Beating Cervical Cancer with Vinegar

My brother used to play this song for me after which a bonus section would play — the band being The Swirlies and the song being Wrong Tube from the album Blonder Tongue Audio Baton — their discography is freely downloadable from their site — about how interesting it would be if it turned out that the cure to extremely distressing diseases and cancer came from seemingly bizarre combinations, like twigs from the Brazillian rainforest mixed with Mountain Dew. I have been a life long advocate of more natural remedies, stemming from the fact that my mother subscribed to Prevention magazine as long as I could remember and we were always taken to homeopathic and natural doctors in addition to the more traditional doctors — both were consulted before decisions were made.

I read with glee an article that David W. Boles wrote about using cornstarch instead of talcum powder. It’s great when you can take something we find in nature and make good use of it to help us with our everyday needs.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that there were women in Thailand who were not just fighting but beating cervical cancer — not a minor feat in itself — with the help of vinegar!

Nurses using the new procedure, developed by experts at the Johns Hopkins medical school in the 1990s and endorsed last year by the World Health Organization, brush vinegar on a woman’s cervix. It makes precancerous spots turn white. They can then be immediately frozen off with a metal probe cooled by a tank of carbon dioxide, available from any Coca-Cola bottling plant.

So the vinegar isn’t quite the actual cure for the cancer itself — it leads to the cancer being removed from the women by properly diagnosing it and helping to remove it. When you live in a remove village and it is completely impossible to get access to complex and expensive pap smears that can take a long time to diagnose — time that is costly when your access to medical treatment is rare.

Let us applaud this important find and support efforts to help keeping the people of the world healthy — not just through expensive treatments and billion dollar drug companies but through simple remedies and treatments that can be found in the kitchen cabinet.