The Birth Control Bandaid
Names changed to protect the privacy of the individuals.
Abby is in eighth grade, she is fifteen years old, and just like any other teenager. She has smooth, blemish free skin that everyone envies, along with a healthy lifestyle of working out regularly and eating well. But privately, Abby felt something was wrong. She could relate with her peers on everything relating to music, sports, and academics, but whenever her friends would talk about their periods—Abby would go silent, nervously waiting for her own to finally arrive.
When Abby decided to go to the doctor about her absent menstrual cycle, the doctors insisted that she go on birth control. She went on the pill on January 1, 2021, and for the first two to three months everything was perfect. Her period had finally arrived, and she was beginning to feeling like a “normal” girl. Her reproductive processes were working efficiently and properly, making her feel like birth control was truly the answer to all of her problems.
She then started breaking out, bad. To her dismay, acne began to cover her cheeks: an issue she never had to deal with prior. She also noticed a weight gain—her face and midsection seemed to become fluffier and fuller. Nothing had changed in Abby’s lifestyle…except her prescription to birth control.
Then the heart palpitations began.
Lily is at work. It is the summer of 2019, she is eighteen and serves in a banquet hall. While standing off to the side of the event space waiting for a task, she feels a strange twitch in her right leg. Uncomfortable, she sits down, which makes the pain pulsate and shoot up to her thigh. She has never known a pain like this before, and struggles to find words to explain the feeling to her mother later that night. She does not go to the doctor, assuming it was just a fluke and a one time thing, so she continues on in her daily routine.
Then, it struck again. She was sitting in class and she felt the paralyzing pain shooting up her leg. She knows something is wrong and goes to the emergency room in an attempt to get some answers. After waiting for hours in the hospital, she gets taken back to the doctor only to be told she is having period cramps and will feel better with some water and Ibuprofen. Lily knows what period cramps feel like: this was not a period cramp.
It’s August 2016, Samantha starts high school tomorrow, she's fourteen and excited and anxious about the first day. She wakes up in the middle of the night to intense stomach pains. She goes to tell her mother and her mom tells her to try and go back to sleep with the promise that they will go to the doctors in the morning at 8 am.
They arrive at the doctor the next morning to which Samantha is told by the doctors she is experiencing period cramps. Samantha has only had her period for one month at this time, so she figured maybe this was what period cramps felt like. The doctors suggest birth control, to help with the intense period cramps she seemed to have.
Her mother knew this was an incorrect diagnosis and that something truly was wrong with her daughter. She continued to advocate for Samantha and push the doctor to do more research into her condition.
Three hours later Samantha went into emergency surgery.
Each of these women have unique stories and conditions, but there is one constant in all of them. All three of them were told that they were experiencing period cramps by doctors and encouraged to go on birth control, when in reality there was a much more serious diagnosis waiting to be uncovered. Why is it that periods are the automatic scapegoat when it comes to women’s health? This is not new in the healthcare industry, women have been and continue to be underrepresented in research, resulting in misdiagnosis and the prescription of birth control working as a bandaid on a bullet wound (Mitchell).
In a research article by Kate Young from the Feminism and Psychology Journals she states, “The institution of medicine is predominantly the product of privileged men who have thus produced androcentric knowledge and practice”. For the vast history of medical research men were used as the standard, specifically, white straight men. This leaves people of color and women largely under represented, and by effect largely misdiagnosed as well. “Any aspect of the female body that differs from the male or that cannot be given a male comparative (exemplified by the uterus) is viewed as evidence of deviation or ‘fault.’” (Young). Male and female bodies have different anatomy and different symptoms for certain disorders and diseases. Therefore, when men’s research is applied to women’s bodies the answers are askew and inaccurate which could lead to possibly fatal circumstances.
For example, heart attacks are commonly assumed to be the number one killer of men, with the main symptom being the intense and dramatic chest pains. Breast cancer is then the disease that is assumed to be the number one killer of women. In reality, 1 in 3 women die of heart diseases each year, while only 1 in 30 die of breast cancer (Sadick). Women’s symptoms for heart disease include shortness of breath, cramps, tightness in chest, and lightheadedness. These symptoms are very similar to period symptoms, so women are either taught to ignore them, or get ignored by health care professionals.
The heart palpitations were the last straw for Abby. Though there was no way to determine if they really were caused by the birth control pill or if they were caused by extraneous circumstances, such as stress or anxiety, but Abby knew she needed to get off of it. Once done with the pill she went to a professional physician as a last resort, and in her senior year of high school she was diagnosed with PCOS, poly cystic ovarian syndrome.
“PCOS isn’t very understood, because there isn’t much research about it. Birth control is a very lazy way to address it.” Abby describes. She knew she needed to go off of birth control and after doing more research found that by addressing the problem at the root cause, she could overcome this diagnosis. Doing low intensity workouts such as walking and Pilates and eating more greens she found were the best holistic and successful ways to live with this syndrome. However her doctor still continued to push birth control, suggesting different brands and doses, ignoring Abby’s pleas to stay away from it, “Birth control is a bandaid, it does not address the root cause.”
“Birth control is a bandaid, it does not address the root cause“
Lily goes to an OBGYN in an attempt to get more answers, they recommend a trans-vaginal ultrasound to get a closer look at her ovaries. She sits on the chair and stares at the large metal prongs that she will place her feet on to expose herself. The doctor puts a large ultrasound probe in her vagina in a way that any young woman at the time would consider the thief of her virginity. Uncomfortably, as her mom sat across from her in the small beige examination room and she choked back tears, Lily worried she knew what diagnosis was to come from this.
Lily did some research of her own after the unhelpful trip to the emergency room. She explored studies and other forums of women’s personal experiences with similar symptoms to her own. In the end she found endometriosis, and she knew that was what she was battling against. When brought to her doctors attention, they quickly denied the possibility of it ever happening.
“They told me, ‘You can’t have endometriosis, you are too young, this usually only affects women in their twenties.’” Lily explains about the doctors reaction to her hypothesis that she was in fact struggling with this disorder. In an attempt to prove to Lily that she did not have endo, the doctors gave her the ultrasound. Lily loves to be right, but in this situation she did not boast when she found out that she was in fact diagnosed with endometriosis.
For treatment plans, she was very limited. Lily explains, “Endo is so under researched, the only main ways for ‘treatment’ are to either go on birth control and cross your fingers, or go under an extremely invasive surgery in an attempt to get it out of your ovaries”. She decided to go on the birth control route, she recalls with a disappointing sigh. While on birth control she gained weight in her stomach and chest area, began breaking out with acne, and found her emotions and hormones completely out of control. The leg pains didn’t stop, and she knew in her gut that birth control was what was making her situation worse. She gave it the benefit of the doubt, but after six months she got herself off of the pill, and once she did she found that all of her symptoms had silenced.
Samantha is in emergency surgery. After her mother continued to fight for her to get further examination, the doctors were able to find her appendix moments away from exploding acid all throughout her body. The doctors were convinced that she only was experiencing period cramps, and if their attempts at dismissing her were successful, Samantha’s story would be much different.
“If my mom didn’t advocate for me and tell the doctors that there really was something wrong, I would’ve died.” Samantha, even at a young age experienced the effects of women’s health being under researched, and the quick blame of period cramps anytime a young woman expresses concern for her own health.
When women approach a doctor with pains similar to those that come with having a period, doctors tend to point the finger at the uterus before discussing other options. Nowadays, simply having a period is all it takes to either get doctors approval for birth control, or order yourself birth control in the mail. Many women are encouraged to take it or influenced to take it by peers or partners, “However, in recent years continuous oral contraceptives have been marketed to women as a way to avoid menstruation altogether” (Johnston-Robledo I). Periods have the stigma of something that hold women back and limits them in the workforce, and big pharmaceutical companies target and take advantage of this assumption to sway more young women into taking birth control. There are even online dispensers of birth control that only require you to fill out a survey, put in your address, and credit card number to have the pill sent to your front door monthly. This does not take into account prior health issues or concerns such as breast cancer or heart problems that could be activated if birth control is ingested. When the communication between patient and professional is cut off for the sake of “convenience” to get the pill, it could result in many women prescribing themselves an unsafe brand or dosage of birth control.
Birth control started as a contraceptive, a method in which women could take the pill and lower their chances of becoming pregnant. It now is used as a multipurpose medicine for an assortment of disorders in women, but it does not solve the core issue. Birth control is used as a bandaid due to the insufficient research in women’s health and the negative stigma that is attached to menstrual cycles. The only way to prevent further misdiagnosis and unnecessary birth control prescriptions is to continue to educate and push for research in women’s health in the same expectation research is carried out for men.
Works Cited
Johnston-Robledo I, Chrisler JC. The Menstrual Mark: Menstruation as Social Stigma. 2020 Jul 25. In: Bobel C, Winkler IT, Fahs B, et al., editors. The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies [Internet]. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan; 2020. Chapter 17. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK565611/ doi: 10.1007/978-981-15-0614-7_17
Mitchell, Madeline, et al. “Opposition to Pharmacist Contraception Services: Evidence for Rebuttal.” Pharmacy, vol. 8, no. 4, 2020, p. 176., https://doi.org/10.3390/pharmacy8040176.
Sadick, Barbara. “Women Die from Heart Attacks More Often than Men. Here's Why.” Time, Time, 1 Apr. 2019, https://time.com/5499872/women-heart-disease/.
Young, Kate, et al. “‘Do Mad People Get Endo or Does Endo Make You Mad?’: Clinicians’ Discursive Constructions of Medicine and Women with Endometriosis.” Feminism & Psychology, vol. 29, no. 3, 2018, pp. 337–356., https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353518815704.