WoW (war on women) News Today: Let's stop indulging in all these wasteful, luxurious pap smears!

[elehhhhna]

Your Future Just Got a Little Less Pap Smeary

Ever since the Republicans began waging their backwards little War on Women, all the talk about between-the-legs matters has focused on the evils of contraception. So it's been easy to forget that there are other dangerous things that can happen to our lady parts besides rampant sluttiness. One of them is cervical cancer, and interestingly there are new guidelines just out from the American Cancer Society that recommend women get screened less often for it than had previously been recommended. Hooray?

http://jezebel.com/

[spooky3]

1. Actually, I think this is a good thing, if the research can be believed.

My OB-GYN has followed this policy for several years because she does not believe that there is enough value in doing Pap smears yearly, especially for women who have to pay out of pocket for them.

In the article linked at the site you linked:

"Frequent testing can also cause real damage. Pap tests often result in false alarms, which lead to more procedures to check for cancer. These can end up damaging the cervix, and the more of these follow-up procedures you have, the higher the risk of causing problems for women later, if they want to have children. The other factor is that the HPV test changes things. Saslow says, "The addition of this HPV test adds so much accuracy to the result that screening more frequently than five years will again be more harmful and not more beneficial."