It was two months since I had stopped taking The Pill. Might I add, I hate how culturally grammatical we have to be when we write, “The Pill”. THE Pill is how I read it; it’s 2019, and it all still seems so covertly retro. Anyway, it is hard to go back in time because […]
On March 6th, 2019, I went to the podiatrist. When I was in the exam room, the receptionist asked if she could take my blood pressure and weigh me. I said, ‘I’m here for my feet, but okay.’ I was agitated that she was asking for these readings, but I allowed her to take my […]
Over the last several years, stories of young women, many of them athletes (here, here), suffering from dangerous and sometimes deadly blood clots have filled the press and academic literature (here, here, here). Often mentioned in passing is the fact that these women were taking hormonal contraceptives at the time of the event. As a mom […]
I am a 37 year old woman who has been taking birth control since I was 15 years old and I had a pulmonary embolism (PE) while driving last year. I was on Aviane for over 6 years and then switched to Camrese on 9/19/18 and was taking that up until the PE on 12/13/2018. […]
The term ‘Spin Doctor’ wouldn’t be coined until much later, but it was already clear by the time of the Nelson Pill Hearings that some prominent physicians were willing to twist statistics, incorporate doublespeak, and create confusion in any way they could to defend hormonal birth control. They were Spin Doctors in the truest sense. Fortunately, […]
I’m writing this article with all the trepidation of someone walking into a Thai restaurant with a peanut allergy — knowing it could go horribly wrong.I want to discuss politics. More precisely, I want to talk about a political fight by apolitical means. When it really comes down to it, hormonal birth control and women’s […]
I recently began a new project tackling the economics of testing women for clotting disorders prior to receiving prescriptions for hormonal contraception. Hormonal contraception induces chemical blood clotting cascades in all women, and thus, developing blood clots while on hormonal birth control is a very real risk. In women who have genetic clotting disorders, those […]
This time of year, the holiday season, can be a time of overindulgence for many of us. And how can we talk about overindulgence without taking a look at the liver? To say the liver is important is an understatement. It is the body’s largest gland and while estimates of the number of functions of […]