Abnormal Pap Smear: What Is The Next Step?

Dr. Marchese shares what a woman should do once she learns she has an abnormal Pap smear result.

Dr. Marchese:
Well if a woman’s Pap smear comes back abnormal she needs to ask her doctor, “Was the Pap smear tested for the human papillomavirus?” If not, she needs to ask the doctor to call the lab and if they still have the sample they can then go back and check for the human papillomavirus because we want to know, is the Pap smear abnormal, plus high-risk HPV is detected because that makes a difference in terms of how the patient’s case will be managed.

Conventional medicine has a set of guidelines that are already established in terms of if a patient needs to get further testing done to see if the cells of the cervix actually have abnormalities deeper into the cervix itself, and that would be a referral for a technique called a colposcopy.

A colposcopy is where the physician applies vinegar to the face of the cervix and looks through a big, like a telescope that magnifies the cells and often times the doctor will sample those cells or take a biopsy and then that goes to the pathologist to see if the deeper tissue of the cells of the cervix are also abnormal and is that abnormality the same as what the Pap smear showed.

About Dr. Marianne Marchese, N.D., L.L.C.:
Dr. Marianne Marchese is a clinician, author, and educator. She graduated from Creighton University in 1990 with a B.S. in Occupational Therapy and specialized in neurological and orthopedic conditions while working at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Dr. Marchese received her Doctorate of Naturopathic Medicine from the National College of Naturopathic Medicine (NCNM) in Portland, Oregon in 2002. She completed a two-year postgraduate residency in Integrative Medicine and Women's Health and completed a six-month post-graduate training in Environmental Medicine.

Visit Dr. Marchese at her Website