unnecessary hysterectomies…. Feel free to share this information…
In 1945, at a gynaecological convention, a speaker said: “Hysterectomy is a racket, where the majority were done for dubious reasons at best, and non-existent reasons at worst”…
BOOKS ON MEDICAL ABUSE AGAINST WOMEN, UNNECESSARY HYSTERECTOMIES AND DANGEROUS MEDICINE… written by gynaecologists, doctors, Investigative Journalists, and from the personal experiences of women themselves…..
THE H-WORD: The diagnostic studies to evaluate symptoms, alternatives in treatment, and coping with the aftereffects of hysterectomy. Paperback
Women Under the Knife: A Gynecologists Report on Hazardous Medicine.
by Dr Herbert H. Keyser
No More Hysterectomies…. by Dr Vicki Hufnagel
You Don’t Need a Hysterectomy…. by Ivan K. Strauz, M.D.
The No-Hysterectomy Option – Your Body Your Choice…by Herbert A Goldfarb, M.D.
The Hysterectomy Hoax….. by Dr Stanley West
Male Practice: How Doctors Manipulate Women…. Dr Robert Mendelsohn
Men Who Control Women’s Health: The Miseducation of Obstetrician-Gynecologists – Diana Scully
Misinformed Consent: 13 women’s stories of unnecessary hysterectomies… Lise Cloutier Steel
The Ultimate Rape: What every woman should know about hysterectomy and ovary removal…. Elizabeth Plourde
The Case Against Hysterectomy… Sandra Simkin
What Doctors Don’t Tell You: The Truth about the Dangers of Modern Medicine… Lynne McTaggart
Bad Medicine: How Safe is Modern Medicine?…….. John Archer
Confessions of a Medical Heretic… Dr Robert Mendelsohn
Some Doctors Make You Sick Stephen Rice
Health Betrayal: Staying Away from the Sickness Industry…. Eve Hillary
Women Under the Knife… Ann Dally M.D.
How to Avoid a Hysterectomy….Lynn Payer
The Diseases of Civilization….Brian Inglis
……MEDICAL CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN……
While most doctors are male, women are the main recipients of medical treatment. In a financial sense they provide not only the bread and butter for the medical profession, but also the cream and the jam.
Women undergo more operations, consume more medications and are subjected to more tests and experimental procedures than their male counterparts.
As a consequence, many more women than men suffer financial hardship, sickness, disability and death as a direct result of treatment by their doctors.
Dangerous and needless operations, deadly drugs for conception, contraception, morning sickness, menopause and other ‘women’s complaints’, and unethical life-threatening experiments misrepresented as ‘safe’ therapy – these are some of modern medicine’s most recent crimes against women.
WOMEN AS TARGETS…
“Woman is a pair of ovaries with a human being attached; whereas man is a human being furnished with a pair of testes.”……DR RUDOLF VIRCHOW, WOMEN UNDER THE KNIFE
“Women make superb guinea pigs. They don’t cost anything, they clean their own cages, they pay for their own bills, and they remunerate the clinical observer.”
DR RALPH BENSON, THEY CLAY PEDESTAL
“If like all human beings, he {the gynaecologist} is made in the image of the Almighty, and he is kind, then his kindness and concern for his patient may provide her with a glimpse of God’s image…..RUSSELL C. SCOTT, M.D., THE WORLD OF THE GYNAECOLOGIST
9 out of 10 hysterectomies are unnecessary and are mainly done for profit and medical training and can do far more harm than good…. Dr Stanley West…”The Hysterectomy Hoax”….. (Hoax: a trick or fraud intended to deceive)…
Gynaecologists are the most dangerous to women’s health than any other doctors.
60% of complaints against doctors are against gynaecologists.
Women who go to clinics and Community Health Services in low socioeconomic areas for Pap smears, etc., are at more risk of getting unnecessary surgeries than if they go to their own doctors or a general practitioner.
Too Many Hysterectomies?
Doctors say that more than two-third of hysterectomies each year may be unnecessary.
But here’s a shocker: More than two-thirds of the 600,000 hysterectomies performed every year may be unnecessary, experts say. The truth: Several other approaches are available that may have fewer complications and shorter recovery times. And some research suggests that hysterectomy may lead to sexual problems, incontinence, and a slight loss of physical strength……
In 1945, at a gynaecological convention, a speaker said: “Hysterectomy is a racket, where the majority were done for dubious reasons at best, and non-existent reasons at worst”…
Australia’s rate of unnecessary surgical procedures ranges from appendectomies to the excessive removal of females’ uteruses. This wholesale removal of functioning body parts is often a direct result of fee for service medicine. Problems are abroad when doctors succumb to dollars as an indication for surgery. The welfare of a patient disappears along the doctors wholesale road to further payment on the BMW or the next successful tax effective property investment.
Dr Paul Curson
Is The HEALTH-CARE system letting you down?
To an enthusiastic surgeon, there is not such thing as unnecessary surgery and as Bernard Shaw pointed out, once an operation has been performed, it’s difficult to prove in retrospect that it was unnecessary. The debate about what constitutes appropriate reasons for some forms of surgery has raged in medical circles for a century.
However, as we shall see, research into the subject in recent years has confirmed that a high proportion of unnecessary surgery is still being performed, even by reputable surgeons. This practice needs to be considered to be considered in its social perspective.
If a non-surgeon were to cut someone open with a knife, remove a perfectly healthy organ and simultaneously rob the same person of $1,000, he would be charged with assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, robbery, and numerous other offences. If he said in his defence that he did it for the victim’s own good, a jury could justifiably find him criminally insane.
On the other hand, this same procedure ceases to be a crime when performed by a suitably qualified medical practitioner, who has judged in his professional opinion that the operation is required or ‘indicated’.
‘Many surgical procedures still have no demonstrated proof of their effectiveness or of their value to the patient,’ wrote Brian Inglis in The Diseases of Civilisation. He continued: ‘When a new drug is produced, clinical trials have to be conducted before it is passed for general use. No such monitoring is applied to surgical operations nor are trials carried out to test whether they are necessary and, if so, whether they can be made safer. As a result, many pointless types of operations have been introduced and used for many years on unsuspecting patients…’.
Part of the problem is the practitioner’s sincere belief in the value of surgery as an appropriate solution for a wide variety of complaints. Just as a psychiatrist may assure you that your symptoms are a physical manifestation of an emotional disorder which can be cured with therapy, so a surgeon may be equally convinced that surgery is a more beneficial approach – particularly for women.
Bad surgery appears in several different forms: unnecessary, ineffective, negligent, poorly executed, or a combination of any of the above.
There is no doubt that a significant proportion of unnecessary surgery is carried out in Australia. The debate has always been about how much. Since surgical practices in the US are similar to those in Australia, the American figures offer some perspective.
In 1978 a US congressional subcommittee estimated that 2.4 million unnecessary operations were carried out in that year, at the cost of US$4 billion, and with a loss of 119,000 lives. Medicine on Trial quotes estimates which suggest that between 3 and 6 million unnecessary operations in 1982 resulted in between 40,000 and 83,000 deaths. There are no such figures or estimates currently available in Australia, but experts generally agree that between 15-25 per cent of all surgery is not medically indicated. If their estimates are applied to Australian figures the equation looks like this:
Conservative estimate of the number of major surgical procedures performed in Australia in 1993-1994 = 1.8 million
Overall mortality rate for all major surgery = 1.33 per cent
Unnecessary surgery estimates = 15-25 per cent, and up to 50-60 per cent for some operations, 40-80 per cent and more for tonsillectomies and hysterectomies.
Some 15-25 per cent unnecessary operations multiplied by 1.8 million operations equals 270,000 – 450,000 unnecessary operations. Multiply that figure by the 1.33 per cent mortality rate equals 3,500 – 6,000 Australians who may die in any one year as a consequence of unnecessary surgical procedures.
BAD MEDICINE: How Safe is Modern Medicine?…. John Archer..1995
………NEANDERTHAL MEDICINE MEN……….
BIRMINGHAM, 1995
Medical chauvinists whose exploits are noted by colleagues like Dr Luisa Dillner. ‘When considering the attitude of male obstetricians and gynaecologists,’ she wrote in her column in the Guardian, ‘you have to remember they are predominantly surgeons. This makes them automatically autocratic. Many genuinely have difficulty with the concept that what’s yours isn’t necessarily theirs to remove.’
Trust Me I’m (still) a Doctor… Dr Phil Hammond
Womb snatching
Besides cesarean, hysterectomy is the most likely operation you’ll face if you’re a women, even though up to 90 per cent could be unnecessary. Here’s how to avoid one. There is a joke among medical practitioners confronted with a woman suffering from gynecological problems. The diagnosis: she is suffering from CPU or Chronic Persistent Uterus. The solution: Hysterectomy.
…. In fact, hysterectomy, or more correctly female castration, is now one of the most widely applied surgeries for women, second in some countries only to the cesarean. In the US, a woman has a one in three chance of having her uterus removed by the age of 60. In Britain, her chances are only slightly better at one in five………
These are the words of Sandra Simkin, from her book “The Case Against HYSTERECTOMY”, but is exactly how I felt after I was butchered of my 6 healthy female organs.
“Writing to a woman police constable, I said: “To have your womb and ovaries taken out from you for no reason, or for little reason, has to be assault on a par with violent rape. It is a terrible and unwanted intrusion into a woman’s most private and sensate part of the body and, as with rape, the traumatic effects of it last for the rest of her life.”….
THE REDUNDANT WOMB: “A USELESS, BLEEDING ORGAN”
The womb, or uterus, is another organ that doctors in Australia tend to remove from the (female) human body with great enthusiasm. At least half the medically insured women in Australia have had, or will have, a hysterectomy. It is the most common operation performed on women, and often it is done simply as a “precautionary” measure. The operation takes only 30 or 40 minutes. The rationale is simple:
THE UTERUS HAS BUT ONE FUNCTION: REPRODUCTION. AFTER THE LAST PLANNED PREGNANCY THE UTERUS BECOMES A USELESS, BLEEDING, SYMPTOM-PRODUCING, POTENTIALLY CANCER-BEARING ORGAN AND THEREFORE SHOULD BE REMOVED.
Such a course of action might be justified, if it were not for the fact that of every 1600 women who have the operation, one will die as a direct result of the procedure. Complications can also leave a patient permanently injured. Apart from all the usual risks associated with surgery, there is growing evidence that the uterus is not “useless” but produces hormones which protect women from heart attacks after menopause. Removing an otherwise healthy womb, far from protecting the woman’s life, may instead threaten it.
Another important consideration is that many women experience severe depression after a hysterectomy, a state sometimes described as being like an exaggerated menopause. A number of studies have found that women who have hysterectomies are far more likely to need psychiatric treatment than other women.
A hysterectomy may be justified – indeed, essential – in cases of cancer, and other serious diseases. But usually it is needless, a medical fashion gone completely out of control. In the Canadian province of Saskatchewan during the 1970’s, a deliberate effort was made to reduce the number of hysterectomies. A committee was established which included not only doctors, but a social worker, a political scientist, a systems analyst, and a medical student. The unlikely group compiled a list of indications they felt would justify a hysterectomy. The list was published; no coercive or disciplinary measures were imposed, but doctors knew they were under scrutiny. In four years, the proportion of unnecessary hysterectomies dropped from 23.7 per cent to 7.8 per cent. A similar, though less dramatic, fall (17 per cent in three years) occurred in New South Wales during the 1980s after a well-published campaign against unnecessary hysterectomies by the Doctors Reform Society.
The non-medical reasons for hysterectomy include, of course, money. One of Australia’s leading obstetricians and gynaecologists, Professor Derek LLewellyn-Jones, has pointed out that there is no financial incentive for doctors to explore the alternatives to hysterectomy. Professor LLewellyn-Jones does not advocate that hysterectomies should be performed only where there is a malignancy. “What I am concerned about is the woman who sees her doctor on Monday and is told she must have a hysterectomy on Thursday,” he says. “She is being pressured into having an operation without time for reflection.”
Some Doctors Make You Sick: The Scandal of Medical Incompetence…. Stephen Rice
……SCARE TACTICS……
The foregoing stories are not cases of medical error, but of FRAUD. The uterus is a favoured target for a number of unscrupulous doctors who deliberately use scare tactics to persuade patients to have high-priced, unneeded surgery. The approach includes statements like:
“This is something bad for you. Who knows what it will cause in the future, so it must come out!”
“Why do you need or want your uterus? Now that you’ve had your children it ought to come out!”
“We can’t tell when that will become malignant. It had better come out now!”
THE CANCER SCARE! It takes a well-informed patient to walk away from that one!
The percentage of cases in which needless surgery is performed is impossible to pin down – but it is not small.
Women Under the Knife: A Gynaecologists Report on Hazardous Medicine.
Herbert H. Keyser, M.D.
