For many women, the dream of having children is at the forefront of their minds. Yet a new study shows that ladies who suffer from cancer may lose their ability to have children- and never be informed until after the fact. When you are going in for a treatment at the hospital, you want to know all the risks and repercussions. It is the medical staff's duty to let you know what you are jeopardizing when you enter an operating room or undergo a specific therapy for your illness. Sometimes a sacrifice may be necessary for your survival, but you still have the right to know what a treatment will do to your body.

According to MSNBC, cancer treatments can sometimes lead to infertility, but young woman aren't normally told this. Young men, on the other hand, normally get a warning before undergoing the remedy. Doctors will tell them of the risks of infertility that are present when receiving chemo. A Swedish study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology interviewed nearly 500 cancer survivors who were treated with chemotherapy. 80 percent of the men in the study were told that the chemo could possibly affect their ability to have a child. The men were aged 18 to 45. The women who were given the same treatment did not get the same information. In fact, only 48 percent of the ladies who had to undergo this chemo were warned of this possibility.

Only 14 percent of the women were offered information on ways that they could work to preserve their fertility during the treatment. On the other hand, 68 percent of the men were given this information. Researchers assume that the lack of help in this area is in part because it is harder to preserve fertility in a woman than it is in a man. The techniques for that type of thing concerning women is complicated, hard to complete, and rare. For men, fertility-preserving techniques are widely known and easy. Yet it seems like women would want to know about this potential risk even more than men would.

A researcher on the project e-mailed the press from the Karoslinka Institute in Stockholm, saying that even though there not be many options as to how to preserve a female's fertility, men and women both have the right to know about the dangers of this before undergoing chemotherapy. By hiding this information, doctors are being elusive. They may crush a married couple's dreams of ever having a family by subjecting them to this treatment and failing to tell them of the potential risks. According to one medical institute, both the chemotherapy drugs and the radiation therapies that are used for cancer treatment can be damaging to the reproductive organs.

Also, doctors who use hormonal therapies may tamper with and eliminate a person's possibility to conceive a child. A recent survey shows that more than half of all women under 40 who were diagnosed with cancer still wanted to have children at the time that they were diagnosed. Depending on the type of cancer that a woman has, she may not be able to gain any sort of fertility treatment that could preserve her ability to have a child in the future. Doctors should always work hard to keep their patients informed of what is going on in their bodies. If a doctor held important information about your treatment from you, you may want to contact a medical malpractice attorney. You should be fully informed of all known results or side-effects whenever you are given therapy or a medication.