wtf is wrong with these people.

[applegoddess]

i'm sorry if i'm posting way too many posts about how much i hate this person or that, but this one..this one is just unbelievable.

http://digg.com/health/Feds_Approve_Birth_Control_Pill_That_Eliminates_Women_s_PeriodsOkay, so finally a digg story with a title that isn't misogynistic. but have any of you actually read through most of those

Comments

Re: It's Still Not Safe Enough for Men, So Why Is It Approved for Women?

[applegoddess]

No.

Hormonal contraceptives have always had that risk factor involved, I swear EVERY single pill, patch, ring and what have you has this listed as the #1 side effect that every person taking these drugs should know. I am not saying FDA is godlike or anything, but the increased risk of strokes and blood clots (and the lessened risk for cancers of the ovary and endometrium too, fyi) is inevitable. The patch's problem was that it was delivering WAY more estrogen than was needed. This risk has gone down since the beginning days of the pill, when research showed that contraceptive effectiveness stayed around the same after lessening doses. If the dosage is lessened too much, the contraceptive part becomes moot.

So really, Lybrel is not new. It is a new formulation of the same or similar synthetic hormones at a changed dose, maybe or maybe not with something else (e.g. an iron supplement) added on. Those are the ONLY differences between the various forms of the pill. The only difference is that you have no withdrawal bleed. Which, fyi, with ANY hormonal contraceptive is still a withdrawal bleed and not a "natural" one.

I don't give a &*#$ about what one doctor says about it being unnatural. You'll find just as many saying it's unnatural to have this many periods.

For what it's worth, the first reason why I started on hormonal contraceptives is because my period was whacked - I'd have a 2 week long one, not have one for 3 months, have one for 2 days, two weeks later have a 1 week one...and so on. To top that off, I had painful debilitating cramps that I willingly skipped out on many events to deal with, headaches and various other things showed up/got worse, I became one moody bitch. You call that natural? No, fuck no, that's a curse, that's a sickness, that's something that had to be dealt with sometime. The pill changed that to something more manageable where I don't have to be curled up in a fetal position in the corner of my dark closet wishing the migraine and periods to be gone.

So that doctor can suck a nut. Natural or not, I like what HBC can do, and I use it to get rid of a few cycles a year, which adds up pretty fast.