In a hysterectomy, a doctor carves out the uterus and usually the cervix (40 percent of the time, the ovaries are also taken) to deal with a number of conditions ranging from cancer to fibroids to severe PMS. The second-most popular surgical procedure on women, hysterectomies are performed 600,000 times per year in the US. Stanley West, MD, calculates: “At that rate, one out of every three women in this country will have had a hysterectomy by the time she reaches her sixtieth birthday.”
The problem is, 70 to 90 percent of the time, the surgery is unnecessary.
For a study published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, researchers eyed the cases of 497 women who had undergone the operation. They assembled a panel of physicians who are experts in various specialties to judge whether the procedure was appropriate in each case. The results were dismal: 70 percent of the hysterectomies shouldn't have been done.
Then the researchers judged the operations based on the guidelines set down by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the outcome was even worse: 76 percent of the operations were deemed “inappropriate.” The researchers write: “The most common reasons recommendations for hysterectomies [were] considered inappropriate were lack of adequate diagnostic evaluation and failure to try alternative treatments before hysterectomy.”
Dr. West, a division chief at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, goes even further, stating that 90 percent are unnecessary. The operation must be done in cases of uterine cancer, which account for 10 percent of hysterectomies. But, the doc says, every other hysterectomy-inducing disorder can be treated with other, less drastic techniques that avoid or greatly lessen the repercussions of uterus removal — namely, sterility (always), depression, memory loss, and other psychological problems (often), lack of sex drive and response (often), heart disease (increased risk), and death (twelve out of 10,000 women die from the procedure).
Uterine fibroids — the cause of a third of hysterectomies — can be cut out individually, if they truly need to be removed at all. Endometriosis, cysts, pain, abnormal bleeding, PIS, uterine prolapse (in which the uterus loses support and heads south), and pelvic inflammatory disease can be treated by surgeries other than hysterectomies, drugs, alternative therapies, and/or other methods.
Dr. West laments:
The surprisingly outdated attitudes doctors harbor toward female patients are a big part of the problem. Some very old-fashioned views remain embedded in medical training. It may take a few more decades and more medical consumerism on the part of women before the old attitudes give way to a more rational and scientific basis for hysterectomy.