Wed, 13 Dec 2006

Year-round contraceptive, elimination of menstrual cycles safe, study shows

This strikes me as a bit of a stretch - can they really say that a drug which totally eliminates a natural, rhythmic cycle that normally continues for thirty to forty years is safe after an 18 month study?

Obviously, I'm not female, and have never experienced first hand a single menstrual cramp. But I've been married (more than once), and have three daughters and a mom, and I certainly do understand that the menstrual cycle can be a real pain in the backside (sometimes quite literally). Yet I am still loathe to give credence to the safety of it's complete elimination - biological cycles are not just things you can turn on and off with a switch, be it time or menstruation. I'd be really nervous before I suggested this regimen for a girlfriend, wife or daughter.

Researchers for the first time have demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of continuous-use oral contraceptives that can eliminate menstrual cycles.

(link) [EurekAlert]

/Technology | 2 writebacks | permanent link

---

On 12/13/2006 09:52:26
Analemma wrote

I haven't followed recent trends in birth control very closely (taking any dosage of hormones turns me into a raving PMS super-bitch), but calling this "safe" seems premature. We now know that simply not having kids raises womens' risks of various ailments of our reproductive parts. Anything that makes those parts stop working altogether raises all kinds of red flags in my mind. As miserable as periods are, this is how we evolved and thus, presumably, what's healthiest for us. When I first heard about the various birth control methods that reduce the number of periods per year, they seemed like a generally bad idea. I hope that by the time I might have daughters old enough to need birth control, that we know a bit more about the long-term effects of these things.

---

On 12/13/2006 15:53:32
SB wrote

Analemma, you probably won't have to wait that long. Remember the birth control "patch"? They discovered that the doses of hormones that women were getting from those were too high because they'd based the doses off the pills where the hormones break down some in the digestive system. Women who used the patch had much higher risks for blood clots, stroke, and ovarian cancer. That was only a year after they'd been marketing those things. I was on "the pill" when I was in my teens, and it made my depression so bad I couldn't get out of bed. Nobody has ever been able to convince me that it's a safe thing to do to your body. I'll take the cramps, a couple of ibuprophin and a heating pad is better than being crazy any day of the week.

---

:: Categories ::

 agriculture
asatru
copywrongs
humor
musings
politics
technology
index
haxton.org

---

:: Search ::

---

:: Blogroll ::

A Mindful Life
The Accidental Smallholder
Austro-Athenian Empire
Cauldron Born
Center for a Stateless Society
Dances with Ewes
Dispatches
egregores
Hardscrabble Creek
Honk & Helen
In Siberia
Laudator Temporis Acti
Lorrie's Livejournal
Masson's Blog
MyAppleMenu
NoNAIS
Notes on Religion
Numenous Thoughts
OrangeGuru
Overlawyered
Prophet or Madman
rogueclassicism
Sugar Mountain Farm
Thud Factor
Universe of Discourse
Wildhunt Blog
within the crainium

---

:: Archives ::

←April→

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

---

:: Site ::

Contact Me   

MacRaven
Dave Haxton's Weblog
Musings, Reflections, Rants and Comments from a Hoosier Heathen husband, father, grandfather, farmer and software engineer. There's really only one of me ...

---

lunar phases

Unless otherwise noted, all original
work on this site is licensed under a

comment...

Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
Name:
URL:	(optional)
Title:	(optional)
Comments:
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time