女性面临新的保健深坑!
Remember when the internet was having a field day making fun of vaginal steaming - the latest fad popularised by Gwyneth Paltrow, our modern queen of pseudoscientific health nonsense? Health professionals everywhere immediately started warning people about the risk of burns if you tried this dubious remedy - and now they have an actual medical case to point to. The patient, a 62-year-old woman, had tried vaginal steaming at home on the advice of a traditional Chinese doctor. After two sessions of sitting atop a pan of boiling water mixed with unknown herbs, the results - which included an alarming discharge - sent her looking for help at the emergency department. Sadly, the reason this woman steamed her lower parts wasn't for "freshening" or "detoxifying" effects, but rather to try and treat a serious medical condition she'd been struggling with for the past 9 months - stage IV vaginal prolapse. As the name implies, the prolapse of a woman's pelvic organs means that the surrounding tissue and muscle are failing to hold everything in place, a condition that can be quite common after childbirth. It's not always problematic, but this woman's case was severe, with her entire cervix completely outside the vulva. The usual treatment for this is surgery, which the patient had been reluctant to have at first. As gynecologist Magali Robert from the University of Calgary, Canada reports in the case study, the woman eventually consented to the procedure. |