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.