Actually, I think this is an excellent point. I can tell that I took BC specifically for excessive bleeding. I was 18, working 40 h/wks in the summer 20 hr/wks during the school year, and 15 hrs/week in school. The bleeding gets out of control and is all consuming. We’re not talking about use a more absorbant product… We’re talking sit on the toilet and just drip as if urinating. I know GROSS and TMI.
And am I interested in switching that for possibility of Breast Cancer? NO WAY! But can I bleed for weeks at a time? Or so badly that I risk losing my job, or missing too many classes and not be eligible for passing? Yes… THAT BAD… this IS going to happen every single month. How much PTO do most people get?
And so my complaint comes in multifaceted… WHY can’t we get doctors (and this is a 20 year old complaint) to ADDRESS THE PROBLEM??? Not the Symptom? It took until I was blessed enough to have ranting session with a Local Nurse who filled me on on WHO to go to. Then FINALLY, the actual problem was addressed!!! And then, I read things on other threads where pharmacists are conflicted even selling the product, NOT for the horrifying side effects ( NAME a drug that doesn’t have a LONG LIST of those) but because it’s birth control.
I started to think about how these birth control pills were developed. The kinds of hormones, the doses, the treatment regimens were probably tested (in animals first) and optimized for one specific end result, namely to prevent ovulation. Using the drug for something else, such as for controlling menstrual bleeding, is more like an afterthought. The drug was not optimized for that specific purpose. To use another analogy, let’s suppose you buy an expensive Corvette. The car was optimized for speed on good quality highways. The car was not optimized for off-roading in the deserts of Arizona, or in the wilderness of Alaska. If you take your Corvette off-road, due to its low clearance it will perform worse than even a much cheaper ordinary car, and you may end up stuck with it pretty soon. For off-roading, you need something like a 4-wheel drive Jeep with high clearance, which was optimized for harsh terrain.
I think with birth control pills, some people who want to avoid pregnancy will even willingly take a risk of breast cancer, stroke, blood clots, thrombosis, etc, all of which are established risks and side-effects with the Pill. But a majority are probably unaware of all this, and they just take the Pill because it was FDA-approved. Meanwhile, FDA approval of the Pill may have been politicized, meaning that some policy makers insisted on having such stuff approved, even if it is fraught with higher than ordinary risks and side-effects, because the goal of avoiding pregnancies justified even the risk of breast cancer, in the minds of these policy-makers. The push to make the morning-after Pill available over-the-counter, like an ordinary Aspirine tablet, is further proof that these decisions are highly politicized and ordinary caution is thrown into the wind, for the “sacred” goal of “reproductive freedom”. Then, the doctors start prescribing the Pill not only for its original intended purpose, namely to avoid pregnancies, but also for other indications, even for such trivial goals as controlling acne, and alas, that’s how we ended up with a high-risk medication, one that can cause breast cancer, stroke, and thrombosis, being prescribed for acne!
Drug developers, the pharmaceutical industry could probably do much better by researching specifically what causes heavy periods, and with custom designed drugs that were specifically optimized to treat that specific condition, i.e. to treat heavy bleeding. And doctors probably have other, less risky tools available to them, right now, to treat patients with heavy periods. But the majority might have not researched those less risky alternatives, they might not possess the knowledge and experience, and thus they just take the easy route and prescribe the Pill, because everybody is doing it (everybody is prescribing the Pill).
