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Created by: Medical Billing and Coding

Essure birth control - miracle or not?

Listen to the ads on Essure (and read the website) and it sounds really great - a one time non surgical procedure which takes care of birth control forever.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. They call it "non surgical" because although it involves a procedure which has to be done in the doctor's office, there is no incision but in another way, it could be considered surgical because it's invasive - it's just that they go in through an opening already there - that's why no incision. And also, they are inserting a foreign medal object (two of them) into your body in order to cause an irritation in the tubes which go from the ovaries to the uterus in order to force your body to create scar tissue in the tubes and thus, in theory, block the tubes.

The way that is said delicately on the website is "your body forms natural barrier around the micro-inserts that prevents sperm from reaching the eggs". Well, yes, scar tissue is a natural reaction but the irritation which caused it is not natural at all and can be a health risk!

And if you are still ovulating, blocking your fallopian tubes like this can raise the risk for ectopic pregnancy, a condition which can be life threatening for the mother.

That is, it doesn't take very much for a sperm to sneak through the scar tissue if it isn't really a super strong barrier. (Sperm are very small).

Also, it must be causing some other problems because the side effects are listed as heavy bleeding during periods, dizziness and more, which according to not happy campers, continue long after the procedure. We are not told why it's causing these side effects but a page on FaceBook where unhappy Essure patients hang out, confirms that at least a percentage of women get these uncomfortable side effects. The cramps the Essure folks warn can happen are described by some as "stabbing pains in the abdomen"

The women who are not happy with the procedure (posting on the complaint site), all say they are sorry they ever had it done and since it's permanent and the only fallopian tubes they will ever have, have been ruined, unlike something like "tubal ligation", Essure cannot be undone. The nice doctors who performed the procedure in the first place (there are 150 of them in my area for example) apparently, according to these women, are not any help when they are suffering side effects and some complain that the fatigue, nausea and dizziness, heavy bleeding etc, are pretty disabling.

On one site, there are more complaints about Essure.

Another side effect which doesn't seem to be listed in the Essure material but which many complain about, is weight gain.

On the website, they admit that the claim of rendering a woman safe from pregnancy was made from tests of less than one year.

This procedure doesn't sound like a real good idea to me. Sold on the premises Americans love, of "fast and easy", it sounds like if your body objects, it can be difficult and painful.

Do we sit too much?

Computers are great but problem is, we don't have to expend much energy using them (says she sitting in her easy chair writing this blog)! :)

Will sitting too much kill us? Well, it depends on how much we move otherwise and all of this is very unproven, anyway although if you listen to the scare tactics in the news, you might get the impression, it's well proven! hmmm. Fact remains, even with our cars, and sitting most of the time, we today, are living decades longer than our active ancestors. Perhaps one can go too far in getting upset about lifestyle? Just make sure you get in a 30 or more minute cardio workout daily or most days, and do get up from your desk every so often but even if you don't do this, you will likely live a lot longer than your active ancestors lived. Thank modern medicine - also modern nutrition, sanitation and a myriad of factors! :) At the link below are some good suggestions that those of us who sit a lot at computers can do to help our bodies and our hearts. Of course, they emphasize the "dangers" of obesity - they missed that there are no studies which found that obesity ALONE kills - ooops...and in re-visiting this infographic (which I originally put up here because the person asking me to do so was charming - ok...not the best reasoning...anyway, in re-visiting it, I find several things on it which are either unproven or questionable. Because of that I have removed the infographic but you can still view it at the link below. I think some of the info on it may be outdated or unproven. Take-away message - if you sit at work all day, get up from your chair, once every hour or so and walk around. During lunch or breaks, take a little walk - no evidence that you will survive longer than the office chair potato (cousin of the couch potato) but at least the exercise will invigorate you and send blood to the brain etc. i.e. it's all good! :)...

See InfoGraphic at: Infographic about sitting too much and the dangers thereof

Aging musicians have sharp brains

Did you study music as a kid or are you studying it now? I've never met anyone who was sorry they studied music but I've met quite a few people who tell me that they wished they had studied music or studied it longer! (the photo is of me in my 20's - I am still playing at the age of 66!)

Besides all the other benefits of musical study, here's a new one. Two scientists who tested a group of people with several levels of musical study, found that those who had studied music the longest, also did the best on cognitive tests - the type of tests that elderly usually don't do so well on. A news article on futura.org detailed the study.

Hanna-Pladdy and Alicia McKay, then both at the University of Kansas Medical Center, enrolled 70 individuals, aged 63-80 years old, in their study. Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, clinical neuropsychologist now at Emory University and lead researcher on the study commented that :

Musical activity throughout life may serve as a challenging cognitive exercise, making your brain fitter and more capable of accommodating the challenges of aging. ... Since studying an instrument requires years of practice and learning, it may create alternate connections in the brain that could compensate for cognitive declines as we get older.

Those with over 10 years of study, functioned the best, those with 1-10 years of study functioned the second best and the ones who functioned the least well were those with no musical training. All of the cohort were about the same fitness level and none had evidenced signs of Alzheimer's disease.

The study was published in the April 2011 issue of Neuropsychology Journal.

Dr Hanna-Pladdy did point out that more research is needed because they could not make a direct connection between musical training and better cognitive skills but the study results are interesting and makes sense to me - especially that I am an aging musician!

New York city not growing in population

Will the familiar skyline which has signaled the excitement of New York City, change as the lights go out, one by one?

Indications are if NY doesn't stop aborting many times more unborn babies than carrying to term, it might indeed change things and not in necessarily a way people will like.

In the past decade, according to statistics, NY has only increased a modest 2.1 percent since over 1 million potential citizens were aborted.

The following were listed in a Molecular Biologist's blog as the repercussion of virtually no population growth:

• NY has lost 2 representatives for the House in Congress so the state has less voting power


• Like Japan which is suffering a similar program, NY is beginning to experience a labor shortage

Scientifically speaking, a society which is not reproducing itself, is a society which will not survive. Of interest to Hispanics and African Americans, statistically, 79 percent of babies aborted are either Hispanic or African American. (And that was actually founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger's original plan - she wanted to eliminate those populations she thought "inferior").

Dr Nadal the blogger concludes by writing "we are dying out".

To read Dr Nadal's blog which is well cited, please click here.

BPA - is it a threat to health?

A recent article in Dr Gupta's CNN blog, carries the frightening headline "BPA may reduce sperm count". It goes on to detail a study in China of workers in plastics factories who had lower sperm counts (and high blood levels of BPA). The problem with this study is those workers are exposed to the chemical in a way that we will never be, from drinking from plastic bottles.

And yet, one wonders - how much chemical does leech into the substance in the plastic bottle? Do all plastic bottles leech BPA into your drink or food?

BPA is short for bisphenol-A, a chemical used in clear plastic. It has lately been loosely linked with numerous problems including obesity, cancer, brain damage and early puberty.

It is true that girls are exhibiting earlier puberty these days but that also could be attributed to other factors - pharmaceutical estrogen which is widely used for birth control and HRT, has been found in drinking water (it is thought to be excreted in the urine), and pollution in the atmosphere has also been suspected as a factor. So how much of the earlier development can be linked to BPA? No one knows.

As for obesity, here the links are very vague and much more likely factors can be named such as labor saving devices (our grandparents burned a whooping 800 calories more daily than we do, just in executing housework etc), and foods which are delicious but extremely high calorie while not being particularly filling. Lending fuel to those reasons is the lack of obesity found in environments which do not have easy access to fancy and fast foods and do not have labor saving devices like cars and automatic washers (for example, the PIMAs of Mexico who still live the same way they lived 1000 years ago).

Cancer? Well, here again, there are many factors have been strongly linked to it, including heredity, use of tobacco and alcohol, pollution in the air, synthetic estrogen and even some medications like those medications taken to lower cholesterol (statins).

So again, we are left with questions about BPA.

Even more concerning, is the fact that there is no way around plastic bottles - everything comes in it, from milk to water. So if plastic is really leeching into our food and causing health problems, where would we turn?

It seems in our modern society, rather than curing all the ills, we are often doing trade-offs like the vaccines which have been linked to the high incidence of autoimmune disorder in exchange for infectious disease. And I also wonder why some chemicals which happen to be popular or hot sellers are never mentioned in our many health warnings. Chemicals like aspartame which has been linked to brain cancer in 100 worldwide studies and is actually banned in some countries, or the preservative in vaccines which is a form of mercury, known to be extremely toxic, even in trace amounts. Or coffee, which contains caffeine, a stimulant which can, over a lifetime especially in larger quantities, disarray the dopamine in the brain, possibly leading to the development of Parkinson's disease (REF: PROZAC BACKLASH by J. Glenmullen, MD, NY,2005).

I would tend to think, if BPA is a player, it's a minor player in causing disease. But I guess it's more of a "stay tuned". Studies like the Chinese study of workers in plastics factories are not really telling us anything about the general public and BPA.

New Study finds high cancer risk with low dose birth control/hormone replacement

Low Dose Birth Control Hormones are given for birth control and also for hormone replacement therapy (HRT). And the cancer risk with pharmaceutical estrogen first popped up in the 1930's when rats given the drug, all came down with breast cancer, both males and females. In the 1960's this study was repeated with the same results, but funded by Planned Parenthood which saw a gold mine in selling a medication for contraception, research pushed on and in the mid 1960's, the "birth control pill" became available, touted as safe and effective.

Epidemiological studies which are notoriously inaccurate but because of the large numbers involved, convincing to the public (and medical providers also) suggested that giving menopausal women estrogen (and later on, low dose birth control including estrogen and progestin) would relieve their hot flashes and other symptoms associated with menopause and even protect them from heart attacks.

But even after these studies, nursing magazines referred to the "estrogen - breast cancer risk". The Merck Manual also listed these medications as significantly raising the risk for heart attack, stroke and thrombosis (40% higher risk in those taking the hormones). But the general public never heard about these risks and the large epidemiological studies which suggested that this medication was "heart protective" were convincing.

In the year, 2000, 9 million women were on premarin for menopause.

Meanwhile, the incidence of breast cancer went from a low percentage in the 1950's to occurring in 1 in 8 women by 2000 (80,000 women die yearly in the USA, from breast cancer).

In the early 2000's, 2 NIH double blind studies had to be stopped mid-term because those on estrogen alone or low dose birth control - estrogen and progestin, were getting too many heart attacks, strokes and cancer. And pharmaceutical estrogen was put on the FDA list of cancer causing chemicals in 2005.

Recently a new study, an 11 year point analysis of the Women's Initiative Study Data, suggested that low dose birth control given for Menopause and Hormone Replacement significantly raises the risk of cancer.

The women taking both estrogen and progestin were found to have a much greater chance of dying from lung cancer or breast cancer (for example, women on HRT had a 70 percent greater chance of dying of lung cancer than those who never took the hormones).

The study was reported on in the AMA's Journal. Rowan Chlebowski, of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, who led the analysis,told the press:

"Women taking estrogen plus progestin are at greater risk from dying from the two leading causes of cancer death in women."

In 2002, there were 110 million prescriptions filed for low dose birth control. By 2005 after both NIH studies had to be halted, prescriptions "plummeted" to 40 million. And the incidence of breast cancer also dropped somewhat.

However, today, millions of women still take the hormones as birth control and hormone replacement therapy. In my acquaintance, I've seen a 17 year old have a stroke (she was on hormones for birth control - it paralyzed her partially) and recently, a woman in her 50's with no other risk factors, had a major stroke paralyzing her totally on one side. This woman was likely on hormone replacement therapy.

It is hoped that with the new analysis, the public will finally consider not taking these hormones.

When my husband and I got married in 1966, the "pill" was a new thing. Everyone asked me enthusiastically if I was planning to take the pill. "No," I told them, "That's a system which is too sensitive and I have a hunch that dumping amounts of pharmaceutical hormones into my body would not be a healthy thing!" I never did take birth control medication - but had no idea how unhealthy and risky those hormones would turn out to be.

NOTE: Natural Progesterone Cream (like "Progesta-Care") is a nice alternative for menopause which cuts the symptoms but does not put the woman at risk. See "WHAT YOUR DOCTOR MIGHT NOT TELL YOU ABOUT MENOPAUSE" by Dr John Lee, MD. (No, I do not sell this but this is what I used to get me smoothly through menopause and also, to avoid a hysterectomy.)