Keeping yourself clean is easier than you think

I recently received an e-mail from a reader asking if douches are a good idea to use after sex. A douche is a way of cleaning the inside of the vagina by squirting water and other fluids like vinegar or antiseptics inside to flush it out. You can find douche kits in pharmacies and many grocery stores, but really how useful are they? And should people be using them at all?

Douching has been practised for centuries; it reportedly goes back to the time of Hippocrates, when people didn’t know a whole lot about female anatomy and there weren’t many medications or antibiotics available.

Douching was done only when it was absolutely necessary to clean out the vaginal cavity. But for some reason, douching ended up becoming a fairly common practice among many groups of women.

Today about 37 per cent of women in the U.S. douche and half of these do so at least once a week.

Women use douches for various reasons. To wash away menstrual blood, to reduce perceived vaginal odours, to “feel clean” and some even use it after sex as birth control and to avoid catching an STI (sexually transmitted infection); however, a douche is not an effective contraceptive and will not protect you from infection.

Studies show that women who douche actually end up with more health problems than women who do not. For example, women who douche have greater than 73 per cent chance of getting PID, pelvic inflammatory disease, a bacterial infection in the reproductive organs.

PID can lead to infertility, problems during pregnancy, and ectopic pregnancies (where the baby starts growing in the fallopian tubes). Women who douche once a week are 83 per cent more likely to contract cervical cancer.

Women who douche regularly are also more likely to suffer vaginal irritations, bacterial infections, and are actually more at risk for catching STI’s.

In addition, using a douche after sex is actually more likely to push semen into the uterus, increasing your chances of pregnancy — so much for using it as birth control.

A douche also won’t “cure” vaginal odours, if anything it might only mask them temporarily.

A healthy vagina should have a slight musky odour — it shouldn’t smell like flowers or rain!

But if you do think that something is wrong with your smell, or if it smells fishy or pasty then you should go see your doctor.

Doctors and nurses today advise against the use of a douche, though very rarely your doctor might prescribe it to treat certain conditions.

Your vagina has a lot of important processes going on inside of it. There are friendly bacteria living in your vagina; these bacteria are very important and protect your vagina from other infections. It gives off a natural form of hydrogen peroxide, which keeps the pH of the vagina more acidic, in turn guarding you from the invasion of other, more destructive bacteria.

The friendly bacteria in your vagina also keep the yeast cells in your vagina under control. If the bacteria dies off (which can easily happen) the yeast cells can start to multiply, giving you a yeast infection.

Douching can also abrade the delicate tissue of your vagina, causing irritations and making it easier for things like infectious bacteria and STIs to get inside your bloodstream.

Your vagina doesn’t need a douche to keep itself clean; it does just fine on its own. It is constantly producing mucus and this mucus lining is constantly moving — your vagina is like an glacier. All day and night the mucus lining of your vagina slowly flows towards the outside, pulling with it anything else that might be inside: dead cells, semen, blood, and other tiny particles that may have gotten inside.

So in answer to my reader’s question: no, you should not be using a douche after sex or under any circumstance, unless your doctor prescribes it. Just let your vagina do its own thing and grab a box of tissues or a warm washcloth for cleaning up externally after sex.