The Truth About Smear Tests 'They' Don't Want You To Know

The Truth

About

Smear Tests

‘They’

don’t want

YOU to know

Meet the authors

Ada, Alex, Angela, Chrissy,

Diane, Eliz, Kat, Linda,Su

& join our lively

discussion at

www.forwomenseyesonly.com

Published

December 2015

Contents

Foreword by Hippocrates

Introduction

Fleas, Fiddles, Nazis &

the giant leap into Women’s Vagina’s

by Linda

The shameful history of the British Cervical

Screening Programme, by A. V. Wells

Diane’s Story

Chrissy’s Story

A Short Thesis on Bums by Linda

Ada’s Story

Linda’s Story

Unconventional Attacks &

Iatrogenic Assault, by Alex

Kat’s Story

Suzanne’s Story

Hit That Target! by Linda

Angela’s Story

Eliz’s Story

Bibliography

Foreword

Medicine is of all the arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, form a judgment of them, it is at present far behind all the other arts. Their mistake appears to me to arise principally from this, that in the cities there is no punishment connected with the practice of medicine except disgrace, and that does not hurt those who are familiar with it. Such persons are the figures which are introduced in tragedies, for as they have the shape, and dress, and personal appearance of an actor, but are not actors, so also physicians are many in title but very few in reality.

Hippocrates 460-370BC

Introduction

With the advent of the Internet and increasing access to once hidden away medical journals, women around the World are discovering for themselves that incidence of Cervical Cancer is extremely rare. Rare enough for us to begin questioning why doctors and nurses insist on having intimate access to our genitals on a frequent, ongoing, (in many countries, annual) basis for our entire adult lives.

For the past thirty years, in every country, around the globe, when a women makes an appointment to see her doctor, no matter what she presents with, whether it be anxiety, depression, headaches, coughs and colds, or any other ailment, if she is ‘overdue’ for her smear, the first thing a doctor will want to do, is for her to remove her underwear in order for them to look inside her vagina to check her cervix for cancer.

Their focus, is not on us as women, but entirely on a small part of our anatomy, which is barely two centimetres in diameter, and unfortunately for us, located far up within the most private place of our body. Yet this small, usually inconspicuous piece of flesh, totally dominates the conversation during every consult.

Forced smear testing of all adult women is an archaic, degrading and dehumanising ritual fostered on us by the outdated mindset of the medical profession. A profession that gave us Mercury to drink, used leeches to drain our blood, tied dead pigeons to our feet, inserted acid enemas to rot our guts.

This highly unreliable, virtually useless, and particularly invasive test invented nearly a century ago - in this modern, dynamic, vibrant world, has no place.

A consequence of this manner of testing has been the unnecessary harming of millions who trusted our doctors enough to hand over our bodies to them. Countless millions more have been tricked into believing the timely removal of suspicious looking cells actually saved their lives.

What follows is just a few of these women’s accounts … Women who until now have had their comments and complaints scrubbed from many medical sites. Experiences effectively silenced. Silenced that is … until now …

*

Fleas, Fiddles, Nazis

& the giant leap into Women’s Vagina’s

by Linda

Georgios Nikolaou Papanikolaou was the inventor of the ‘Smear Test’ or the ‘Pap Smear’ as it is more widely known.

He was born in 1883, the third child of Nikolas and Maria Papanikolaou and raised with his two sisters and brother in a small town on the island of Euboea, Greece.

In his early twenties, he studied medicine at the University of Athens. Upon leaving, he was conscripted into the Greek army to work as a medic.

On discharge two years later, he faced a decision: practice medicine on Euboea or continue as a medic in the military. Having no interest in holding down a job, Papanikolaou convinced his wealthy father to finance additional education in Jena, Germany. In 1907 he began to study zoology under Ernest Haeckel.

Haeckel was an ardent supporter of white race supremacy, who earlier had conducted ‘scientific’ experiments on the feet of black people to show their ‘opposable big toes’ proved that they had ‘come down from the trees’ much later than white people, proving ‘Negroes’ were ‘less civilised.’ A great deal of this rogue professor’s work was later utilised by the Nazis for their propaganda campaigns against ‘non Aryan races.’

Despite studying in this backwards environment, Papanikolaou was awarded a PhD three years later for his thesis on fleas, Sex differentiation of the Daphnia which looked at the sexual determination of the water flea. (What makes them male or female and how they have sex.) Yes, that’s right a - PhD on fleas.

Returning to Greece to pursue a career in biologic research, while on the journey home, he met Andromache ‘Mary’ Mavroyeni. They married on Sept. 25, 1910.

A few years later they decided to emigrate to America. When Papanikolaou and Mary landed at Ellis Island in 1913 the couple did what they could to survive in New York City. During the day he was a salesman, selling mats, rugs and carpets at a well known department store and of an evening he earned extra money playing his fiddle at local restaurants to entertain diners. Mary took a job working as a seamstress to create extra income.

Within a year of arriving, somehow he managed to secure a position at New York Hospital as an assistant in the Pathology Department. He stayed there for a short time before moving to the Department of Anatomy at Cornell Medical College.

At the time, (for reasons never made clear) the department was studying the effects of alcohol on guinea pigs and their offspring.

Georgios rapidly bored getting the little fury things drunk, finding the experiments useless and unnecessary. He was still interested in the sexual determination of living organisms. Making an application to the college for money, he was given funding to conduct experiments on a small number of the more sober female animals. The ensuing research, involved the study of pre-ovulatory guinea-pigs.

The experiments required obtaining the ova of the female guinea pigs at a precise stage of development near ovulation. He was interested in examination of the vaginal contents of a number of females every day to determine whether female guinea pigs had oestrous changes. Inserting a human nasal speculum into each of each female guinea pigs, he made daily observations of their discharge. Later, he decided to take smears so that microscopic changes could be assessed. He discovered that the oestrous cycle occurred for 24 hours every 15 or 16 days.

In 1920, he began to use his technique of examining smears under the microscope to study human female cytology. 

His wife, Mary, was his first and long term, human subject.  Along with smears samples from her, (taken every morning after breakfast over a period of twenty one years.) Papanikolaou then began to wish for more subjects to compare his results.  So Mary asked ten friends over for a party, where they too agreed to be sampled.

The following Sunday evening after a light tea, one by one, Mary lead each of her nervous friends into their parlour, in which her husband had prepared his instruments to examine each of the women and take samples from their cervix’s. Things were going well until 9pm when one of the ladies’ husband turned up at their door looking for his wife. A big argument ensued and the police were called. The ‘party’ was broken up but by then Papanikolou had taken all his samples.

However, some weeks later, when he was allowed time and equipment to examine the samples, one of these women was discovered to have ‘unusual’ cells on her slide.

The Water Flea expert contacted her and examined her a second time, taking the smear to be seen by a proper cytology doctor at Cornell.  They both agreed there were ‘unusual’ cells on the slide.

The University was interested in his finding and in 1925 and began a joint study with the Woman’s Hospital of the City of New York.

Initially, examining samples from twelve women that worked at the hospital and later collecting samples from surgical and pregnant patients, (who in a telling insight of what was ahead were told the procedure was a ‘legal’ requirement of their admittance, were the very first of what was to be a long procession of ‘coerced women’) he went on to publish an article on his research called , The Diagnosis of Early Human Pregnancy by the Vaginal Smear Method.

Under examination of the slide, taken from a smear of one of his patients suffering from uterine cancers, Papanikolaou demonstrated abnormal cells could be plainly observed under a microscope.

At the time, there was very little enthusiasm from his fellow pathologists as cervical cancer was considered an ‘unusual cancer’ due to its rarity. They thought he would be better concentrating his efforts on the cure for more pressing concerns such as stomach and lung cancers which affected a great many more people.  Alarmingly, his colleagues also voiced concerns about the specifity of the test. Demonstrating how easy it was to determine cancer was present on the test slides when it wasn’t, and more worryingly how often it failed to detect cancer when it was present.

However, just a few years later, the American Cancer Society was established. Having received huge amounts of funding in donations from well meaning benefactors as well as several government grants, it began to look around for new forms of cancer treatments to develop and utilize. Ignoring the very vocal concerns about the test by Papanikolau’s colleagues, by 1945 this new organization began pushing and educating hospital administrators about the perceived usefulness of the Pap Smear Test. 

Papanikolaou, realising the possible shortcomings of the test himself, began focusing his energies on training pathologists and cytologists on using what he saw as the correct cytological techniques.  Prior to that time, he haphazardly trained interested people in his laboratory of an evening when most of the staff had gone home. 

The following year in 1948, the First National Cytology Conference in Boston was held.  The conference members felt that although there was some value in using the ‘Smear’ test, they did not feel an extensive campaign should be made until more pathologists accepted the test and were trained to conduct it properly.  (Training people

in reading the slides was important in making accurate diagnoses.) 

The American Cancer Society began putting the full