Remember when the internet was having a field day making fun of vaginal steaming - the latest fad popularised by Gwyneth Paltrow, our modern queen of pseudoscientific health nonsense?
还记得网上有个机会大肆嘲笑阴道蒸汽吗？阴道蒸汽是由我们的伪科学健康胡说八道摩登女王格温妮丝·帕特洛带起来的风尚。

Health professionals everywhere immediately started warning people about the risk of burns if you tried this dubious remedy - and now they have an actual medical case to point to.
各处的健康专家立刻开始警告人们，试验这种不可信的疗法会有烧伤风险。现在他们有了一个真正的医疗案例。

The patient, a 62-year-old woman, had tried vaginal steaming at home on the advice of a traditional Chinese doctor.
患者是一名62岁的女性，她采纳了一名中医的建议，在家尝试阴道蒸汽。

After two sessions of sitting atop a pan of boiling water mixed with unknown herbs, the results - which included an alarming discharge - sent her looking for help at the emergency department.
她坐在一盆混合了未知草药的沸水上，进行了两个疗程。结果她的身体开始流脓，这把她送进了急诊室。

Sadly, the reason this woman steamed her lower parts wasn't for "freshening" or "detoxifying" effects, but rather to try and treat a serious medical condition she'd been struggling with for the past 9 months - stage IV vaginal prolapse.
让人悲伤的是，这位女士对下体进行蒸汽疗法的原因不是为了达到“清洁”或者“去毒”的效果，而是想治疗她过去九个月都在努力应付的严重疾病--4期阴道脱垂。

As the name implies, the prolapse of a woman's pelvic organs means that the surrounding tissue and muscle are failing to hold everything in place, a condition that can be quite common after childbirth.
顾名思义，女性骨盆区器官的脱垂意味着周围的组织和肌肉无法支撑任何东西，让它们各司其位。这种症状在分娩后很常见。

It's not always problematic, but this woman's case was severe, with her entire cervix completely outside the vulva.
这也不总是会造成问题，但是这位女士的状况很严重，她整个宫颈都膨出于外阴外。

The usual treatment for this is surgery, which the patient had been reluctant to have at first. As gynecologist Magali Robert from the University of Calgary, Canada reports in the case study, the woman eventually consented to the procedure.
治疗手段通常是手术。这位患者一开始不愿意进行手术。加拿大卡尔加里大学的妇科医生玛格丽·罗伯特在案例研究中报告，这位女士最终同意手术。