on the grounds that she is deeply religious and wants to have children. That’s sad enough in it’s own right. But no one could have foreseen what happened next: A judge found her “mentally incompetent” based on her “delusional religious beliefs” and ruled she was to have the procedure.

The Montana Supreme Court has halted the surgery to allow for an appeal, but in the interim let’s ponder this question: Since when do we force people to be sterilized in this country?

On one side of the case we have L.K.’s physician and psychiatrist testifying that without the surgery she could die in three years and that her “religious delusions” — namely, that God had cured her — interfered with her ability to make reasoned decisions about her care.

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Read the complete article and related information at Judge Forces Hysterectomy on God-Loving Woman

The Times of India

November 10, 2009

CHENNAI: At 25, it was a surgery Meena Kumari least expected. When she had gone to the doctor last year with irregular menstrual cycle, a
city-based private hospital diagnosed a small fibroid and removed her uterus. Covered as she was by the government employees’ health insurance scheme, the hospital sent a Rs 40,000 to the insurance company.

Her surgery has now been termed ‘needless’ by an expert panel of doctors of the insurance company.

In what could be an indication of medical ethic violation that may have left several women medically unfit to conceive, more than 30% of the hysterectomies done under the insurance scheme have been termed ‘‘unwarranted’’ not just by the doctors employed by the insurance company but also by the senior private practitioners.

Records available with the insurance companies show that under the government employees’ health scheme, at least 540 women in the age group of 25-35, more than 100 of them in the 20-30 age group, have had their uterus or ovaries removed.

‘‘When we called one of the patients, she told us that she had agreed to go for the surgery only because she had been told that it could turn cancerous. Many young women need not have gone through the surgery. Many of them needed just medicines to regularise their periods. They had no family history or any other problems with their reproductive system,’’ said V Jagannathan, chairman, Star Health and Allied Insurance, who has been holding marathon meetings with hospitals warning them against such practices. Only recently, the insurance company removed two private hospitals in Nagercoil and Kanyakumari for charging extra from beneficiaries of the Kalignar health insurance scheme.

In fact, parallel audits on other health insurance schemes showed that uterus removal for women below 30 years has been very low. ‘‘We have 1.5 lakh women under the age of 35 covered under the general health insurance. Of this, just seven women below the age of 35 have had their uteruses removed. All of them were trauma cases, mainly accidents,’’ Jagannathan said. Meena Kumari, already has a child, but there could be others who have lost all chances of child bearing at a very young age.

MORE…

Read the complete article and related information at To up insurance bills, docs remove patients’ uterus

Natural News

	Thursday, June 25, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

Everywhere in western medicine you find the Caduceus symbol: It’s the staff entwined with two serpents, with wings at the top. You’ll find it emblazoned on medical texts, medical school certificates, medical websites and even in hospitals and medical buildings.

But what does the symbol mean, exactly? I decided to conduct a bit of research to find out some possibilities.

The Caduceus, it turns out, was a staff carried by the Greek god Hermes. Hermes is best known as the messenger of the gods, but he is also well known as the protector of liars, gamblers and thieves. He’s also prominently known as the guide of the dead.

According to Wikipedia, the name of the staff, Caduceus, is adapted from the Greek word kerukeion, which means “herald’s wand” — the staff of the public messenger. It’s related to the words kerux and kerusso, which pertain to someone who announces information to the public.

From a Biblical point of view, the two serpents on the staff are, of course, symbols of evil and deception. There is a Greek myth about the two serpents on the staff which states that Tiresias found two snakes copulating and he beat to death the female snake with his staff.

So far, then, we have a staff carried by the Greek god Hermes, a protector of liars and thieves (who is also the guide of the dead), named as a staff or wand related to announcing information to the public, encircled by two serpents representing evil, and tied to yet another Greek myth about the female being beat to death.

This is the symbol of modern-day western medicine.

The evil of western medicine revealed

The part about the female being beaten to death is especially relevant, given how our male-dominated western medical system considers virtually all female physiology to be disease (pregnancy, menstruation, etc.). Women are treated like animals in many ways, through endless breast cancer screening and mandatory HPV vaccines. Female organs are considered useless or disease-ridden, such as when hysterectomies are performed to remove women’s “hysteria” (madness). That’s where the name “hysterectomy” actually comes from, of course.

That the two snakes representing evil would encircle the staff of public announcement could be an indication that the purpose of the staff is to announce evil (the propaganda of western medicine). At the same time, the mythological carrier of the staff is the protector of liars and thieves (the drug promoters and drug companies).

Once you understand the symbology, it becomes quite evident that this prominent symbol of western medicine was not chosen by chance: It sends a powerful subconscious message, much like the symbols of secret societies used on dollar bills, for example (the all-seeing eye floating above the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill). It might even be said that, through the repetition of this symbol which adorns the most important documents and texts used in the medical schools, doctors are, in a very true sense, being continuously indoctrinated with the powerful symbols of evil and death.

Once these impressionable young doctors graduate from their medical schools, they are given the tools of death to “treat” patients: Chemotherapy poisons, toxic pharmaceuticals, scalpels and radiation machines. They slice off women’s breasts and call it “cancer prevention.” They poison children’s brains with chemicals and call it “medicine.” They damage and destroy key organs like the heart, liver, kidneys and brain through the forced application of toxic chemotherapy agents, sometimes at gunpoint (as with the case of Daniel Hauser).

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Read the complete article and related information at The Caduceus Decoded: Secret Symbols Reveal Dark Agenda of Western Medicine

The NY Times

Each year, hundreds of thousands of women who undergo hysterectomies have their ovaries removed along with their uterus, a practice meant to protect them from ovarian cancer. But a new study has found that women who keep their ovaries live longer.

While women who had their ovaries removed developed fewer breast cancers and almost entirely eliminated their risk of ovarian cancer over 24 years of follow-up, they were more likely to develop heart disease than women who kept their ovaries, and they were more likely to die.

The new findings — from an analysis of data in the famous Nurses’ Health Study, published in the May issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology — raises questions about a widespread practice. Some 300,000 American women a year, about half of those who have hysterectomies, have their ovaries removed.

“This finding is contrary to 35 years of teaching in gynecology,” said the lead author, Dr. William H. Parker of the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, Calif.

“In the 1970s, it was decided that taking out the ovaries to prevent ovarian cancer would be the new strategy,” he said. “This study shows that you’re more likely to die if you have your ovaries taken out, unless you’re among a group of women with a family history that places you at high risk for ovarian cancer or breast cancer.”

While ovarian cancer is difficult to detect and often deadly, it is also rare, Dr. Parker explained, noting that only 34 of the study participants who kept their ovaries died of ovarian cancer during the follow-up period. “Heart disease kills more than 20 times the number of women every year,” he said.

The study analyzed data on 29,380 women who had participated in the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study: 16,345 who had hysterectomy with both ovaries removed, and 13,035 who had hysterectomy but kept their ovaries.

After 24 years of follow-up, women in the first group had 895 cases of breast cancer — a 25 percent lower risk than those who kept their ovaries — and 96 percent less risk of ovarian cancer (just 5 cases). But they were 12 percent more likely to die during the follow-up period. Their risk of heart disease was 17 percent higher than the risk faced by women with ovaries. They also had a 17 percent greater risk of dying of cancer. And in an unexpected finding, they were at greater risk for lung cancer.

The risks of heart disease and death appeared to be even greater for women who had their uterus and ovaries removed before age 50 and did not take estrogen, compared with women who had a hysterectomy before 50 but kept their ovaries.

The study may add to the debate over estrogen and the role it plays in heart disease in women. Dr. Parker and other experts suggested that women who kept their ovaries lived longer because even though the ovaries make less estrogen after menopause, they produce androstenedione and testosterone, which are converted into estrogen by fat and muscle.

Dr. Isaac Schiff, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Harvard School of Medicine, said the study did not mean that women undergoing hysterectomies should never have their ovaries removed.

“A woman with a strong family history of ovarian cancer or breast cancer should still be given the option of having her ovaries removed,” said Dr. Schiff, who was not involved in the study. “The individual patient should be given the information, and decide what’s best for her.”

But that is a change from the past, he said, adding, “We used to just arbitrarily say, ‘If you’re over 45, have your ovaries taken out.’

Comment from Leslie

Well, Holy Hormones Honey! What does this say for the millions of women who have had their ovaries removed during a hysterectomy based on their doctor’s advice?  The same as lumpectomies vs. mastectomies? The analogy can be applied to so many other incidents as barbaric surgeries finally catch up with science/common sense.  When will we stop being guinea pigs in the name of medicine?

Read the complete article and related information at Women Who Keep Ovaries Live Longer