Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Dr. Erika.com

Eliminate Birth Control Pills, IUDs are safer

Let me preface this blog with a clear and unequivocal statement: Birth control pills are dangerous to your health!

There is no debate here, just facts. Birth control pills are made of chemical substances that are specifically designed to destroy your body’s natural hormone rhythms and stop you from ovulating and thus prevent you from getting pregnant.

There is no reason to take birth control pills. They cause blood clots, cancer, infertility and change your moods, thinking processes and make you gain weight and loose your sex drive.

The marketers of birth control pills are constantly spinning the information just to sell more of these horrible drugs.

When you take your 14 year old to the gynecologist with irregular periods (normal for most teens), your child is given birth control pills to REGULATE her period.

Doctors will glibly prescribe birth control pills to stop your period for six months at a time just because, they will tell you, we don’t need periods every month. We should be saving our eggs. Are we taking birth control pills to regulate our periods or stop them altogether? Maybe we should simply let Mother Nature take her course.

We are born with between one-and-two-million eggs. By puberty we have 400,000 left and then when we get our periods and start ovulating we generate about 12 eggs a year for about 30 years. That adds up to about 400 eggs. Who needs to save the other 390,600?

And one more use for birth control pills that will shock you now. When you get into perimenopause, the gynecologist will give them to you to eliminate the left-over eggs, which are doing…. what?

Nightmarish because the public knows nothing about this and the doctors are totally brainwashed.

It’s all marketing and it’s all about taking advantage of your fears and your lack of understanding of how the body works.

Enough with the birth control pill rant.

What is the best method of contraception for a woman who is in a committed relationship and not in need of protection from STDs?

My answer and your doctor’s should be an unwavering: the IUD (intra-uterine device) without hormones.

IUDs are safe, they are easily inserted in your uterus at a gynecologist or family practitioner’s office visit when you are having your period. IUDs are about 2 inches long plastic gizmos that are easily introduced into the uterus during a pelvic exam with only minor discomfort. The procedure may leave you feeling a little crampy for 24 hours, like a period is coming on.

The only side-effects over the life of the IUD, which is a good 10 years, are local: increased cramps, heavier bleeding or rarely increased incidence of infections.

This is certainly a very short list and by the way, you can take the IUD out very easily just by having the doctor pull the string that attaches to it in the vagina and have no long term effects from having had one in you for a month or many years.

So why doesn’t everyone know this fact and why is your doctor so unwilling to give this option first?

This is how the story goes. In the 1970s and 1980s there were a number of women with endometrial scar tissue build up and a number of perforations of the uterus from the use of a particular IUD called the Dalkon shield (no longer on the market) which resulted in the users’ inability to get pregnant.

The situation that led to the removal of the particular IUD from the market and a class action suit against the manufacturer of the Dalkon shield was capitalized on by the birth control marketing machine. Within months the credibility of all IUDs was demolished and even though there were many other types of problem-free IUDs on the market ( Copper 7, Lippy’s loop), its use rapidly diminished and the IUD vanished as a viable contraceptive option.

By the way, the number of cases of cancer, infertility and serious other side-effects of birth control pills are statistically and individually significant and are kept under wraps by its manufacturers at very high cost to you the consumer and me the prescriber.