Is Prenatal Ultrasound Dangerous to the Fetus-warning content may be objectionable to some readers

 Warning content may be objectionable to some readers

The Forgotten Dangers of Ultrasound by A Midwestern Doctor

What no one tells you about having a healthy pregnancy

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•The medical field has had a long history of exposing mothers to “treatments” that harm their infants. After decades of work to stop routine x-raying of fetuses, the “safe and effective” practice of prenatal ultrasound (US) was adopted in its place.

•While US is thought to be safe, there are decades of research showing it can harm tissues. Initially, this was well recognized, but as the ultrasound industry took off, it became a forgotten side of medicine, and research in this area became almost impossible to conduct.

Almost every mother-to-be is subject to US examinations to detect fetal abnormalities and/or determine fetal sex. At times pregnancy is terminated if the fetus has severe abnormality. These congenital syndromes have poor survival statistics, and many babies with these conditions don't live past the first few weeks of life. 

Anencephaly

This neural tube defect is considered lethal, with a median postnatal survival of less than 24 hours. However, there have been rare cases of short-term survival into infancy. 

Renal agenesis

This severe congenital anomaly has a median postnatal survival of less than 24 hours. 

Thanatophoric dysplasia

This severe congenital anomaly has a median postnatal survival that is not reported. 

In this article, we will review the body of literature on the risks and benefits of prenatal US, alternatives to prenatal US, and the strategies for pregnant mothers we have found are the most helpful to ensure a healthy and vibrant child, along with strategies for preventing common pregnancy issues like miscarriages, pregnancy back pain, swelling, and preeclampsia.

During their medical training, each student is taught that every form of medical imaging has pros and cons (e.g., that a theoretical risk exists from x-rays), but that US is entirely safe and that its cons are due to the images it produces is dependent on the skill of the US operator (whereas other imaging modalities produce much more consistent results). Because of how those axioms frame the topic, it leads every medical student to unconsciously assume the US must be 100% safe.   Before we go further, I would like to review an important (forgotten) interview about US with Robert S. Mendelsohn, a courageous physician and one of the most influential dissident physicians in history (e.g., he paved the way for much of what people like me do now).  

Safe” Levels of Ultrasound

Very few physicians know that for decades, there was extensive debate over the safety of US, particularly for children in the womb, especially early in gestation (e.g., in 1980, one leading researcher stated “the possibility of hazard should be kept under constant review”). Sadly, this 1979 quote encapsulates much of what followed:

Present-day ultrasonic diagnostic machines use such small levels of energy that they would appear to be safe, but the possibility must never be lost sight of that there may be safety threshold levels possibly different for different tissues, and that with the development of more powerful and sophisticated apparatus, these may yet be transgressed.

Much of this amnesia was a result of the FDA in 1992, owing to divided opinions over safety in the US field deciding to raise the maximum allowable US strength from 94 mW/cm2 to 720 mW/cm2 so that higher quality imaging could be developed, at which point US effectively became “safe and effective.”

The rationale for this increase was twofold. First, the FDA wanted to have the standards be uniform (except for the eyes):  

The effects of fetal ultrasound may be very different at the early stages of pregnancy when formative stem cells are vulnerable EMF, radiation and ultrasound

The Aftermath

Sadly, once the FDA declared US levels below 720 mW/cm2 were “safe and effective,” that quickly resulted in:

•The previous research on the dangers of US becoming forgotten.

•Medical societies gradually shifting their guidelines to increasingly downplay the dangers of US.

•A massive increase in the use of US (not unlike what happened after the 1986 Vaccine Act gave vaccines legal immunity).

•US technicians not being trained in the dangers of US, and hence not being mindful of how to avoid damage to the fetus. For example, the higher intensity used in US, the “clearer” the image is, so technicians (who were primarily assessed on their ability to get clearer images) will frequently use much higher US intensities (or expose the fetus to excessively long ultrasound sessions)—situations which would both be avoided if they knew US was not “100% safe and effective.”

•Very lax oversight of the US output of commercially available US models, allowing many to have far higher outputs.

A review article in Anesthesiology November 2011, Vol. 115, 1109–1124