Cervical & Vaginal Cancer Screening & Prevention
COLPOSCOPY FOR CERVICAL AND VAGINAL HEALTH...
With the epidemic of HPV infection, cervical dysplasia is common and cervical cancer still strikes 13,000 per year and 4100 die of this disease annually in the United States alone. Both of these tragedies are preventable.
Colposcopy used for decades is simply a comfortable and totally painless magnified view of your cervix and upper vagina. It is conducted in the office during a routine pelvic examination. Most women have undergone this test sometime in their past. It is commonly performed to evaluate an abnormal pap smear result, follow-up of a cervical abnormality or a visible abnormality of the cervix. To examine means to look…and this is similar to a dermatologist looking at your skin in detail.
This same test is also useful to identify precancerous conditions (dysplasia i.e. CIN I, II or III) and occasionally invasive cancer of the cervix in the presence of a NORMAL pap smear result. This is because pap smear testing even with the newer liquid medium technology has at least a 20% to 50% false negative rate. That is to say… pap smears done properly and interpreted by an experienced laboratory can miss significant abnormalities 20% to 50% of the time. What happens in these circumstances is that the abnormal cells present are simply not shedding and cannot be acquired during the collection of the sample. We believe that this number is too high to chance. Therefore, we recommend screening colposcopy to improve the overall screening efficacy. Colposcopy fills in the 20% to 50% inherent miss rate. Also, HPV testing by itself is not sufficient in our view for stand-alone screening. We have never missed a condition of dysplasia or cancer of the cervix using the liquid pap and colposcopy together.
Our Mission
To reduce the mortality and morbidity of women’s cancers through education, prevention and early detection.
Candidates for Evaluation
Any woman with a cervix and/or history of abnormal pap smears of dysplasia.