I want to tell you about a friend of mine. She used to get yeast infections and urinary tract infections (UTI) all the time. She was miserable, plagued with either or both of these nearly every month for years. The yeast infections would be terribly uncomfortable while the UTIs would be incredibly painful. These nasty […]
If you’ve read any of my posts, you know that this is one of the questions that pervades my work. Do we really know what we think we know? More often than not, the answer is no. Upon examination, what we hold true falls short. In the field of pharmaceutical medicine, where money plays an […]
It is interesting and devastating to look at the story arc of hormonal birth control’s acceptance in the medical community. At the time of the Nelson Pill Hearings in 1970, many top physicians were upset because they felt The Pill had been forced upon them by the drug industry. They were alarmed by significant side […]
In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, freshman Representative Lauren Underwood challenged Labor Secretary Alex Acosta on his Cabinet department’s efforts to allow insurance exemptions to employers who wish not to cover birth control for religious reasons. She told him, “Women’s lives and their health depend on their ability to access contraceptives.” Then, citing the many […]
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’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 […]
When I had a stroke at age 28, my doctors did some tests and found that I have a fairly common clotting disorder called Factor V Leiden. They told me that this, combined with birth control pills, are what caused me to have the cerebral venous thrombosis (stroke). It didn’t occur to me then to […]