{"id":461,"date":"2001-09-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-09-09T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/mind-body-5-surgeries-to-avoid\/"},"modified":"2001-09-09T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-09-09T00:00:00","slug":"mind-body-5-surgeries-to-avoid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/mind-body-5-surgeries-to-avoid\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Surgeries to Avoid"},"content":{"rendered":"
Maybe Im the wrong ex-patient to be telling you this: Experimental surgery erased stage III colon cancer from my shell-shocked body six years ago. But even Ive got to admit that all is not well in Americas operating rooms. Please dont get me wrong. Id go back under the scalpel in a minute if I had a gastro-tumor recurrence (like White House press officer Tony Snow did) or some totally unrelated, unforeseen orthopedic emergency (a knee injury, for instance). But at least 12,000 Americans die each year from unnecessary surgery, according to a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) report. And tens of thousands more suffer complications.<\/p>\n
The fact is, no matter how talented the surgeon, the body doesnt much care about the docs credentials. Surgery is a trauma, and the body responds as such—with major blood loss and swelling, and all manner of nerve and pain signals that can stick around sometimes for months.<\/p>\n
Those are but a few reasons to try to minimize elective surgery. And I found even more after talking with more than 25 experts involved in various aspects of surgery and surgical care, and after reviewing a half-dozen governmental and medical think tank reports on surgery in the United States. Here, what you need to know about five surgeries that are overused, and newer, sometimes less-invasive procedures and solutions that may be worth a look.<\/p>\n
Next Page: Hysterectomy<\/a> [ pagebreak ]<\/p>\n Operations_2_225<\/span> and osteoporosis rises markedly. There are also potential side effects, from newfound pelvic problems to lower sexual desire and reduced pleasure. Hysterectomies got more negative press after a landmark 2005 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), study revealed that, unless a woman is at very high risk of ovarian cancer, removing her ovaries during hysterectomy actually raised her health risks.<\/p>\n So why are doctors still performing the double-whammy surgery? “Our profession is entrenched in terms of doing hysterectomies,” says Ernst Bartsich, MD, a gynecological surgeon at Weill-Cornell Medical Center in New York. “Im not proud of that. It may be an acceptable procedure, but it isnt necessary in so many cases.” In fact, he adds, of the 617,000 hysterectomies performed annually, “from 76 to 85 percent” may be unnecessary.<\/p>\n Although hysterectomy should be considered for uterine cancer, some 90 percent of procedures in the United States today are performed for reasons other than treating cancer, according to William H. Parker, MD, clinical professor of gynecology at UCLA and author of the 05 study. The bottom line, he says: If a hysterectomy is recommended, get a second opinion and consider the alternatives.<\/p>\n What to do instead<\/strong> Focus on fibroids. Fibroids are a problem for 20 to 25 percent of women, but there are several specific routes to relief that arent nearly as drastic as hysterectomy. For instance, myomectomy, which removes just the fibroids and not the uterus, is becoming increasingly popular. And there are other less-invasive treatments out there, too.<\/p>\n In France in the early 1990s, a doctor who was prepping women for fibroid surgery—by blocking, or embolizing, the arteries that supplied blood to the fibroids in the uterus—noticed a number of the benign tumors either soon shrank or disappeared, and, voila, Jacques Ravina, MD, had discovered uterine fibroid embolization (UFE). Since then, interventional radiologists in the United States have expanded their use of UFE (typically a one- to three-hour procedure), using injectable pellets that shrink and “starve” fibroids into submission. Based on research from David Siegel, MD, chief of vascular and interventional radiology at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, New Hyde Park, New York, some 15,000 to 18,000 UFEs are performed here each year, and up to 80 percent of women with fibroids are candidates for it.<\/p>\n Another new fibroid treatment is high-intensity focused ultrasound, or HIFU. This even less invasive, more forgiving new procedure treats and shrinks fibroids. Its whats called a no-scalpel surgery that combines MRI (an imaging machine) mapping followed by powerful sound-wave “shaving” of tumor tissue.<\/p>\n Next Page: Episiotomy<\/a> [ pagebreak ]<\/p>\n 20825750<\/span> [ pagebreak ]<\/p>\n 20825746<\/span> and are stable, you can take medicines that do the job of angioplasty,” says William Boden, MD, of the University of Buffalo School of Medicine, Buffalo, New York, and an author of the study. Medicines used in the study included aspirin, and blood pressure and cholesterol drugs—and they were taken along with exercise and diet changes.<\/p>\n “If those dont work, then you can have angioplasty,” Boden says. “Now we can unequivocally say that.”<\/p>\n Of course, whats right for you depends on the severity of your atherosclerosis risks (blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides) along with any heart-related pain. The onus is also on the patient to treat a docs lifestyle recommendations—diet and exercise guidelines—just as seriously as if they were prescription medicines.<\/p>\n
Go knife-free. Endometrial ablation, a nonsurgical procedure that targets the uterine lining, is another fix for persistent vaginal bleeding.<\/p>\n