This just in from PRWire (see the part in bold)….

Front Range Primary Care Opens 2nd Family Medicine Clinic

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Have you heard of Kathleen Slattery–Moschkau? She’s a mom, wife and former drug-pusher (her words, not mine) who’s reformed, and using her zeal against big pharma to promote all things healthy, whole and fun. She’s gone from rebel with a cause to writer, radio talk show host, and movie producer–still with a cause.

Well, one of her creative and great ideas is Prevention, Not Prescriptions Tuesdays, which is a jazzy blog idea to cultivate conversation, inter-blog promotion, and promote holistic and preventative health care.

Well, the outlook of Natural Family Planning and Fertility Awareness advocates definitely jives with Kathleen’s sassy and smart pro-woman, pro-wellness outlook, so I thought I’d spread the word. I’ll be doing my darndest to jump on the PNP Tuesday train. If you have a pro-fertility blog, whatever your focus is, I’d encourage you to consider it, and jump on board. Here’s the deal:

What is Prevention Not Prescriptions?
It’s a simple blog carnival held every Tuesday specifically organized around the idea of ‘Prevention Not Prescriptions’. It’s information and inspiration. It’s for the bloggers, doctors, journalists, moms, dads, teachers, alternative health practitioners and everyone else who has had it up to here! with the status quo of a society pushing and turning to prescription drugs as a quick fix for their bodies or their lives.

If it relates to healthier living, we want to hear it. Here are a few ideas of things you can post…

• Advice/suggestions
• Your personal anecdotes
• Commentary on related headlines
• Film/media reviews
• The politics of pills and health (as it relates to prevention)
• Fitness, stress, nutrition related information (and yes, even recipes)
• Anything that might get others fired up to think twice before they pop that next Rx pill

We’d love to hear from and offer up a variety of voices and topics. There are no weekly themes. And participation is super easy…

Here’s how it works:

If you have a blog entry or article related to healthy living that you’d like to share, email us the link at anytime.  If your post is from your archives, please repost it so it’s a current entry on your site, or write a new entry directing people back to your archived post.

There’s only one hitch…you must include a link back here so that others can find out how to participate.  If you don’t provide a link back to this page, you will not be included. We’ll compile all links that come in during the week into one blog entry that we’ll post on The Kathleen Show blog the following Tuesday.

• • Links must be received by Noon CT on Monday to be included in Tuesday’s post.
  • And don’t forget to join the conversation.  Create a personal Typepad profile and leave a comment about your post once it’s up.  You’ll be able to find your entry and create a profile directly at The Kathleen Show blog the Tuesday after you submit your link.
  • We’ll also have a running archive below where you’ll be able to find past week’s posts.

From Taking Charge of Your Fertility:

Do you realize that a part of every single one of us resided inside our maternal grandmother’s uterus, even before our own mothers were born? Unlike male fetuses which contain no sperm, female fetuses already contain all the eggs that the newborn child will ever have. What that means, practically speaking, is that when your mother was just a fetus inside hermother, she already had developed one of the eggs that eventually became you.

Wow.

 Developed migraines since starting the Pill? Have you had a pesky blood clot go to your lung or brain? Those darn birth control Pills may have been at it again!

I just found this great web site, a feminist support site devoted to educating people on the dangers of the Pill, aptly named “Ditch the Pill.” About the group whose entire non-sectarian goal is to empower women:

DitchThePill.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to the understanding, research and treatment of women’s health concerns caused by the toxic side effects of birth control pills (BCP’s).  It was created in response to what is becoming a growing epidemic of health problems in women over the last 50 years, beginning with the introduction of oral contraceptives.

DitchThePill.org strongly feels that women should have a vital part in managing medical decisions regarding their own health.  Prescription medications, particularly in the form of oral contraceptives, have unknowingly caused an epidemic of health problems in women since the advent of the Pill in the 1960’s.

Have you been told that taking BCP’s are the only way to prevent your family history of ovarian cancer? Oops, that’s not entirely supported anymore.

What’s the alternative, to a hormone-free, pro-fertility, pro-woman approach?

Shockingly (!), I’m going to suggest natural methods of family planning. You’re going to have to go elsewhere from this site to find information on Natural Family Planning (NFP), because, strangely enough, they don’t know all that much about modern NFP. Guess who’s going to give them a call today? Maybe you should too (281-962-4264).

NFP/ Fertility Awareness Resources:

• Secular NFP, or Fertility Awareness Method (FAM)–this is a great book and educationally amazing for women, although it advocates the option of using barrier methods during a woman’s fertile time, which some readers may be opposed to.
• NFP Background info–religious base (same science)

6.2 million women experience some sort of compromised fertility in the United States. Are you one of them? If you are blessed with your full fertility, chances are you know someone who struggles with or has struggled with it.

In this FertilityCare Consult episode, show number fourteen on Infertility, Dr. Thomas Hilgers talks about the major differences between the ordinary approach to treating infertility and the FertilityCare and NaProTechnology way. The ordinary way is to treat the symptoms, and if all else fails, try IVF. The NaProTechnology way is to begin learning about and charting your cycle through the Creighton Method of FertilityCare, then working with your FertilityCare Practitioner and Medical Consultant to identify and diagnose the underlying problem to the compromised fertility. Napro treats the disease, not the symptom, and with much higher success, lower cost and much less suffering.

Do you know the success rate of pregnancies achieved and carried to term with IVF? It’s in the low to mid 20 %. With the Creighton Method of FertilityCare (charting your cycle) and subsequent diagnoses and treatment, do you know what the success rate is? At the lowest, it’s around 35%, and at best 80%, depending on the underlying cause.

If you’ve been having difficulty achieving a pregnancy, or have had recurrent miscarriages, you’ll definitely want to listen to this episode. You may wish to follow up by listening to the episode on Recurrent Miscarriages. So many people have amazing stories of going through the IVF process, only to find disappointment or disillusionment. But there is hope. Please pass this on to any one who might be interested or find healing in new hope for infertility, as well as insight for women’s wellness.

I nixed the Teens and Birth Control show on the FertilityCare iPod queue because it was more moral and cultural commentary than about diagnosing young women’s menstrual issues. It was a good show, and a little insightful into the average teen-and-mother/ doctor experience; i.e., what the doctor says when prescribing versus what he really things, and the general lack of knowledge into women’s wellness. What it comes down to is that typical Ob/Gyns are not prepared to identify, diagnose and treat girls’ or womens’ wellness issues without the Pill. There’s a lot of reasons for this–lack of education, contraceptive bias, pharma kickbacks for prescribing the Pill, etc.–but in the end, the Pill serves as a band aid over the underlying issue, which may persist for years and cause problems down the line. However, I was looking for more of the medical/ fertility commentary on that issue.

Which brings me to the next episode I’d like to feature: Women Healed: Infertility. In this episode Dr. Hilgers talks about FertilityCare vs. IVF, and why FertilityCare blows IVF out of the water, not only for helping people conceive, but also for treating their fertility issues. His years of research and medical practice developed into something called NaProTechnology, or Natural Procreative Technology. It’s a major breakthrough for reproductive science, offering real solutions to some real issues:

• Infertility
• Menstrual Cramps
• Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS)
• Ovarian Cysts
• Irregular or abnormal bleeding
• Polycystic ovarian disease
• Repetitive miscarriage
• Postpartum depression
• Prematurity prevention
• Hormonal abnormalities

…and so on.

It’s really quite astounding once one looks into NaProTechnology, which is a fertility-based women’s care, not fertility-control, or fertility-suppression methods. It works with your whole body because fertility is a state of wellness, not a disease to treat. Dr. Hilgers has put together a book of the same title of this post, which you can find here. Are you ready to find out more about being healed?

This seems to be news to some– though sadly not on the radar of many–but Dr. Chris Kahlenborn has been saying this for years: taking synthetic hormones, namely hormonal replacement pills and oral contraceptives, for a sustained period of time greatly increases a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.

At the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium this past Saturday, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles presented the results of the study sponsored by the Women’s Health Initiative. The AP reported,

“Taking menopause hormones for five years doubles the risk for breast cancer, according to a new analysis of a big federal study that reveals the most dramatic evidence yet of the dangers of these still-popular pills.”

While the researchers emphasize that the pill use should be avoided if possible, they admit that some menopausal symptoms may be so severe that a short term risk may be worth taking hormonal replacement therapy, as long as the dose is as low as possible and continued for a short duration.

Now we can’t play chicken little every time a new study comes out, but when the sample size of a study is so large, and the results are published without a lot of controversy in the medical community (this isn’t the only litmus test, because certainly there’s a lot of valid claims that are disputed by the establishment), it makes one wonder.

It makes me wonder why nobody is connecting this to oral contraceptives? Is it about the machine of so called “big pharma”? Is it because of a cultural pride that refuses to black list the Pill because it was the so-called liberator of the sexual revolution? As contemporary sociologists have shown, most of the promises of the sexual revolution were empty, and the weapons of revolution like the Pill, have only served to contribute to the divorce explosion of the seventies, higher rates of single parenthood, low levels of participatory fathers, increased levels of delinquency–and the poor and minorities have paid the heaviest price.

This isn’t about having an axe to grind–it’s about waking up! When are we going to give up our political pride and social hubris and realize that contaceptives, and in a particular way, oral contraceptives, have not done women, families and society any favors? Janet Smith says this issue is a time bomb waiting to explode, another Big Tobacco waiting to happen, and it will only be a matter of time.

If you’re not convinced, here’s some simple suggestions for your journey to a fuller truth about the ills of synthetic hormones:

• Read Kahlenborn’s, “Breast Cancer,” and see what you think. It’s only $6. That’s a couple coffees, or the price of tampons. You can do it.
•  Listen to Janet Smith’s “Contraception: Why Not.” Distributed a million times over, this can’t just be the enthusiasm of so-called “fundies.” I prefer the revised edition because she draws from a lot of science and anthropology.
• Google “birth control” and “lawsuit”
• Read “Protecting the Pill” by Carolyn Moynihan

If you’re convinced, on board and passionate about this message, I encourage you to:

• Stop taking contraceptives if you are, for the sake of your soul, mind, body and family. Take an NFP class.
• Give informative brochures away, leave them in bathrooms, or perhaps more creatively, put them in envelopes when you pay your bills (if your’e still paying by snail mail)!
• Give out copies of “Contraception: Why Not” revised edition. They’re cheap when you order them in quantity! Make sure these are in your church foyer, especially if you’re Catholic.
• Educate medical professionals you know with the recommended resources, and ask informed medical professionals who are convinced of this message to coach you how to speak to other doctors about this.
• Print out copies of these studies and give them to your physicians and pharmacists.

Spread the message! Link to this post, and work for the true dignity of women and families. Contraception divides families and poisons women. It’s not worth the risk.

Chris McGregor continues her interviews with Dr. Thomas Hilgers. We continue from the last post with “Contraception, p.2.” Dr. Hilgers talks about the orgin of the IUD (camels? really?), development of contraceptive technology, the politics of redefining pregnancy, the side effects of it all…

Dr. Thomas Hilgers is a rock star of reproductive health. Truly is on the avant-garde of  women’s health, and  his groundbreaking work is hidden from the masses. He approaches fertility as something beautiful and dignified,  rather than the disease that many people think it is. He’s the Director of the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and the National Center for Women’s Health in Omaha, Nebraska. Last year he teamed up with an Omaha radio station to produce a number of shows. This week’s feature is Contraception, Part1.

About Dr. Hilgers: Thomas W. Hilgers, MD, is the director of the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and the National Center for Women’s Health in Omaha, Nebraska. Working at the St. Louis University and Creighton University Schools of Medicine, Hilgers and his coworkers developed the Creighton Model FertilityCare System. Dr. Hilgers is currently a senior medical consultant in obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive medicine and surgery at the Pope Paul VI Institute. He is a clinical professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Creighton University School of Medicine, Omaha, Nebraska. In 1994, Dr. Hilgers was appointed to permanent membership to the Pontifical Academy for Life. In 2004, Dr. Hilgers published the definitive textbook on natural procreative technology, The Medical and Surgical Practice of NaProTECHNOLOGY.

Henry Tanner, 1898.

Zenit published a piece recently about the US Catholic Bishop’s approving a blessing for the newly conceived, to be prayed either at Mass or outside Mass. The next step is approval by the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship & Sacraments. Since conception is the real “birth day” of the person, it’s very appropriate to celebrate conception! The Annunciation is the liturgical solemnity in the Church, so why not make it extra special for the domestic church?