A number of women have been hospitalised after trying to stop their periods by applying a vacuum to their vaginas, a nurse has claimed.
A nurse in Seattle, Washington State, claims that in the space of a week, a couple of women were rushed into hospital suffering from "shock", after the unorthodox period prevention gambit backfired horribly.
The method is called 'Menstrual Extraction' - popularised by Lorraine Rothman and Carol Downer back in the '70s - and it started off as a way to terminate pregnancies before the historic Roe v Wade case that effectively legalised abortion in the United States. After that case, Menstrual Extraction became dormant until a few years ago, when it emerged as a way to extract menstrual blood earlier than expected (according to Mic).
Now, a nurse has tweeted about the period extraction method making an unexpected return. "I don't know if it was Eureka, Dyson, Hoover or some Walmart brand, but yes... An actual vacuum cleaner," confirmed the tweet, adding that applying suction to the vagina in such a fashion can lead to some serious health issues.
"Your period has a steady flow of it's own that for all intents and purposes your body can tolerate. A vacuum increases that flow over a 1000 times which your body can't tolerate, therefore sending you into shock."
"It's a terrible unsafe idea. It can lead to severe vaginal injuries and infections," added Dr. Adeeti Gupta, OBGYN and founder of Walk In GYN Care, who was speaking to MailOnline.
"Menstrual bleeding is an active and natural process, it's not just sitting in the uterus in a pool that can be sucked out. Please don't even think about it. Thankfully we don't see this often.
"Menstrual extraction via vacuum can definitely send you into shock. It's very real and I have thankfully no seen this happen recently. But I have seen shock happen in similar situations before."
"Shock can happen either due to severe vaginal injuries leading to blood loss, or just due to stimulation of the nerves in that region which can cause the body to go into a neurogenic shock," she added, while Dr Brian Levine of CCRM fertility clinic in New York explained to Mic:
"This is a serious medical procedure with serious ramifications if not done correctly. Any time you are instrumenting anything into the uterus, you put yourself at risk of perforation, of bleeding and hemorrhage, of infection, of sterility. It is not something to experiment with."
"I think the women who say it's safe to do at home are overstating their capabilities," Dr Levine added.
