Funny, how ironic life can sometimes be. There I was sitting in the waiting room of my friendly neighborhood holistic dentist, waiting to get my mercury fillings removed. On a mission to eliminate my exposure to as many of the harmful toxins that I had learned about as I could, I was now down to the last few items on my hit list. While waiting my turn for the chair, I picked up a popular women’s magazine. Always on the lookout for new and useful information, I attempted to do a little multi-tasking while waiting. There was bound to be some good info here, after all, a top magazine doesn’t get to be a hit with the masses for nothing, does it?
As I flipped through page after page searching for something meaningful, I gradually came to the realization that my search looked futile. The only thing noteworthy seemed to be their outlandish quest to cram in as many pharmaceutical ads as they could. They were literally saturating the pages. I understand that a magazine’s advertising revenue is the bread and butter that allows them to spread their glossy covers across the nation, but I guess I just didn’t realize how influential those advertising companies might be over what lies inside that cover.
As I flipped through the multitude of pages touting everything from aspirin to birth control pills, I finally came upon a substantial looking article. It was about the increase in cases of ovarian cancer and what women can do to protect themselves against it. Under the headline “Prevention,” two of the ways suggested were the following: “Taking birth control pills,” and “having a tubal litigation,” which the article went on to claim, “can reduce your risk by 30 percent. Experts theorize that it stops environmental carcinogens from reaching the ovaries.” Fascinating magazine all right—the audacious irony of it almost made me fall over in my chair!
They were actually suggesting for women to not only take carcinogenic chemicals into their bodies to prevent a problem that can be caused by carcinogenic chemicals (see ’95 study by National Cancer Institute and ’96 Lancet Meta Analysis which found a 24 percent increase of cancer in users of birth control pills), but they were also suggesting that women should just go ahead and go under the knife with invasive surgery instead of simply trying to reduce their exposure to the environmental carcinogens, which, as they even suggest, can be the cause of the problem!
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