How I learned to stop worrying and love my hormones!

[ageofscience]

As I've mentioned, I'm working on a conference paper proposal on the use of oral contraceptives for menstrual suppression. Although paper is less about oral contraceptives themselves and more about why the idea of menstrual suppression is really messed up, in doing my research I've learned an awful lot about that little thing we call The Pill

Comments

[ageofscience]

Interestingly enough, ovarian cysts were one of my major reasons for going on the pill in the first place! But no one ever told me you only need to take it for a month- what I was told is that if you're prone to them, every cycle when an egg is released, you're risking it not "bursting" when it's supposed to and getting a huge, painful cyst. Hmmm!

I totally hear you about the "too good to be true!" aspect. And admittedly, that's one of the reasons I started taking it too. It's like one day it occurred to me that, "dude! This pill can do everything! Why aren't I taking it again?" and off to the doctor's office I went! And while it does provide a lot of short term benefits, I think often people are too blase about long term things. I mean, it's easy to choose between "osteoporosis or cramps?", but it becomes less easy to choose between "breast cancer 30 years from now or less worrisome sex for the next 30 years"? You know?

And I think the diet pill and birth control pill paralells are totally interesting. I wanted to write something about seeing paralells between our desire to control our reproduction with the pill to the desire to control our body size with dieting or disordered eating, but it was mostly polemical and I didn't want to be inflammatory!

But yeah, totally.

[sakuramochii]

i would be interested in reading that.