These Essure damages are hard to look at, but as a woman, if you aren't aware of the gruesome truth about the medical device industry and how it preys on women, an image can be worth a thousand words.Introduction to Medical Devices
Quite some time ago, I worked as a medical writer for a company that imported medical devices into the U.S. It was during this time that I first watched the documentary The Bleeding Edge. Just prior to this, my mother had been admitted to a hospital for a bleeding ulcer. She was subjected to a procedure called “fluoroscopy” that I vehemently protested against. Doctors wouldn’t allow me or my mom to refuse though. So she was subjected to 2 hours of radiation, thousands of dollars in extra costs, and in the end, this diagnostic procedure didn’t even work. Read more here. about my mom’s ordeal with medical devices as well as a general overview of my general experiences with the dangers of hernia mesh, another commonly used medical device that causes all kinds of pain and agony in the world.If you don’t know anything about medical devices, take some time to learn. Medical devices are a serious issue and something that every American and every European needs to understand very well. The medical device industry is a shady business. And it is particularly predatory against women.
Medical devices that are approved by the FDA often undergo no scrutiny prior to being approved for use on patients. In other words, any medical device on the market today that’s still under patent likely has not been tested even though it’s been approved. Indeed, the patent laws often run out before reports are in regarding the dangers and risks involved in using the device. The IUD is a relevant example in terms of women’s health. And Essure is another.
The Dangerous American Love Affair with Medical Technology
Medical devices are often used to give patentable life back to drugs like Methylene Blue that have long outlived their original patents. By combining a drug like Methylene Blue with something like, for example, a foot bath that features electrical wires that produce a current of electricity in the water, Big Pharma is able to mark up the overall cost of the Methylene Blue and the footbath and even make a contraption like this available by prescription only for the treatment of diseases like diabetic neuropathy.
You might be thinking, “Hey—it seems unwise to mix electricity and water to treat diabetic patients with nerve pain.” And I would concur. But because medical devices require almost no examination prior to being approved, patients who use them are rather like guinea pigs. And Big Pharma has learned to simply push lawsuits and settlements out as long as possible to try to keep a medical device that’s been patented alive and kicking so that it can continue to make big profits, even at the cost of patient health.
I should note here that Methylene Blue is now available over-the-counter and it is extremely affordable and easy to get. It can be taken orally so there’s no need to mix it with this expensive, “prescription-only” footbath.
This is a reality of all medical devices, including medical devices used to diagnose patients. Americans are particularly in love with technology, so it’s not hard for doctors to sell diagnostics or treatments involving medical devices to patients even though many of these devices are extremely harmful with the power to kill as well as to maim. Women, as I mentioned before, are excellent prey for medical devices and they’re targeted because they make up 50% of the population and every woman who partakes in medical device technologies to diagnose or to treat a problem becomes weaker and less able to fight for her rights against the male-dominated Powers That Be.
Below, we offer two examples of medical devices for women that specifically target reproductive health. Healthy women, as such, are targeted by these big pharmaceutical companies to accept these devices as a form of contraception. In doing so, these women become ill or injured, or worse, they die. New medical devices are constantly being approved by the FDA without any scrutiny. As such, providing examples is all we can do in an article like this. Women must become more savvy and in-the-know about how medical devices can harm them — even medical devices used for diagnosis. If you’re experiencing some kind of health-related situation and your doctor recommends any form of treatment involving technology or a medical device, do your research and look closely at the possible adverse outcomes. Often, the so-called “side effects” and “adverse events” are glossed over with fancy words or low percentages demonstrating how few women might expect to experience problems. So think critically about what The Propaganda Machine wants you to believe and the possible truth about the medical device that your doctor is recommending for treatment / diagnosis before you automatically agree to the procedure.
Essure: Not-So-Permanent Birth Control at a High Cost
Essure was marketed by the company known as Conceptus as a simple way option for permanent birth control. Later, in 2013, the device was purchased by Bayer though word of serious health effects due to Essure had already begun surfacing in 2009. The product, though painful to insert as an outpatient procedure, was a lure to women who didn’t want to undergo surgery as a form of permanent birth control. So doctors learned to pitch their patients this “easy” form of permanent birth control and women lined up to have the procedure never suspecting that the Essure device had never really been tested for safety.To date, over 270,000 women have gotten the Essure implant. The following adverse effects were common as a result of the Essure implant:
- Prolonged bleeding after placement of the Essure implant
- Device failure
- Unintended pregnancy
- Miscarriage
- Improper placement of the device
- Chronic pelvic pain
- Migration of the Essure device
- Organ perforation
- Death (70 women died as a result of the Essure implant)
This is the usual procedure for medical devices of all kinds. They hit the market without being properly tested.
Essure was supposed to be a permanent form of birth control. The device is a 4 centimeter coil made from a combination of stainless, titanium, nickel, platinum, silver, tin, and polyethylene terephthalate fibers. Note that phthalates disrupt testosterone production in the human body. Terephthalate contains phthalates. So this ingredient would have been a vital clue that it would be toxic.
Essure is a medical device that’s implanted in the uterus. This medical device has destroyed women’s health by causing an array of serious health complications.
The Essure device was implanted in women’s bodies as an outpatient procedure that did not involve anesthesia. The procedure was painful and many women experienced nausea, vomiting, and ongoing pelvic pain after the procedure even though they’d been promised a “rapid recovery”.
Essure was supposed to work by causing scar tissue to form around the metal coil. Instead, the coil sometimes migrated out of the uterus into other areas of the body such as the intestines to cause scarring and tissue buildup in other organs. Though the supposed success rate of preventing pregnancy was 99.8%, Essure failed to prevent pregnancy in many women. A number of women developed chronic pain issues due to the metal coil which could not be removed due to the migration of the coil into areas that were not accessible to surgery and due to the fact that scar tissue made it nearly impossible to safely remove it.
On December 31, 2018, Bayer, the pharmaceutical company that owns rights to Essure stopped selling this medical device in the United States. Though Bayer was no longer selling the device, doctors who owned these Essure birth control devices were allowed to continue to implant them for a year after the December, 2018 date. At this point, the product had been on the market for 16 years and it had been a known health hazard for
In September of 2019, Bayer told their customers (i.e. doctors) that Essure units that hadn’t been implanted had to be returned to Bayer before the end of the year. As such, December 31, 2019 marked the date when Essure units stopped being available for implantation. In other words, though information about the seriously negative effects of this device were available for years, the legal system in the U.S. allowed Essure to continue to be offered to women. Bayer was thus able to continue to make profits on this tiny torture device that was sold only to women to squeeze out more profits from its product.
Conceptus developed Essure and got it approved in 2002. And though women began experiencing complications due to Essure implantation and reports rolled in within just 5 years after Essure was released, the device was not removed from the market for well-beyond its patentable lifetime, until 2020 (18 years). In other words, the drug companies were able to make plenty of profits off Essure to ensure their continued reign of terror and the payout to the patients (approximately $45,000 per patient) whose lives were damaged or ruined were not even enough, in many cases, to pay for the medical treatments that became necessary due to Essure damages.
The Facebook group “Essure Problems” was developed and 20,000 women joined the group which made it possible for the women to file adverse event reports with the FDA and lobby for consumer protection against the dangerous Essure device.
IUD ParaGuard
The ParaGuard IUD is also a birth control device. It is a copper intrauterine device (IUD) that thousands of American women had implanted as a long-term birth control option. The ParaGuard IUD dangers are well-known in the legal world and they’re quite serious, but many women have no knowledge of the harm caused by ParaGuard. Indeed, this device is marketed with the slogan:“Simple, Honest Pregnancy Prevention.”
The ParaGuard was one of five IUDs on the market and it was the only one that was free of hormones. Women liked that idea. They didn’t want their bodies to be controlled by synthetic hormones, a topic we discuss in greater depth here. So this hormone-free copper IUD seemed like a good choice. It was, after all, hormone-free birth control. So women thought they were dodging a bullet by steering away from birth control pills and synthetic hormones.
Drug companies claimed that the ParaGuard IUD was safe but like all medical devices, it was not properly tested before going to market. Currently, there are numerous lawsuits claiming that there is a manufacturing flaw that causes the ParaGuard IUD to break before or during its removal from the body, essentially leaving behind bits and pieces of copper and plastic that lodge in the uterus or in some other organ of the body.
Though knowledge of these serious issues existed for a number of years, prior to 2019, the ParaGuard IUD didn’t come with any kind of warning prompting women to seek legal action due to the fact that they weren’t warned of the ParaGuard IUD risks in advance. As a result, in 2019, the FDA finally ordered Teva Pharmaceuticals, the ParaGuard manufacturer to include a warning about the IUD risks saying that it can break and get permanently lodged inside the body.
The warning put in place by Teva Pharmaceuticals follows a pattern similar to how Bayer dealt with Essure. Though this IUD presents clear health hazards, Teva was vague in how it worded its warning to doctors to purposely understate the negative effects of ParaGuard. Teva is obviously not worried about losing money in a settlement as this device is able to turn a huge profit each year as long as women continue to trust their doctors and Big Pharma blindly without doing research into medical devices that have been specifically designed to prey on women.
The ParaGuard has been in use since the 1980s. It was designed to be inserted and to stay in place for up to 12 years. So women who believe that the longevity of a treatment or medical device is a measure of its safety should think again. Longevity in the world of pharmaceuticals is all about money as a buttress to protect a given treatment or medical device against litigation.
Dangers of the ParaGuard IUD
The ParaGuard IUD, though it is “hormone-free” can cause the following negative effects:- Chronic Pain (even after it’s been removed from the body)
- Infertility (even after it’s been removed from the body)
- Organ damage that requires surgery that may not be covered by health insurance
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ParaGuard Breaking During Removal: Natural Treatment to Prevent Scar Tissue Formation
The ParaGuard IUD and Essure are just two medical devices that cause harm at least in part by migrating out of position and/or causing the inappropriate buildup of scar tissue. If you’ve had a medical device implanted in your body and it’s migrated out of position (including, for example, hernia mesh), consider applying Castor Oil packs to the abdomen to soften and release scar tissue buildup around the device. Read more about how to do Castor Oil packs here.
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Natural Hormone Free Birth Control Options
Many women experience nasty birth control pill side effects and as a result, they wish to avoid synthetic hormones, but they don't know how to do it. Also, with the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, women feel desperate to protect sexual freedom by seeking out any kind of birth control method that may or may not safe. Many women don't have a lot of disposable funds such that some women have even resorted to trying to remove the ParaGuard IUD at home in order to save just a couple hundred bucks. So we wanted to note here that Neem is a powerful, hormone-free birth control herb. You can read more about Neem here.
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Herbal Abortifacient Herb List / Herbs to Avoid During Pregnancy
As another important layer of information in this discussion regarding hormone-free birth control, readers might be interested in learning more about herbal abortion options, their rates of effectiveness and how to use them. Read more about herbs that cause abortion here.
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Resources:
• Documentary The Bleeding Edge.
• Moncivais, K (2020). Bayer Announces Settlement Signaling the End for Essure Lawsuits. Retrieved November 28, 2022 from https://www.consumersafety.org/news/essure-settlement/
• U.S. Food and Drug (n.d.). Essure Permanent Birth Control. Retrieved November 28, 2022 from https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/implants-and-prosthetics/essure-permanent-birth-control
• Sokolove Law Team (2021). Is ParaGuard Dangerous? Here’s What To Know. Retrieved November 28, 2022 from https://www.sokolovelaw.com/blog/is-paragard-dangerous/
• (2002). Paraguard Intrauterine Copper Contraceptive: Simple, Honest Pregnancy Prevention. Retrieved November 30, 2022 from https://www.paragard.com/
