Fighting Cervical Cancer With Vinegar and Ingenuity

[Skyfarmr]

While Gardasil (HPV vaccines) have been dominating the news, this article in the NYTs may provide a balanced alternative side to the issue and possibly soften the scare factor of developing cervical cancer, should you opt-out of the vaccine. Having recently had a scare of my own, I found this news comforting that there's a simple effective preventive treatment/method being studied with some success.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/health/27cancer.html?src=me&ref=general

Nurses using the new procedure, developed by experts at the Johns Hopkins medical school in the 1990s and endorsed last year by the World Health Organization, brush vinegar on a woman’s cervix. It makes precancerous spots turn white. They can then be immediately frozen off with a metal probe cooled by a tank of carbon dioxide, available from any Coca-Cola bottling plant.

The procedure is one of a wide array of inexpensive but effective medical advances being tested in developing countries. New cheap diagnostic and surgical techniques, insecticides, drug regimens and prostheses are already beginning to save lives.

It's really a shame that developing countries are a "testing ground" for all of above mentioned: insecticides? drug regimens? Ugh! But this new procedure which uses vinegar, which I would imagine might be part of the "cure" (used to be common practice for women to douche with vinegar), is a pearl in the sea of abuse that developing countries have been flooded with.

Won't be holding my breath for this inexpensive procedure to make it to the "developed" countries; we don't have a "force of nature" as a women's health advocate like Thailand does (well, there is Planned Parenthood, but even their future is in financial shackles):

But the real secret, Dr. Wachara said, is this: “Thailand has Lady Kobchitt.”

Dr. Kobchitt Limpaphayon to her colleagues at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University medical school and “Kobbie” to her classmates long ago at New York’s Albany Medical College, she is the gynecologist to the Thai royal family. “Kobbie is a force of nature,” said Dr. Blumenthal, who has taught with her. In 1971, as a young doctor, she moved from Albany to Baltimore to help start the Johns Hopkins Program for International Education in Gynecology and Obstetrics.

In 1999, she read one of Dr. Blumenthal’s papers and asked him to introduce VIA/cryo in Thailand. Without her connections and powers of persuasion, said Dr. Bandit, it would have been impossible to get the conservative Royal Thai College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to give up Pap smears, or to persuade Parliament to allow nurses to do cryotherapy, a procedure previously reserved for doctors.