Here is the best post on hysterectomy that I’ve seen in a long time of 3+ years that I am involved with this site.

Technorati Tags: Hysterectomy

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Uterine artery embolization is a relatively non-invasive procedure to stop the blood supply to the existing uterine fibroids in order to eliminate them. It involves a catheter through the artery and lasts for about an hour, but after the procedure, the uterus is intact. The fibroids do not have blood to feed them, so they disappear. But is it really a better solution than the hysterectomy, given that the symptomatic uterine fibroids may return within a year or two, and that with hysterectomy they cannot return because the uterus isn’t there any more?

Here’s a comparative study, with the full name of

Uterine artery embolisation or hysterectomy for the treatment of symptomatic uterine fibroids: a cost-utility analysis of the HOPEFUL study

by Wu, O. and Briggs, A.H. and Dutton, S. and Hirst, A. and Maresh, M. and Nicholson, A. and McPherson, K. (2007), and published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology 114(11):pp. 1352-1362.

They wanted to see which procedure should be favourized from the standpoint of UK NHS. There were 649 women who underwent UAE (Uterine Artery Embolisation) and were followed for the 8.6 years in average, while there were 459 women with hysterectomy, which were followed for up to 4.6 in average.

Two main measures were the Costs of procedures and complications, and Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) UAE had the lower cost, £2536 versus £3282, small reduction in quality of life (8.203 versus 8.241 QALYs) when compared with hysterectomy. However, when the quality of life associated with the conservation of the uterus was incorporated in the model, UAE was shown to be the dominant strategy—lower costs and greater QALYs.

The result of the study is that simply more women should be allowed to UAE instead of going directly to hysterectomy. This is especially important if the woman wants to preserve her uterus.

The abstract of the Uterine Artery Embolisation or Hysterectomy For the Treatment of Symptomatic Uterine Fibroids study is published by the University of Glasgow.

Technorati Tags: fibroids, Hysterectomy, NHS, quality of life. Glasgow, symptomatic uterine fibroids, UAE, UK NHS, university of Glasgow, Uterine Artery Embolization, Uterine Fibroids

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Hysterectomy recovery in  real life is terra incognita in each case. When you speak with women about their hysterectomies and other surgeries as well, they tend to minimize the problems that followed, especially if that happened long time ago and all went well, after all. When you start digging, you hear how it really was. Now, with the ability to blog, many women post their “internal” problems as “external” posts, for everyone to learn and see. In this blog, truered37 had three posts, the first one on 48 hours before the operation, and the first and second followups.

Of course, we wish her all the luck in the world and the best of recovery in the future!

Technorati Tags: Hysterectomy, hysterectomy recovery, operation, surgery

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

When you read forums and somebody says they are heading for hysterectomy, almost always one or two participants stands up saying that hysterectomy was the best thing that ever happened to them in their lives! OK, maybe that’s how it was for them, but not everybody has their own little “happy hysterectomy”. The case in point is Christine from Atlanta, let’s quote from this article:

Exactly one week after the hysterectomy, Christine awoke in horrible pain and immediately went to her doctor’s office. When she passed out in his waiting room, an ambulance took her to a hospital.

A CT scan revealed urine was accumulating in her abdomen. Christine says her doctor explained what he thought went wrong: When he was using a cauterizing tool, he must have nicked the ureter, the duct that carries urine from the kidneys to the bladder. “He really owned up to it,” Christine says.

The next day, her doctor implanted a nephrostomy tube, so Christine’s urine could accumulate in a bag outside her body. A week later, she had a third procedure to insert an internal stent to replace the tube and the bag. When that stent caused her pain, doctors removed it in a fourth surgery. Today, Christine is scheduled to have a fifth procedure to fix her ureter, which has become almost completely blocked by scar tissue.

Grant says the complication that caused all these problems — the nicking of a ureter — would most likely be considered a regular complication of the surgery, and not negligence. This means that even though Christine has clearly suffered, she wouldn’t have a case. “Just because you have a bad outcome doesn’t mean you can sue,” he says.

Since she lives in the USA, her relatives wanted her to sue, but it doesn’t seems it is possible — her costs are too small for an attorney to have a profit at court. (That’s what happens when you live in a profit driven justice system.) She is not well, and the money is gone. Being a physician herself, she knows how major surgeris can be dangerous…

Bottom line: avoid hysterectomy if you can.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

What to do if you do have a hysterectomy? What happened before, how did it go at the hospital and where are you now, say, 5-6 weeks after the deed was done? Some women are brave enough to put it all online, and here is one such blog, One Girl No Uterus, with a subtitle that says it all, Discovering life after hysterectomy…

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Here is how it is in reality, for patients with adhesion disorder, who have undergone an open hysterectomy:

The typical ARD patient is in her 30s or 40s and has undergone an open hysterectomy. Ninety percent of people who have an open hysterectomy develop adhesions. A few years later, the patient develops bowel problems and a doctor diagnoses irritable bowel system. When the patient has trouble urinating, a doctor prescribes medication. The patient complains of pain and a doctor prescribes more drugs. The patient goes to a psychiatrist who prescribes anti-depressants. The patient’s pain gets worse, she probably lose her job due to the escalating pain and days lost from work. Then the patient may develop a bowel obstruction.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Removal of uterus increases risk of urinary incontinence

Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have shown that hysterectomy – a common operation involving the removal of the uterus – greatly increases the risk of urinary incontinence. Their results, which come from a nationwide study, are presented in The Lancet.

Hysterectomy is the most common gynaecological abdominal operation in the world. It is normally performed as a cure for benign medical problems in order to improve life quality for the patients. However, the long-term effects are largely unknown, and it has long been suspected that the operation increases the risk of developing urinary incontinence, in many respects a very disabling condition that affects hundreds of thousands of women in Sweden.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now shown that women who have had a hysterectomy are more than twice as likely to undergo surgery for urinary incontinence as women with intact uteri.

“It’s important that gynaecologists take this into account ahead of a hysterectomy, and the patients should themselves be aware of the greater risk the operation entails, particularly if they belong to a high-risk group,” says Daniel Altman, gynaecologist and one of the researchers behind the study.

The highest likelihood of incontinence surgery was noted within five years of the removal of the uterus, but the higher risk remains throughout the patients’ lives. The risk increased most for women who had a hysterectomy before their menopause or after having undergone several deliveries.

The study was based on analyses of patient registers for the years 1973 to 2003, and incorporated over 165,000 women who have had hysterectomies and almost 479,000 women who have not.

Publication:

Daniel Altman, Fredrik Granath, Sven Cnattingius och Christian Falconer

Hysterectomy and risk of stress urinary incontinence surgery: nationwide cohort study

The Lancet, 27 oktober 2007, ref 370: 1494-1499.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

There is a great discomfort about request to have a hysterectomy on a disabled child. A British mother desires her severely disabled 15 year old daughter to have a hysterectomy in order to avoid the discomfort of periods. Naturally, many are opposed to this idea, read the news here. Here is the opposite point of view — the girl’s uterus is healthy, so maybe periods won’t be a distress after all!?

Here is yet another voice of doubt.

Do you need that hysterectomy!? is a fair appraisal of the alternatives that exist for the hysterectomy today.

If women new more about their anatomy and physiology, they would make informed decisions about hysterectomy, the HERS foundation believes. They are organizing their 26th conference soon:

ERS TWENTY-SIXTH HYSTERECTOMY CONFERENCE
Saturday, November 3, 2007, 8:30am-6:00pm
The Westin Pasadena, Plaza Room
191 North Los Robles
Pasadena, CA 91101
Open to the public

For more info, click here to go the their blog.

Hysterectomy can really have disastrous consequences upon your sex life. Furthermore, it can ruin long term marriages, read the awakening testimonials here.

If you are in the USA, this short, short list of hysterectomy resources by Washington Post might come handy to you.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Not a day passes that someone will not write about or mention hysterectomy, either in the news or in their blog or wherever.

Low Libido in Women — What To Do About It?

So many women have low libido, a low drive to have sex with their partners. Almost half of the women actually fall into this category and some of the actually want to do something about it. This story, Pills Not Always the Cure for Women Suffering Low Libido, tells us about a case in which testosterone pills actually helped a woman regain her libido, and at the same time, it also states that the low male hormones are far from the only cure.

A typical situation in which sex drive is diminished is after the hysterectomy, you can read an article testosterone for women on this site about it.

Although, as as astrologer, I must add that the quality of your sex drive depends both on your Mars and Venus in the natal chart, as well as on the interplay of these two planets with your partner’s Mars and Venus. (Hint, hint: find a partner with any kind of crossed aspect with your Mars and Venus and you won’t even need artificial hormones!)

Treatments For Menorrhagia Evaluated, UK

Heavy menstrual bleeding (menorrhagia) is a common problem in women. About 5% of women asks their GP about that such bleeding. In previous decades, hysterectomy was the only way to resolve it, but in the meantime, new surgical techniques evolved. Professor Siladitya Bhattacharya of the University of Aberdeen will lead a team of researchers to review the existing evidence about hysterectomy, endometrial ablative techniques (microwave endometrial ablation and thermal balloon ablation), and the Mirena coil. The goal of the study is to establish long term effectiveness of all these methods, and then to create a set of guidelines for doctors to follow in clinical decision making. The estimated publishing time is mid 2010.

Here are the technical details of the proposed study.

New Hysterectomy Offers Faster Recovery

A sugar-coated story of how a woman had increasingly heavy periods and anemia, how her doctor persuaded her to take the uterus out and how she walked home the next day after the laparoscopic, or minimally-invasive, hysterectomy.

This story reads like an open advertisement for hysterectomy. Laparascopy is better than laparotomy, and yes, you do walk away from the hospital much faster as compared to the usual gynecological surgery. What the story does not tell is that from now on that woman will live without her main sex organ, and that can hurt in more ways that one.

Incidentally, in this hysterectomy news here is an animated video of laparoscopic hysterectomy. If you are interested in video presentations concerning hysterectomy, you can use a rich collection of annotated hysterectomy videos from the very site that you are reading now, How To Avoid Hysterectomy.com.

You can learn more about laparoscopy in hysterectomy, here.

Peggy Anderson Blog: September is
National Gynecological Awareness Month

I’ll just quote Peggy Anderson:

I know that I didn’t consider myself at risk. I was at 23 years of age, had cervical cancer, and had a hystertomy. At 33 years of age I had vaginal cancer due to bad cells left over from my surgery from that caused some major problems for me. Hemorrhaging problems that brought me to emergency wards, even though I had a hysterectomy. I had a procedure called cryosurgery or freezing of the cells. (Since I will turn 60 this next year, I don’t get embarrassed about “the little things in life.” Health is important in our society!)

I always say, “Every day is a gift.” This is especially so for many cancer patients, who cherish the rising of the sun, and the smell of a flower, a new taste, a new day, and a new event. We see the beauty in every day and every tomorrow.

Read her blog post about the conditions that can lead to various forms of gynecological cancers.

I’d like to do her natal chart and see why she had all these medical problems and also what enabled her to survive them all for decades.

Sex After Hysterectomy

Here is an ongoing discussion on the effects hysterectomy has on sex. I added a comment and here is what I have said (I’ll record it here, in case they don’t allow my comment on their blog):

================================

Hi to all here

Although my site is active for more than two years by now, I have only today stumbled upon this blog. The comments here show how painful everything about hysterectomy seems to be and what I find most disturbing is this sheep mentality that so many women succumb to. Oh, the doctor said it would be OK, so it must be OK, right? The thought that some real healing should be tried before the surgery is so alien to the Western World that the results really are sickening.

Every illness has its cause. Removing the cause will lead to true healing, but what do women do instead!? They go to a doctor and hope that they will be able to purchase a solution. Hysterectomy is so widespread in the USA because there is an implicit belief that doctors hold the keys to everything and vise versa, if they don’t know what to do, than all the means are exhausted. This enervates me because I know that there are at least 5, 6 or 7 ways to heal uterine fibroids, heavy menstrual bleeding, cancer and so on. In 20% of cases, hysterectomy will be the only way to proceed, but what about those 80% that can really avoid hysterectomy if only they knew it were possible.

Somebody in these comments said it was not possible to predict the outcome of a hysterectomy. Well, it is possible to predict it through the methods of medical astrology. On my site I list many such cases, and I openly give the recipes that helped several women stop their menstrual bleeding, avoid hystrectomy etc. And here we are not talking about $5000 cost of surgery, we are talking about cheap natural remedies such as herbal remedies, homeopathic remedies, enzymes and the like, that can all be gathered for a few bucks from Amazon.

The point is this: if you want to get healed, you will be — but somebody first has to tell you that you can be healed. Surgery is cutting out, not healing. The Moon rules both the uterus and the breasts, and when they take away the uterus, the energy goes to the breasts… which is why so many women on HRT after hysterectomy develop cancer of the breasts.

For the ladies here that experienced sex drive through the roof after hysterectomy, that kind of behavior is astrologically described as an aspect of Mars and Uranus. It may well be possible that such an aspect was made during the surgery, and that it may affect you harder that it normally would. Strong sexual drives may also come as a result of too much testosterone, so everybody with this type of behavior should control their hormonal mix from time to time.

================================

You can read about hysterectomy side effects from this very site. Also, here is what I wrote about sex after hysterectomy.

That’s it for this week, then!

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites