Moody Radio Florida

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Central Florida’s Morning News
with Jim Turner and Dr Walt Larimore

• Seven vaccines you need right now
• Too Much, Too Little Sleep Tied to Ill Health in CDC Study
• IUDs seen to reduce cancer risk
• Quit Smoking: Death Risk Drops Fast
  

Here’s Part 4 from an excerpt from my and Donal O’Mathuna’s book, Alternative Medicine: The options, claims, evidence, how to choose wisely. You find the book here.

16. Is a therapy encouraged simply because it’s been used for centuries by people in some remote place? This might simply mean that those people had nothing else to use. If the best texts on the subject are decades or centuries old, you’ll probably find that many of the old ideas were discredited long ago. Medicine evolves—just think about all we have discovered about nutrition in the last few decades. Continued use adds to our knowledge, uncovers side effects, fine-tunes dosage, and brings change.

A news story out today contends that when a woman uses an Intrauterine Device (IUD) for birth control this “is associated with a 40% reduction in the risk of endometrial cancer.”

Yet, do not be deceived by this alluring headline. The news stories (and the physician quoted) fail to tell you two very important facts:

1) This 40% “relative risk reduction” means that the absolute risk of this very rare cancer will fall from 1 case per 13,333 women to 0.6 cases per 13,333 women per year. In other words, it would take 22,222 women to use the IUD to result in 1 less case of this cancer per year. Whopee!

2) However, there would be many more unborn children lost (or killed) by the IUD.

My bet is that most women, who believe invaluable human life begins at conception, would not want to take this IUD risk.