In this episode, we talk about the dangers of the permanent birth control Essure and how lack of concern and proper FDA approval standards are to blame. Thanks for listening uterine kind!
Here’s a tip uterinekind, never let someone named Brad shove disinformation down your throat! You deserve so much better. With government officials continuously trying to insert themselves into uterine healthcare, there’s been a flood of disinformation. Men in power are spreading lies about the female at birth body and it’s damaging for those who hear it and those who believe it. Keep yourself and others informed so you can avoid people like Brad Cheeta! (Yea, we know it's Brad Tschida LOL)
Permanent birth control or permanent damage to your body? How long can something so problematic stay on the market? With 1 in 4 uterinekind facing serious problems after getting the permanent birth control Essure, you would assume doctors would start to question the reliability of this product. Yet it stayed on the market for years. Lack of concern and lack of a proper approval process leads to a cycle of insanity that only we feel the consequences of! Changes must be made so we can have guaranteed safety in our health care.
Lastly, we end on a high note out of England! You’ve heard of hot girl walks, wait til you hear about the proper blokes club!
Thanks for listening, learning, and being you. And join us back here every Tuesday for all things uterus, in service to you, uterinekind.
Carol: Do people doubt your lived experience? It comes down to this research and the ERA. I'm Carol Johnson, and this is Hello Uterus.
There is something really off about the decades of dismissal of patient experiences, the funneling of cash to male centric conditions. Pharma focusing on symptoms suppressors rather than getting to the root causes and determining the mechanism of action for drugs that we take on the daily, like , hormonal contraception.
There's this laissez fair attitude woven throughout healthcare for those born female. Essure is a perfect example of this attitude. But before we go there, uterus in the news,
I did some math and it's probably wrong because I did the math, but guess what? This coming year will be our 30th anniversary, so I just wanted to say to you, happy 30th anniversary. 30 years of what you ask. Oh. Oh, well. Just a second. First, let's take a walk down memory lane and view some other remarkable events that occurred in 1993.
The Pentium Microprocessor was introduced by Intel, incredible technological advancement. Windows NT 3.1, released by Microsoft cern. Put the worldwide web software in the public domain, which enabled us to do all the things that we do both good and bad on the internet today, including getting you this podcast.
Dyson sells the first Bagless Cyclonic vacuum cleaner. I had one of those that ate my carpet, but anyway, Cool. Right? Bagless, and then also the space shuttle Endeavor had a mission. Out to the Hubble Space Telescope to repair an optical flaw. They were successful. Oh, and this one, this one is huge. Okay.
Potentially kind of scary, but like from a science perspective and an innovation perspective, just massive. The first cloning of a human embryo by two American scientists. All of that happened in 1993, just 30 years ago, just 30 years ago. It goes so fast. Time goes by so fast. You know what also happened in 1993, and this is what we're celebrating, it was the first time those born female could participate in medical research.
30 years. We've had all of 30 years to catch up on missing out on decades of research on our bodies that could have accelerated our understanding of our systems. Recent evaluations show that those who are assigned female at birth are still underrepresented in clinical trials based on the gender burden of disease. We talked about that in a episode a few weeks ago. It's shocking. The differences are in the multiple, multiple, multiple tens of millions of dollars going to male centric.
Conditions that are primarily experienced in men versus those primarily experienced in female bodies. We still fight so much patriarchal nonsense in society, in medical schools, in the government. And then of course now the government has inserted itself between people and their doctors. So we get disinformation.
Disinformation like this, which is doing so much damage. Let me introduce you to Brad. Brad Cheeta, a former Montana House majority leader who's running for the state senate.
Brad was quoted as saying the follow. The womb is the only organ in a woman's body that serves no specific purpose to her life or wellbeing. He wrote this on Monday, this past Monday, according to the Montana News, I think it was in a, Either in a response or an op-ed. I'm I, but I found it in this article that was posted in the Washington Post and also at MTN News.
He goes on to describe the uterus in this way. It is truly a sanctuary.
That was me heaving.
Continuing and it's so hard. There is only one organ in a woman's body that is not there to serve a purpose for her, and that is her womb. I'm not going to apologize for saying that Cheetah told MTN news. I think that's exactly what it's there for. It welcomes in a new life and that's what it's there to do, to nurture and sustain that life.
And he's not gonna apologize for saying that, this dude got this far. He's 67 years old and never cared or bothered to look at any research he thinks. So therefore it is. Is Brad's way of going through life, he thinks, and therefore it is. seriously, like there is only one organ in a woman's body that is not there to serve a purpose for her, and that is her womb.
Oh geez. I swear I, the images in my mind of what I would say and do if given the opportunity to stand in front of Brad. Yikes. It wouldn't be pretty. Brad, I hope you hear this. You're an uninformed, willfully, uneducated man who doesn't care to know that there is more to the uterus than incubating a fetus.
I feel bad for the women in your life if there are any. For this understanding of anatomy suggests that there are other things that you are wildly uninformed about,
but the opportunity for misinformation, it goes beyond Brad. But what Brad is doing is really damaging. people in Montana will hear this in believe it. They will believe that the uterus is a disposable organ that serves no other purpose except to be the baby bag for a fetus.
And that is complete and utter nonsense from the same Washington Post article from this week. They quote the Cleveland Clinic, the false claim. Brad's false claim goes against long accepted science surrounding the para shaped organ and how it helps in women's reproductive health and. The uterus plays a critical role, not just in the growth and development of a fetus during pregnancy, but also menstruation and fertility.
Here we go again. Yeah, it does that. It for sure does that, But you know what, it does more than that and it, it links to our brains. It's removal affects memory, emotions, and heart health. We do not understand the role that the uterus plays in the body. Why? Because for so long it wasn't a part of our research in the United States because those with the uterus were not permitted to participate in clinical research.
It also is just generally dismissed in a patriarchal society, as are those who are women.
So lack of research, a dismissive attitude. We are not prioritized. We are, are not on equal footing, which is why I keep going back to the era. We're not on equal footing with those with a penis. We just aren't right now. But that's gonna change
while being completely inaccurate. Brad's statement also shows us why we have such limited understanding of the female body. Men remain in control of government, in control of research, medical schools, the delivery of care. Although most caregivers are women, they are trained in a system that is, that was developed by men.
That is, that teaching is largely carried out by.
So he can get away with saying such nonsense because of society's widespread lack of, and disinterest in uterine knowledge. There's like zero curiosity unless you're talking to people who are researchers who have chosen to take their time on this planet as limited as it is and focus on researching uterine and uterine adjacent conditions in the female body.
But generally speaking, from a priority standpoint, we don't rank. And so somebody like Brad, a 67 year old white guy, can walk around and say stuff that is clinically inaccurate, that is just so wildly out of touch with basic science and biology. He can not just get away with it. He's actually saying that while he is running for the Senate so
because now that the government is in the consultation room, while our legs are in stir ups and we're naked from the waist down, we gotta worry about people like Brad
and I'm just, I actually wonder if there are doctors who believe what Brad says. I bet there are some, there's a little tale I'm gonna tell you in a few minutes, that speaks to this. But in general, men parrot these statements because men said them, so they must be true.
And it couldn't be further from the truth. And it's so damaging. It's so damaging. Let's hope Brad doesn't win. And then with all that free time that Brad has, Brad can go back to school after this quick break. The link between Essure, the permanent birth control implant, and the patriarchy.
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Carol: So I was binging documentaries on all things uterus ish, and it was while watching the Bleeding Edge, a documentary that explores the problems within the fda, the approval process for devices, and the response from the medical community when these devices cause problems that I had an aha moment. The documentary opens with a mind blowing story from a hip surgeon.
This was a guy who liked to. Tinker. He was a tinkerer. He liked to build things and then take them apart, and he discovered that that talent and that passion that he had was a really good fit for being an orthopedic surgeon. So he went to med school, became a surgeon. He was also a really avid cyclist and developed some hip problems and found himself needing a hip replacement.
So the same procedure that he was performing on other people, he was now himself going to need to undergo.
He obviously knows all the devices that are available that he can choose from. He's obviously equipped to look at the research study, the information he has, access to the manufacturers and to the sales reps that sell these devices. He had all the tools necessary to make an educated. Informed decision that was the best for him and that supported what he needed.
And because he was very athletic, he made a choice to go with a device, a hip, a metal implant replacement for his hip joint that was made of cobalt because it was it. It would stand up to the long endurance races that he participated in as a cyclist after living with a variety of symptoms after he got his implant symptoms like tremors in his hands, headaches, vision issues, difficulty holding attention on something, his wife ultimately.
Kind of hit the wall and connected the dots when she got a phone call.
That, and in that phone call, she was told that while her husband was at a conference overseas, he had ransacked and destroyed a hotel room. He wrote all over the walls with a pen. I think it might have been a Sharpie. And then she described him writing over that writing in soap and just having a complete and total mental breakdown.
this is an orthopedic surgeon, seemingly a really grounded guy. He's an outdoorsman, he's athletic, he's thoughtful, and here he is in a hotel room while he is at a conference and he loses it and Ranson destroys his room.
He had cobalt poisoning.
He and he had to actually figure this out on his own. He took his own blood and did his own blood analysis, and the, the amount of metal of cobalt detected in his blood was, over a hundred times that which would be seen as problematic.
I mean, that is when you factor in all the steps that were taken to select the right, publicly available implant. He didn't go take some crazy new thing that wasn't out on the market. This is something that is publicly available that he himself had implanted in other people.
look where it landed him. He started reviewing his patients that had come to him and complained of symptoms that he had not connected the dots on symptoms that he had dismissed as not possibly being affiliated with the hip implant. He spoke with the device manufacturer. He spoke with the fda, and then he stopped using cobalt.
But guess what? If you want a cobalt hip, you can still get one. This is on the FDA website. As of today. Different people will react to these metal ions and particles in different ways. At this time, it is not possible to predict who will experience a reaction, what type of reaction they might have, when the reaction will occur, or how severe the reaction will be.
Okay, so should we maybe just pull the COBAL off the market please. Like if you don't know, if it's not possible to predict, then don't use it. I mean, it's just so nuts that something that causes a reaction like this can still be supported by the fda.
That excerpts that I just read is in an article on the FDA's website, fda.gov, and it's titled, Concerns About Metal Hip Implant. It's wild. So the documentary also tells a story about Isha, a harrowing, terrifying, insane story about the permanent sterilization procedure known as Essure. So I wanna tell you a little story first before we dive into what essure is and get detailed because this stood out.
It was so wild to see, and I, I hope that you take the time to watch this documentary. So the story is, There is a meeting called acog. ACOG is the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, and every year they have an annual meeting. I've attended this meeting. Generally speaking, it's booths of manufacturers and the reps are there and the physicians are walking around learning about devices and they're also getting training on devices.
Attending talks about research. If researchers are there to give talks and essentially it's their annual get together. What I've noticed about this meeting is that there's probably one to 2000 physicians in attendance and that the majority of them are not from the us. So when we look at how many obstetricians, and gynecologists we have in the United States lightly attended,
So outside of the meeting, there was gathering of peaceful protestors, people that had been impacted by essure, either themselves or their loved ones. And they were trying to draw attention to this device and express to the physicians that were in attendance that there was grave concern that this device was causing serious complications for people and those complications were being ignore.
So they zero in on a woman who was with the protestors and had a sign, and she goes over and sits down next to a doctor who's outside getting some sunshine. Seems like a happy guy. And they're chatting away and she starts to get into, know, what's going on with, Isha. And he, gestures to the people and, you know, what's, what's up with this?
And she's like, Well, you know, there's a lot of problems happening with this. And he does what so many physicians do. He's like, Well, I don't have those problems. That's what they say. I've heard it dozens of times. I don't have those issues at all. Not an issue for me. And so she gently, she was so good, I would've been like, Dude, are you outta your mind?
And then, you know, he would've gotten up and walked away. But she, she was way more composed and she just very gently was talking to him and she started to get at some things that he didn't have a comeback for and provide some data points that he couldn't argue against. his physical demeanor changed quite a bit.
You could see the curtains draw in front of his face. We've all seen those curtains in consultation rooms. When we question something or we, express our experience and it's dismissed. We see the curtains close in front of the face of the clinician that we're meeting with. Same thing happened here.
Curtain's closed. Then he starts like wave into people he sees and he's looking for an out at any point in time. And very quickly he finds one. Someone says, Hey. He's like, Hey. And then he gets up and goes, That guy would go back to his practice and keep implanting Essure. Essure was approved in 2002, if you haven't heard of it.
Essentially it's two coils made of nickel, which is a metal, and one coil is planted in each of the two fallopian tubes. The fallopian tubes are connected to the uterus and the sperm travels up the fallopian tubes. The eggs travel down the fallopian tubes. It's like a highway, so they take these two metal coils and they stick one in each of the fallopian tubes.
That's Essure. Who thought this was a good idea. We're gonna take metal implants that look like it fell out of a ballpoint pen and we're gonna shove 'em into the fallopian tube because then what's gonna happen is scar tissue is gonna grow in and around those metal implants and then no sperm or egg can travel back and forth.
It's gonna be great. Nobody will get pregnant. Who the thought this was a good idea?
Well, cash, of course, Conceptus the company that invented, and I'm so using air quotes right now because honestly, I think the invention was, Hey, it's Penn seems like it's at a ink. Like, let me just open it up and make sure it's not at, Oh, hey, wow, you know what this coil looks like. It might fit into a fallopian tube.
That's kind of the invention that I'm thinking took place here. Anyway, Conceptus was sold to bear for $1.1 billion in 2003, immediately after the approval of Essure, right? So there's this little company Conceptus, and they're like, Oh my God. We can take the same little metal coils that are in ballpoint pens and we can shrink them down and stick them inside of the fallopian tubes, and nobody's gonna get pregnant.
It's gonna be permanent birth control. It's gonna be amazing. And within it, within a year of approval, they were sold for 1.1 billion.
Now, I don't know, maybe this is a crazy, menopausal thought that I'm having, but isn't tubal lation permanent birth control that involves no implants? But essentially cauterizing or sealing the fallopian tube or cutting it and seal it, like that's a thing. It's been a thing forever.
There have been no reports of, migrating implants with tuba lation. There have been no reports of metal fragments found in the uterus with tubal lation. There's been no reports of tremors, neurological issues with tubal lation. But, along comes conceptus, which had to start with just a few people that came up with this incredible invention and in, in no time after it was approved.
$1.1 billion was transferred. So it's cash. And when cash is more important than people's health, that's when I think patriarchy. Because in a more, balanced society where women are thought of as equal and as deserving the same high level of care and consideration, esher wouldn't have happened.
let's just remark upon the fact that we don't have male birth control. We don't have male birth control because there was side effects and, you know, that would just be bad. One of the side effects was erectile dysfunction, and that was not okay. okay, but you know, Es sure's not okay.
How'd that happen? It happened through this really, really, really slimmed down approval process at the fda. It was finally taken off the market in 2018 by bear, who hemmed and hawed the entire time. Why? Because they paid 1.1 billion for this thing. They don't wanna chuck that. They wanna make that profitable.
Meanwhile, at least 17,000, about one in four of the 75,000 people who got the insurance implant, 17,000, have complained of a wide range of serious, serious injuries, which for many women began as soon as the coils were implanted. As soon as they were implanted. But what about the clinical trials? didn't that show issues?
Well, during the clinical trials, investigators changed some of the patient's responses to questions, focusing in on what they considered to be the primary success point for this device or this implant, which is, did you get pregnant? That was the indicator of success, not Did you have pain, tremors, stuff like that.
No, no. It was Did you get pregnant? Well, no, I didn't get pregnant, but I also, I haven't been able to sleep and my hands are shaking and I can't have sex, and I can't think straight. Okay, look, I'm not here to hear all your women's problems person. I'm just here to figure out if you got pregnant or not.
I mean, that's, that's essentially what it felt like to these people. They changed their answers.
So this lifetime implant was studied for a year and a half before receiving FDA approval. A year and a half, but it's a lifetime implant. Shouldn't we study it for longer? I mean, maybe five years, maybe 10 years. I mean, it's not like we don't have other options for permanent birth control. We could do a tubal ligation in the meantime.
But don't you think we should maybe wait until we find out whether or not this thing has long term consequences? Nobody. Nobody said that , like if anyone did, they probably got fired.
Some of these problems that people had things. Migration of the implant. So the implant leaves the fallopian tube and goes somewhere else. Ectopic pregnancy, abdominal pain, excessive bleeding, perforation of the uterus, meaning that the uterus was punctured to the fallopian tube was punctured by the implant.
The coil breaking apart. The coil breaking apart when it's being extracted, the doctor's attempting to extract it, which they didn't really think about having to take it out. So it literally is just pulling it out. It's just, it would be like, you taking that little metal coil insert in your ballpoint pen, sticking it in your arm, letting scar tissue grow around it for a period of time, and then reaching in with tweezers and ripping it.
There was also allergic reactions to the nickel. I mean, we don't have metal in our bodies. you might wanna study. That happened with the cobalt hip replacements happened with essure. So the craziest thing that I saw in this specific essure, Imaging of people who had more than two coils in their body. Now, why would that happen? You're only supposed to get one coil placed in each of the fallopian tubes. they use a thin tube, the little tool on the end that enables them to insert this thin, thin, thin thing up through your cervix, and then it arcs over and inserts the coil into one fallopian tube and then into another fallopian tube.
But if the doctor screwed up, like, Oh shoot, I'm not really sure where that coil went, or, gosh, I don't, I think I lost that coil. The medical device sales rep in the room instructed them to just use another coil. So people had multiple coils found in their flo tubes, in their uterus.
The practice of physicians training on the job to do difficult procedures that involve very sensitive organs is gross. And I get it. You can't, at a certain point in time, you're gonna be sitting in front of a patient who's gonna be your first patient and you're gonna do that procedure, but to do it one or two times on a pig uterus or something, that it's not enough.
The people who suffer, the people who are getting the implants now, instead of having two coils, they have multiples in one image, it looked like there were six. I mean, how bad was that person at it?
And the fact that we still have medical device reps in the room while treatments are being done. I just, to me, if I could run the world, I would say, Look, you gotta meet a certain threshold and it's gonna be high of competency. You're gonna have to pass a test to be able to perform this treatment. I'm thinking right now of myam ectomies and the fact that my ectomies are not taught in medical, One of the best ways to remove fibroids that are inside the uterine cavity.
they're not taught, it's learned on the job. Their hat's gotta end. It's just, it's not even just the intrusive feeling of having a medical device sales rep in the room while you're having a procedure done gross.
But, maybe I'm just super sensitive to that. But I think if you just look at it from a clinical perspective, why is that person in the room well, in case something goes wrong, or in case the physician needs help, why does the physician need help? Shouldn't the physician know how to do this like really, really, really well?
Which is why we, get preachy here about just a small number of things and one of them is, This, you have to ask your doctor, how many times a month do they perform treatment? A, whatever it is that you are looking at, because you want someone who is doing a high volume. You don't want someone who's doing onesies and twosies.
You want them to be extremely competent at this procedure, and the only way that you become competent as at it is to repeat it over and over and over again. In the same documentary, someone was talking about Intuitive Surgical, which makes the robotic Da Vinci device, and they were talking about how some physicians only train on the device three times.
Have you seen this thing? It looks like a giant spider, but the, regardless, it is a complicated robotic system that requires you to completely change the way your body as the surgeon experiences surgery.
Instead of being right over the body and oriented visually, you're now looking at a screen. Your head is inside of a box. You're seven feet away from the patient,
and you're manipulating these robotic arms remotely. And it's great stuff. yay, until the person isn't trained. And I think our assumption as patients is that they're highly competent at this and super, super well trained. It's not the case. And another, in another episode we'll talk about. The da Vinci robot and hysterectomies,
it's like no matter where you look, you really gotta be on the ball. You have to be on the ball.
These things happen because of things that are kind of out of our control, right? So you have a device that you wanna have approved. There was already a device like yours approved at some point in time by the FDA and was available for sale. If that's the case and your device is similar to that device, then you can bypass a lengthy process of clinical trials and you can shortcut to approval by essentially, you know, saying, And what they're saying is, Well, the other device was approved, so you know, we're gonna look at this one, but we don't have to go through all of the hoops that we had to go through before, because, we've already gone through those hoops except what happens if the device was approved and then was taken off the market.
Can you still use that pathway and rely upon the original approval of that device to expedite your approval for your new device? Why? Yes you can. So if that device was taken off the market because it killed people, you can still fast track your approval because there was a device that was approved and the fact that it was pulled from the market doesn't factor in.
And that my friends is insanity. So yeah, lacks approval process. And then the other thing to take into consideration is that health invention to make cash has runamok it, it is, it's like one of those double edged swords, you know, you wanna cheer on entrepreneurism and, invention and all of that, but, there's this tendency to get crazed over the cash and to focus on that despite what's happening to the people who are being exposed to your products.
And that's why Bear waited until 2018 to pull Essure off the market and they didn't want to do it. It had been pulled off the market in other countries. The United States was the last one.
Research is deprioritized when it comes to female bodies. There is a lack of concern. A lack of curiosity. A lack of interest.
And while 85% of residents in OB GYN programs are female, which is, it's wonderful. Only 27% of department chairs are female. So we still live in a patriarchal system, a system that is run by men and we are still living in times when men do not consider women to be reliable witnesses to their own experiences.
Those men train women, those women treat patients.
I used to email a doctor would clear up most of the problems, but it hasn't played out that way. So there's, there is some sort of like desensitizing that happens through medical school probably by design.
All this stuff makes me am sad, which is mad and sad because we are in a peak opportunity for health invention the next five to 10 years from a technology perspective. They're gonna be wild. They're just gonna be wild to see what we come up with. And I wish that as a society we had gotten a whole lot more maternal and less paternal as we approach this time period, because I'm concerned that it's all just gonna be squirrly.
That we haven't fixed a lot of issues that are systemic. When the foundation is sketchy, all that innovation, if it's even directed in the direction. Female bodies can cause great harm and it has caused great harm.
So coming full circle, not included in clinical trials until 1993 And then in 1993, there wasn't this magical like a women, Yay, come on, come on. No, no, not at all. It was like, Ah, all right. All right, we'll study you. But not a lot . There is still very limited understanding of hormones and their impact, inflammation and its impact disrupting the communication system in the body and the impact of.
Because research on the female body is not valued and it's not financially supported, we get crap like esher and let's, let's just call it crap, cuz I'm telling you, , it might be smaller than the coil in your ballpoint pen, but it's no different. there's nothing magical about this thing. Let's shove some metal up in there and scar tissue will take care of the rest.
I neglected to see how much iShare costs. You can probably buy those coils for like 2 cents and I'm sure it costs more than that.
So crazy.
So my concern is, That people are gonna keep spending billions of dollars creating bad fixes instead of investing in research for the purposes of creating better solutions to health problems. But also one level prior to the solutions. Let's invest in research so that we can understand the female body better.
It has been shafted, totally shafted. We got 30 years, but it's not really 30 years. it's like 30 years with not a lot of cash. And here's some, here's like five bucks. See what you can do.
It seems all the attention is on solutions that can clear through the FDA fast and get to market ASAP so that the cash can start rolling in because we have to pay back the venture capitalists and that new yacht costs a lot of money to gas up. And that's why scientists and researchers who aren't under the thumb of manufacturers are your best friends, your allies.
They are the people who are looking at root causation, What is at the heart of this problem.
They also tend to focus on diagnostics so that it's easier to have these conditions diagnosed rather than symptom suppression. But not everybody. Not everybody. So you need to do your research. And we've talked a little bit about. Some of the, tips and tricks that you can use to figure out if there's hidden agendas at play.
And I think we, we definitely need to do like a workshop on that because, I think it's better if, if we really focus in on studies and maybe, maybe look at 'em live so we can circle and point out the stuff that you have to look for. But here's a tip that I can share with you today. If you want to see if your doctor is being paid by industry, and by that I mean are they being paid by pharmaceutical manufacturers and or medical device manufacturers?
There is a website for that and the address is www.cmscharlesmarysteve.gov cms.gov/open payments. cms.gov/open payments. It's a database where you can go and search up doctors and find out if they're getting cash from industry. Be in the know, be in the know. So what's the move now? Well, ah, don't go it alone.
Don't go it alone. be aware of your mind, sort of carrying you on this wave of this is the solution to my problem. This is gonna make everything better. be wary of that. It, that's that same sort of like sales experience that we have, right? When we like, see this thing that we really want and it might be more than we can afford or it might require us to, to do some stuff that has us feeling a little on edge and.
but we can't resist and we have to go forward and get it right. We've gotta buy those, $2,000 VR goggles that we would never be caught out in public wearing ever. so be, be wary of that. In healthcare, I've talked to a lot of people about that, specific sort of way of looking at hysterectomies that they are the solution to all the ills.
And they're not, they are a last resort surgical solution for a very small set of problems, mainly cancer. And so when you're dealing with, Hmm, early onset of dementia or cancer, and not living, you're, you're gonna have a hysterectomy so that you can maintain your life and then you're gonna work on solutions for the prevention of early onset of dementia.
But you, we all gotta go in knowing what these side effects. Are all about, right? So you get all excited because hip replacement surgeon is like, this stuff is indestructible. And you think, Oh my gosh, this is great. I'm gonna be able to do anything. Yeah. And then you find out, no, you're gonna be in a hotel room, like writing on the walls in a mental breakdown.
And these aren't, this isn't a one off. Like that guy wasn't a one off in his own practice. He had people sitting in front of him with tremors. He himself did not connect the dots until he experienced it himself. And that's part of the problem with uterine healthcare. So that for so long, the people who were performing these treatments did not have a uterus.
So there was just literally no connection, no, no ability to empathize with what the experience felt like and a complete dismissal of symptoms. So don't go it alone, take your time. Don't be lured into this. Quick fix type situation, do your research, and also focus the clinician on diagnosing the root cause of your symptoms.
It's okay to say, You know what, before we start talking about different procedures and different medications, I am going to be adamant about this, Dr. Brad. I need a diagnosis. I require a diagnosis before I'm gonna medicate any symptom, because those symptoms are the evidence and I wanna look at the evidence as it is now and get to the root cause of what's going on before I start screwing with the evidence.
You can do that. You need to do that.
We know so little about the uterus and our reproductive organs so little, and the esher example ought to be a flashing red light, something that even the FDA perceived as having very little likelihood of becoming a problem. And look at what happened. It was bad.
Implants can cause inflammation. We don't understand the role of inflammation in the body. I mean, we understand that it happens and we can say inflammation happens when something gets agitated certain, messengers in the body are rushing to that location to try to determine what they need to do to, to go ahead and heal.
But we don't, understand all of the implications of inflammation. So remember that implants need to be looked at with a great deal of, I'm gonna say skepticism. I think being a skeptic is a really good posture to hold when someone wants to put something in your body,
especially in and around the uterus, right? Like pacemakers are super well tolerated. I haven't looked at the what they're actually made of. Maybe they don't make them outta metal anymore, but they're well tolerated. But implants like IUDs and, Isha, some people don't have an issue with an iu.
Some people do. iShare and IUDs are not at all the same thing. So I don't wanna, I don't, by mentioning them side by side, I don't wanna at all draw a comparison there because the whole experience of the i u D is like, your uterus is not growing Scar tissue around the I u d, it's not a permanent implant.
iShare was designed to be permanent. It was, it was like, shove it in there so that it agitates the fallopian tube so much that scar tissue grows throughout this coil and is, therefore creates a permanent seal. Again, I remind you, tubal allegation's always been a thing. I just, oh my gosh. So in, in conclusion, believe in yourself and your experience.
Don't let doctors blow off your experience and don't you blow off your symptoms and think that you have to power through something. Time matters. Getting to the root causes of your symptoms in as quick a fashion as possible is really, really important.
All right, we'll be right back with ending on a high note.
Whew. Boy, we need this. We need this. That was, that's just a lot of intense information and I look forward to when it can be like light and stuff, but you know, you're not coming to me for like gossip or stuff like that. Like if, if you're listening to Hello Uterus, it's because you might likely be experiencing an intense situation. And then my hope is that the intensity that we bring to what we're doing here at Uterine Kind makes it so you don't have to experience all that intensity and we can do it for you. And then here's, here's something on the high note today that you can do as well. And, Oh man, I just, I don't know why, but this really hit me.
This really, really hit me. So a man, or as he refers to himself, a lad in England was having a hard time, went through a divorce, was feeling super low, and decided to go for a walk. And when he was out walking, he realized, this actually might be even more healing if I wasn't alone. So he filmed himself and he posted to Facebook to see if anybody wanted to join him on his daily walk. He thought thousands might show, I'm not sure why he thought that. Because anybody who's tried to gather thousands together through Facebook's just, it's not that easy. But eventually he wasn't the only guy to show up. The next day, one other guy turned up, they went for a walk and they spent the next eight hours talking and so was born the proper blokes club.
These daily walks turned into daily walks of not just two proper blokes, but sometimes over 30 guys turning up to walk with other guys they don't know and talk about their mental health. when I read this the first time, I totally cried and sobbed and it's happening again. I mean, I'm not gonna cry and sob on the podcast. I'm sure that'll happen at some point in the future, but not today. Dam it. But I, there is something about this that just really affected me that I tapped into, and I think it's because of two things. I think one, we are all so raw and yet we try to show up every day. We try to be brave, we try to be courageous. We show up with so much baggage that we have to carry around, but we show up and we push through the day. And the second thing is that it was guys that.
well, first one guy, but then multiple guys because they told each other, they told their friends about it, or they told a guy that was having a hard time about it and these guys got up in the morning and left their house to go walk together. They could have gone to the gym alone. They could have slept in, they could have done whatever they wanted, but they didn't. They went out and walked among other people who were experiencing problems and used that gathering to help sort of share the burden. So the elixir in these times seems to be vulnerable in safe places to gather and emote and console each other. With healthy boundaries and to connect our bodies through movement outside so that we can feel connected to our environment. And in doing so, we see through the obstacles that blot out our bright futures and we do it with, community and I, and it's so beautiful that this is happening and, and it's grown.
So it, it started in England and now there are places all over the world the where the proper blokes club lives. And I just wanna applaud the guy who started it and. And I think it's like, doesn't have to be blokes. I mean, a lot of people gather in groups to go out and run in the morning or go to the gym or whatever but this was different because he led with his mental health problems. it was that really made this something, it was like stepping out of the hamster wheel and getting into like coziness and being all vulnerable and being willing to gather and admit that we're not okay and that we need each other and we need help.
That you don't have to tackle it alone, that you can, tackle these things from a solid foundation of support with no hidden agendas. People that don't, they don't have an agenda. You know, It's not your parents, it's not your siblings. It's not your best friend who wishes that you didn't have your crappy period because it really bums her out, right? It's none of that. It's like, No, no, no. We're getting together because we are struggling. And so together we can move beyond our struggle by sharing the burden of what we're experiencing and by learning from each other, and that brings healing and that just like, it just floored me. Just a simple thing. Walking in the morning. Another simple thing, taking the time to be. And listen to this podcast. And I wanna thank you for that because I, I imagine that, you know, it might be more fun to like listen to, , cat videos or watch cat videos or listen to, any kind of stuff that we just sort of see as, as comforting.
and this can be a little bit intense because there's so much that we have to unwind in uterine healthcare. So I want you to know, I really appreciate the time that you spend to listen because Cuz I get that's, it would be better if you didn't have to. Right. So thank you for being here. And also if you find this information valuable, would you please. Tell your friends, and please let us know by subscribing and giving us a review wherever you get your podcast. Because in this day and age, that's how the word gets out, that we are here and that we are bringing this content to you. So I really appreciate that. There's a lot of people living with chronic conditions and they need that support, so we're not getting together to walk in the morning, although I would be so open to that . but we're getting together, virtually here. I wanna thank Angel and Maryelle for producing Hello Uterus and for being awesome cuz they're both really awesome.
And also to the team at Uterine Kind and our partners. We are almost there. We are so close. We're just a little under a month away from launching our Uterine Health app. We can't wait to show you what we have created for you. And also coming up next week, we have an interview that I've been looking forward to for months. It is with Truthy, Maha, and Gaia. This is a do not miss conversation. She's the assistant professor of environmental, reproductive, and Women's health in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard th Chan School of Public Health. She is not messing around. Okay. She also serves clinically as a physician specializing in ovulation disorders, reproductive endocrinology, and infertility at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
She also is involved with Apple in their health endeavors, and we're going to get into it. All things environmental and reproductive. So come back next week for that. And thank you for being here. I'm so grateful. And until next week, be well, Be cool. Be kind. Bye.
Angel: The Hello Uterus podcast is For Informational Use Only The content shared here is to not be used to diagnose or treat any medical condition. Please ask your physician about your health and call 911 if it's an emergency. And thank you, Uterine kind for listening.