Douching
is a practice which squirts water or fluid in the vag!na in order to
clean it and has become very popular in recent years.
However, according to scientists, the method doubles the risk of ovarian cancer.
A
poll ran by Express.co.uk has revealed that 29% of 232 women polled
douche regularly, and 57% say they have never done it. 14% of women have
done it once or twice.
Previous
studies have linked the method to ectopic pregnancy, reduced fertility,
yeast infections and pelvic inflammatory disease, and one study has
even linked it to ovarian cancer. Joelle Brown, an epidemiology
professor at the University of California, San Francisco, admits that
the link between douching and ovarian cancer surprised her.
“While
most doctors and the American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists strongly recommend that women do not douche, many women
continue to douche because they falsely perceive douching to have
positive health benefits, such as increased cleanliness.”
Ovarian
cancer is one of the leading cancer killers in the world which is
rarely detected in the early stages as it doesn’t show symptoms until
it’s too late. In the USA alone, about 20 000 women are diagnosed with
it every year, with 14 500 dying from the disease.
A
study published in the Journal of Epidemiology has been following more
than 41 000 women in the USA and Puerto Rico since 2003. The subjects
had a sister with b reast cancer, and had no traces of cancer when they
entered the study. They were aged 35-74.
The
results showed that there were 154 cases of ovarian cancer by 2014, and
women who admitted to douching a year before the study had doubled the
risk of ovarian cancer, which only strengthens the link between the
method and disease.
The
link between douching and ovarian cancer was even stronger when the
authors looked only at women who didn’t have b reast-cancer genes in
their family.
These studies show that you need to avoid douching and clean your vag!na with warm water only.