The risks of complications from colonoscopies are greater than the risks of colon cancer for most people.
Risks include perferations of the colon, death from anesthesia, vagus nerve stimulation causing heart stoppage requiring cpr to patient (surprisingly common), infection of virus and other things from the scopes which are used on usually ten or more patients on the day and must be hand cleaned by low paid assistants and cannot be heat sterilized because of sensitive electronics in the probes. So you get fecal matter and viruses and bacteria from others inserted deep into your colon.
Furthermore life expectancy is not better in people who have colonoscopies versus those that don't.
Most cancers caught by colonoscopies are already in spread stage or they wouldn't be visible.
Colonoscopies miss a high percentage of cancers because they hide in the folds and can't be seen.
Your doctor often won't tell you if they perforate your colon because they don't want to be sued. Thus you may have a punctured colon for months before going to a hospital.
Damage to the colon is the leading cause of deadly colon blockages later in life so your colonoscopy today might kill you years later.
There is a shit in a box DNA test which catches as many cancers earlier than colonoscopies.
You probably won't die from colon cancer anyway as most people don't get it and it is a slow growing cancer like prostate cancer if you do get it.
If you do get colon cancer detected, the treatments of colon removal and chemo are often what kill you earlier than if you didn't get standard treatment and those last years are miserable and full of nothing but doctor visits and financially draining events ruining you even if you do happen to live.
You are going to die. No one can escape that. Being constantly paranoid that you might die doesn't help you. Accept that one day you will die from something and don't spend your life in visits to doctors becuase you are trying to avoid death. It won't work.
Disclaimer. I am not a doctor and you should not believe a thing I say and should do your own research.
Also colonoscopies are a huge money revenue sources for doctors and hospitals. Why do you think they push so hard for you to get them? When has any medical association ever pushed anything just for your benefit?
Even though colonoscopies were pushed for decades there was very little followup research on their effectiveness until a couple years ago. What they found were many of the things I mentioned. But they sure took your money. Shocker right?
Again. I am not a doctor. Don't believe anything I say. Research this yourself.
What have I done? I decided not to get the colonoscopy after talking to nurses and researching the doctors available via my insurance. I have not yet shit in a box. Maybe I will one day but not now. I decided I didn't like the treatments if detected and figured if I have it I would rather enjoy my last years without hospital visits and fear and drama..we will die anyway right?
But that's me. You do you.
Some people are genetically prone. If I was I might do things differently.
Some sources
this study says 16% of the people experience this vagal nerve reaction
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8514071/Disease transmission by colonoscopy between patients is not well tracked.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23567025/This was the study in October 2012 New England Journal of medicine and showed no change in overall survival rate
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-09/colonoscopy-screening-exams-fail-to-prevent-cancer-deaths-in-large-studyAnother study
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2802347Also
That was just an example of things that are unmeasured in a colonoscopy with repercussions that don't show up in the first day or two. There was a whole sequence of studies I found where that was the case. In most studies acute reactions to the colonoscopies were not even measured past the second or third day. So people who had a problem that didn't show up for 30 days like undetected perferations or infections or anesthesia fog etc weren't included or even counted in studies.
More about the DNA shit in a box test
https://colorectalcancer.org/screening-prevention/screening-methods/home-screening/stool-dnaNow here is something interesting.
Many insurances pay for a free colonoscopy but they can hit you with a bill if they find something and remove polips during the procedure. You won't be able to stop that since you'll be asleep so you might get hit with a several thousand dollar bill after you wake up not covered by your deductible.
Also if you do the shit in the box test and they find something abnormal they will recommend a colonoscopy to check. Since they are now "diagnosing" something it will no longer be free preventative care but rather diagnostic care and this you will be responsible for deductible.
Ever notice how even though you have insurance and something is "free" they figure out a way to get all your savings anyway?
FUCK it.
I chose not to live in fear and accept that I will die one day and instead chose to enjoy life rather than spend it in doctors offices. And always scheduling and paying. FUCK that.
Other similarly prescribed and recommended treatments I will never fucking do. Number one go on statins for similar reasons number two go on one of the two commonly recommended blood thinners.
If you look up statins you will find things like muscle wasting and muscle pain very negative effects on hormone levels and other things as well as brain shrinkage. My father experienced all those. Furthermore you'll find in studies that people who go on statins have the same risk of death from heart attack or nearly so as those who don't go on statins..
Regarding blood thinners:
There are two that are most commonly recommended in the United States.
One of which started out its life as rat poison which killed rats by thinning their blood so much they bled out. This drug is loved by doctors because it requires you visit their office again and again every month or several months to check the levels of this in your bloodstream. That means it's a constant revenue extreme for the doctor's office. This particular drug is often marked in users by red splotches appearing on their hands in other places which indicate areas where the blood has leaked out of the blood vessels.
The other common one changes your clotting mechanism in your body so that if you start bleeding the doctors literally cannot give you a clotting agent to stop it. My uncle died from slow bleeds over a period of several days that the doctors couldn't stop and lo and behold he was on that drug.
Again I'm not a doctor and you shouldn't listen to anything I say. You should do your own research.
--------
Some additional thoughts that came to me as a reply to someone who says when they go to their yearly doctor exam and how they pressure them
You know I took care of both of my elderly parents. Including shuffling them to doctors which for my father because he was on statins and blood thinners was a very frequent routine. (He was also put on vox which of course was taken off the market because it was killing people.)
In fact he got to the point where he didn't feel like he could go on a trip because he would have a doctor's appointment next week or the week after we just always a succession of doctor's appointments. And in my experience none of the things they did for him like putting him on statins or blood thinners helped him at all. In fact he had multiple heart attacks after he was put on all those things.
So I think of it like this okay let's say you go to the doctor what are they going to look for what are they going to do the blood pressure test they might do a blood test for you and other things and they're going to look at all that and then they're going to recommend you take some pills. If they find something. Now most of the pills that they give you are going to be pills that are actually going to be proven to have no benefit and many harms. Statins is the perfect example. The blood thinners are another example. Blood pressure medication is another example. a lot of the diabetic medicines they're always trying to push on you have real issues. So what is the purpose of you going to a doctor to have them harass you and try to get you to do what they want you to do each time you go. Luckily we're at a point now where you can get your own blood test if you really want to know if there's anything weird going on it you can take your own blood pressure with an easily affordable blood pressure machine for $20 you can test your blood oxygen level in other words you can do most of what a doctor does. I don't go to a doctor for annual exams anymore you know there's also a danger that you can go to your doctor and they can in some states now and it's getting more aggressive in many of them say you're refusing beneficial care and they can actually force you to take care now. They can also actually force your children to do things you don't want them to do. the most extreme example of is all this trans stuff now so if you're taking your kid to the doctor all the time you're putting yourself at a legal risk that somebody else can go to the law and say I have authority over this person I know better than this person they don't know what they're doing I'm a licensed doctor and they should do this. So you're putting yourself in a legal risk every time you go to a doctor not to mention a psychiatrist good God don't do that.
That's very important to remember that doctors offices are businesses and what they seek to do is have the maximum number of patients they can have run through and they really like patients that are recurring patients. They want you on things that require you to come back to them and repeat basis because then they know what their annual income is on a much more steady basis than if just people are coming in when they're sick. Doctor's offices have a profit incentive to have you be treated and I know people know that philosophically but what they don't understand is the real hard reality of it. It's no different than going to a tire store that wants to sell you tires. People find that kind of hard to believe but let me tell you that software that doctors are using these days is the same business software than any other business uses to try to increase their sales and up sales and get more guaranteed revenue streams coming in every month. It's the same software they use.
Now it's even worse than I've become aware of is that many of these doctors are joining together in these groups and they're often called medical group so you might see your doctor's name and then you see such and such medical group. Well that's a big corporation and doctors join that to get some kind of protection against overwhelming malpractice lawsuits and other things but as a requirement for joining that medical group requires the doctor to put their computers in their offices and to do what their computers say. So suddenly it's not your doctor giving you advice it's the medical groups computer so that doctor puts in your blood pressure and other things and the computer spits out that you should put them on this drug. Now the problem is of course the medical group is probably making more profit and they're sitting there maximizing the profit but the real problem is is that the doctors if they refuse will get thrown out of the medical group or they will be fine. Yep that's right an independent doctor I know is not part of the medical group told me that they knew a doctor who did not have enough of their patients on a certain blood pressure medicine or some other medicine because the doctor was an older doctor and most of his patients had gotten to be older so they didn't skew with the averages so the average is and I don't know what drug it was but my guess is it was something they give to young people like some hdad drug. So the doctor didn't have enough of their average patients on that drug because the patients were all older And so the doctor got fined I think it was something like $6,000 at the end of the year. This is why doctors push so hard to get you to do what they want because they're going to get fined if not enough of their patients are doing it. They've been forced to become salesman for the company sales goals. And if you don't meet the company sells gold you can be punished.
