New guidelines from the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Health suggest that those on the combined contraceptive pill have been experiencing monthly bleeds for no reason.
Last week, the news was awash with headlines suggesting that those taking the contraceptive pill had been having periods every four weeks for pretty much no reason whatsoever. New guidelines from the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Health(FSRH) stated that “there is no health benefit from the seven-day hormone-free interval” and “women can safely take fewer (or no) hormone-free intervals to avoid monthly bleeds, cramps and other symptoms”. The guidelines apply to all combined hormonal contraception: combined contraceptive patches or rings as well as the pill.
This should be good news. As the guidelines recognise, the bleed which usually arrives during the seven pill-free days in each 28-day cycle - most packs are divided into 21-pill blister packs, designed to be taken with a week's gap between them - is often accompanied by cramps, nausea, headaches and other symptoms which many women would relish skipping. On top of that it’s just a nuisance. I took the pill for years, and whilst I didn’t exactly mind the monthly “period” - I, mistakenly as it now turns out, saw it as a necessary evil - it was still something that needed to be taken into consideration when it came to everything from holidays to sex to wearing white jeans.
Sexual freedom is a choice and so is the right to use contraceptives. When a huge number of the population are relying upon a particular medication, you’d hope that there would be endless studies undertaken on its effects; countless reports on its efficacy and the ways in which it is taken. You’d hope it wouldn’t take 60 years to work out that the way in which we have been instructed to use the medication is, simply, wrong. But then again, we know that the medical industry has long been biased against women. There’s the bleak history of women being diagnosed with the damaging catch-all term “hysteria” when they presented with legitimate physical and mental health disorders.
And of course I’ve been bleeding, like we’ve all been bleeding, 13 weeks out of the year. For no other reason than that nobody thought to ask, on behalf of millions of women, why?
Commenti