Popular Fibroid Treatment Causes Miscarriages and Heavy Bleeding

by Heidi Stevenson

17 October 2009

An increasingly popular fibroid treatment has been shown to cause miscarriages, heavy bleeding, and caesarians. Uterine artery embolizatin (UAE) has been widely used in medical centers as a wonderful and safe treatment to use routinely on women with benign uterine fibroids.

UAE injects a mass of chemicals through an incision into the groin and femoral artery. After the incision is made, a catheter is inserted and extended to the uterine artery. A mass, either tris-acryl gelatin, an acrylic compound, or poly-vinyl alcohol (PVA, normally a constituent in adhesives, and to emulsify and thicken solutions) is injected. The goal is to lodge this mass inside the uterine artery to block blood flow to the fibroid. Results have always been unreliable; until now, no longterm studies have been done.

That brings up a significant fact. Surgical procedures are performed and promoted as safe and effective, when no studies have been done. Not even the superficial industry-sponsored testing performed on pharmaceutical drugs is performed before mass application of surgical procedures.

Women have been heavily pushed into the UAE procedure. Discussing its popularity, UAE promoter Howard Richard, MD, has stated, "The awareness in the community is what's increasing. Word of mouth is a large part of it. Also, women are becoming more savvy on their own and finding us on our website." The website in question is produced by the University of Maryland Medical Center. It includes prominent links to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, iPhone, and Share this page. As much as I hate giving them even more publicity, the page needs to be seen to be believed, so click here to see it.

The tragedy is that this is commonplace. Invasive and dangerous procedures are heavily hyped because they're profitable. See PsychoCorp #3—Laser Spine Institute Spams for Spine Surgery for another example of the practice.

Performed by a group of UK researchers, the study showed that 35% of pregnancies in women who'd had UAE resulted in miscarriage, compared to a normal rate of 10-15%. Caesarians were performed at 67% as compared to the already-absurd 20-25% and heavy bleeding after birth was nearly triple, 14% compared to 5%

Many harmful effects of UAE were already known, though generally treated by doctors as either too minor or too rare to be of consideration. As reported by the HERS Foundation⁽¹⁾, these include:

• Death from embolism or septicemia
• Infection resulting in lengthy hospitalization
• Misembolization: PVA particles finding their way into other parts of the body, causing blockage of blood flow and resultant damage.
• Ovarian damage and loss of function, with loss of fertility, from artificial embolic materials lodging in them.
• Loss of orgasm
• Menopause
• Post-embolization syndrome: pain, high fever, nausea, vomiting, night sweats, malaise
• Foul vaginal odor/discharge: Result of infected necrotic fibroid tissue
• Hematoma: blood clot at site of incision
• Bleeding from vagina or site of incision
• Unsuccessful fibroid expulsion: cervical trapping of fibroid, resulting in infection and requiring surgical removal
• Allergic reaction: life-threatening result from contrast used during UAE procedure
• Uterine adhesions

The study will be published in the journal, The Obstetrician & Gynaecologist. Its lead researcher, Ertan Saridogan, stated, "I hope this will inform women before they make their decisions, so they can make an informed choice—they've been going at it blindly without realising what it might imply for their future pregnancies."

No doubt! What's most upsetting, though, is that their doctors have doing it to them. And they've been just as blind as their patients.