3 critically important stories on women’s  health....

Today's Post:  Friday, 7-19-2013

This post is a bit different.

Most of my posts are on how to successfully prevent or possibly reverse serious health problems.

(Huge  subject with dozens of things that work and new discoveries every week.)

This one is how to find out exactly if you are at risk right now;

How to do so with great accuracy.

How to do so in greater comfort and far less risks to your health.

It’s really important to do since you or you and your doctors can only fix problems or prevent them from getting worse if you know they exist!

Knowing each of these 3 things can save you grief, save you tons of money and even save your

life!

Any one of them can do so!

By all means consider getting each of them done!

(When I can, I plan to get the one that works for both men and women.)

I’m really grateful to Jenny Thompson of the HSI health newsletter for the first two.

And, I got lucky and found the third one today by accident while researching a company for my day job.

One tests for cervical cancer well enough to be VERY protective.

One is a more comfortable way to check for the dangerous forms of breast cancer that uses no breast compression, finds more of the real cancers, find far fewer cancers that aren’t actually there AND uses zero radiation!

And one is a test for exactly how high your total current risk of heart disease is that is dramatically safer than the two alternatives!  CAT scans use well over 40 times more radiation; and the method using invasive catheters has a death rate! This does NOT!

1.  It used to be that the guidelines suggested that most women should get a pap smear test once a year or once every two years.

Then a vaccine for the HPV virus that is thought to prevent the cervical cancer pap smears came out.

The guidelines changed to something like once every five years in part because of the vaccine and in an effort to save money in health care.

THOSE NEW GUIDELINES ARE DANGEROUSLY INCORRECT!

Use the original guidelines and have a pap smear done once a year or every other year.

If you develop cervical cancer, that’s so if it’s found it’s still at the stage that is 97% curable.

This isn’t the case if you are two and half to four and a half years late finding the cancer. It could kill you and it WILL cost you far more money and grief to treat.

On this subject, Jenny speaks with considerable authority.  She herself was getting the more frequent pap smears.  She DID test as having early stage cervical cancer and it was inexpensively and successfully removed.

THAT means it’s worth getting the more frequent pap smears even if you have to pay for it instead of your insurance!

Advice to the contrary is inaccurate and going by it could cost you your life!

What about the vaccine? 

If you happen to already have gotten every round of it, you may be less likely to get cervical cancer, you’ll be less likely to get genital warts or to give them to a sex partner.

But it cuts your overall risk of cervical cancer NOT by enough to get tested too infrequently if you did get it!

Vaccines that work even most of the time don’t always.  HPV strains NOT in the shot and other things cause cervical cancer.  And, if the strain that was in the shot got cancer started before your vaccine, you will still have the cancer!

Second, Jenny Thompson has written that the current version of this vaccine harms some of the people who take it.  She says that although the drug company involved has succeeded in hiding it from the public and even most doctors, a certain number of the women vaccinated by it have died or become quite seriously and permanently harmed.

Since many of those women were healthy teens or very young adults before that, this is truly scary if true.

I’m quite pro vaccine normally since why fight something you could have prevented instead?

That goes double if the vaccine is actually safe and almost all of the hundreds of thousands of people took it safely. 

And it goes double that if the people getting the vaccine were taking enough vitamin D3 at the time, 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day, because the vaccine is far more likely then to give them full and lasting protection.

Since you can avoid harm from cervical cancer with the more frequent pap smears, it looks to me like running the risk with THIS vaccine is a serious risk you do NOT need to run.

2.  Jenny Thompson of the HSI health newsletter sent out one in the last few days.

Here are her key quotes:

"....there's a much better breast cancer screening technique available right now. It's called Automated Breast Ultrasound System (ABUS).

Last year, the FDA approved ABUS for women with dense breasts. ABUS can spot dense breast tumors with far greater accuracy than a mammogram."

".... I promise you, any doctor can examine your breasts and tell you in five seconds if your tissue is dense."

"There's no breast compression (using ABUS), and radiation exposure is ZERO."

"Then, for good measure, it goes one better...

ABUS doesn't just spot dense breast tumors. With a new technique called elastography, ultrasound technicians can identify which tumors are actually malignant.

That reduces the rates of false positives and biopsies.

That means greater safety and peace of mind for ALL women."

She, to me, seems to also suggest that it works in all kinds of breasts not just dense ones.

Since the women who get false positive breast cancer readings are often really scared to death and severely stressed AND then have to get the invasive, painful, and expensive biopsies done, by avoiding that far more often, this ABUS technique is worth TEN times what X-ray mammography is worth.

But I think ABUS costs less to get!

There are thousands of women who would have been far better off using this test if it had been available before!

3.  You can know your chances of having worse heart disease or less heart disease in the future  by whether or not you live a heart attack starter lifestyle or the reverse –

and/or by using the many revealing blood tests from the basic lipid panel and blood sugar measures and the HSCRP test for chronically high inflammation.

BUT, although suggestive, if they find things that have been going on for months or years, these measures of heart disease and heart attack risks are indirect ones.

You still do not exactly know how severe your total risk and developed heart disease are right now.  You know things about future trends.

What does show how severe your total risk and developed heart disease are right now.

The invasive method using a catheter and sending dye into your heart arteries can do that.  But it has a death rate!

NOT at all worth running that risk in most cases!

And a CAT scan of your coronary arteries does that.  It doesn’t have a direct death rate but it’s not advisable for preventive use because it exposes you to something like 400 times the radiation of a normal X-ray!

The MUCH better news is that Hologic Inc has a much more limited test using something like 40 times less radiation that just looks at your abdominal aorta.

That’s close enough to your heart to be extremely accurate. 

It, like the CAT scan, measures the calcification and amount of plaque in your blood vessels.

 If both are high, your risk of heart attack, stroke, and death from things like sudden heart stoppage is also high. And you will have high blood pressure drugs don’t bring down much.

In that event, it will pay you to have your life insurance and will in order and to turn off ANY part of the heart attack starter lifestyle you’ve not already stopped!

The wonderful news about this Hologic test is how much safer it is – and, I believe, far lower cost it has without losing the accuracy you want!

Many women now don’t know their risk in these 3 areas or have been paying a horribly steep price in dollars or side effects to find out LESS accurate information.

Now, you may not have to do that!