TYLER TOLMAN BLOG
How Accurate is a Pap Smear? | Things You Need To Know
How Accurate is a Pap Smear? | Things You Need To Know
Ladies, today I’ll be answering a question that you’ve all probably asked yourself at one point in time: how often should you have a pap smear test?
As you all know, pap smears are designed to detect cervical cancer. However research shows that there is a 67% inaccuracy with pap smear tests.
Pap smears can also be stressful, may cause discomfort, and can sometimes lead to cramps and bleeding. It’s no wonder that I’ve been asked this question, because in reality, women don’t want or need to have any of that!
So How Often Do You Really Need One?
If you follow the content that I share, you’ll notice a very important pattern: I promote safe, natural ways for you to heal your body, become healthier, and get more out of life. This includes eating a clean, high raw diet consisting of fruits, vegetables, grains and water, getting out in the sun and exercising, and replacing junk foods with whole foods.
All of these recommendations aren’t just to make you healthy, but to KEEP you healthy. By keeping healthy, you may decrease your chances of developing diseases such as cervical cancer, and may not feel the need to go for testing as often.
What Causes Inaccurate Test Results?
The thing about the uterus and the entire female reproductive system is you have to understand that things can affect it. Stress levels can affect the cells inside the uterus, hormone imbalances can affect it, puberty can affect it, just having sex can actually create abnormal cells within the uterus! So if you go and have a pap smear and you have some of those abnormal cells going on, you could very likely be diagnosed as have cervical or uterine cancer.
Once you receive a diagnosis like that, there’s all kinds of other tests and things they will want to do. They may even suggest removing your uterus!
The most important thing to remember is that your body actually heals itself. Your body can go through a level of even having cancerous cells going on and can renew itself. Women have a period every month and renew and bleed and get rid of a lot of stuff and then their body heals itself up.
Other Things to Consider
When it comes to reproductive health, especially for women, there are other things to consider. If you are using feminine hygiene products like tampons and pads, you need to understand that some of these have all types of different chemicals in them which can cause issues.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a pap smear test involves scraping the walls of the uterus and this can actually lead to even more problems and issues.
So if you look into the research on these tests, you will find that there’s a high false positive rate. In fact, there’s actually a 67% inaccuracy rate with pap smears! Meaning, if you get one, you have a very high chance that the results could come back showing you have some issues and then they will want to do other tests.
The additional tests they are likely to want to do can be even more invasive – biopsies, scrapings and other things that then really aggravate the reproductive system. This sort of aggravation could leave to even more issues and, potentially, even cancer.
The thing to really understand is that cancer within the reproductive system for women typically takes anywhere from 5 to 10 years to grow to a point where it can become a problem and could be life threatening. So if you are really set on having a pap smear then I wouldn’t suggest doing it any more than once every 5 years.
Things YOU Can Do ...
Now I would recommend avoiding women’s personal hygiene products that have chemicals in them. Try to get products with organic cotton or use options that aren’t adding extra levels of toxicity to the body.
Eat a clean, healthy diet with fresh fruits in the morning, smoothies and juices, salads and whole food wraps in the afternoon and get your protein at night preferably from lentils, beans, nuts, seeds, tofu, tempe, these kinds of things. Make sure you are eating a wide variety of colourful vegetables, nutritious greens and fresh fruits. These have antioxidants that have the ability to detox the body. They have all the minerals and all the nutrients that are going to keep you really healthy.
Make sure you are doing a level of exercise every day that is enough so you break out in a sweat to build the body and detox.
Keep yourself adequately hydrated and get out in the sun!
All these basic things will help to you stay really healthy. Now if you really want to get checked out and find out, there are other methods and new options coming out which are a little less invasive than a pap smear.
So my opinion is that if you have the right diet and lifestyle, you won’t really need to have a pap smear test. BUT if you are going to, then maybe only once every 5 years.
Until next time!
Thanks for reading!
