More Seasonale™
25Nov2003 Filed under: LinkageA couple months behind, Salon decides to weigh in on the whole Seasonale™ issue: Salon.com Life | Off the rag.
The article is derivative: there’s Dr. Leslie Miller again. There’s Susan Rako again. There’s a few quotes from women saying, “Oh yes!” or “Oh no!” It’s a disappointingly slim perspective, but at least it tries to be a little more even-handed than The Stranger’s article.
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8 Responses to “More Seasonale™”
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Hey there. I'm Ariel Meadow Stallings, a native Seattleite who's written my way up and down the Left Coast. Electrolicious is where I post daily randomata, but I also write for a living. My first book, Offbeat Bride, was published last year.
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alison
November 25th, 2003 at 10:44 am
the creepiest part of the article, to me, was this:
“Historically, says Miller, who has suppressed her own period for years, women started menstruating later in their lives, and then spent many years pregnant and breast-feeding. ‘One hundred years ago, the average woman had fewer than 50 periods during her life…’”
gee, could that have been because THEY WERE PREGNANT? i don’t think miller’s argument is at all valid: it doesn’t make sense to take synthetic hormones just to have the same number of periods as women did in the nineteenth century. should we also take pills to make it look like we still wear corsets? so many things are different now than they were then. maybe “the uterus was simply not designed to bleed every month” in the nineteenth century, but doesn’t evolution count for something?
i’m on the pill myself (the 28-day variety), largely because it has done a lot to relieve my painful endometriosis symptoms where nothing else has, including two surgeries. for women with severe menstrual problems, like the woman quoted in the article who had also had surgeries, perhaps something like seasonale is a viable option. uterine surgery is a pretty invasive process, and in my experience it doesn’t always work. if seasonale can be more effective than surgery in situations like those, it seems to me like that’s a valid reason to use it.
ideally, i think seasonale should be prescribed purely on the basis of need. my menstrual problems are relatively severe (i begged my doctor for a hysterectomy when i was twelve; he of course refused), but a regular pill works just fine for me. other women are much worse off than i am, and if something like seasonale can keep them from having yet another laparoscopy, laparotomy, or D&C, more power to them. but to take seasonale because you think your period is annoying is unnecessary, dangerous, and complete and utter bullshit.
alison
November 25th, 2003 at 10:45 am
(that comment was so long i had to write it out in notepad first.)
donut
November 25th, 2003 at 10:59 am
I completely agree with this: “What if guys had clumps of blood coming out of the ends of their penises? We would have come out with this a decade ago.”
What’s more, I’m indeed outraged to find out I could have gone without this curse long ago, if not for the lies of doctors. Which is not say I’ll be switching over… I’m too nervous about the lack of testing. Who knows what the long term risks could be? I just wish they would have started experimenting with this long ago. But I do agree with the above: that stuff about women being “meant to have” only 50 periods is total bull shit. I don’t believe that was even true 100 years ago… even in those days, plenty of women only had two or three children, or never had children at all.
Emily
November 25th, 2003 at 11:07 am
Am I the only woman that doesn’t mind getting a period?
alison
November 25th, 2003 at 11:36 am
no, emily, you are not.
Levi
November 26th, 2003 at 7:08 am
That entire article reaked of arrogant stupidity…and I’m a guy. I wouldn’t ever think to ask my gf to try something like this without further testing of long term effects. It may seem like a good idea now but will it be worth it down the road?
Susan Rako, M.D.
December 9th, 2003 at 3:11 am
Dr. Leslie Miller’s comment about “guys having clumps of blood coming out of their penises” reveals ignorance to the point of embarrassment. Men and women BOTH have urethras … and if clots of blood came out of a man’s penis or a woman’s urethra, THAT qualifies as a medical emergency and requires immediate medical attention. Menstruation, on the other hand, is not an illness.
I have recently been told by several reporters that the clinical trial of Seasonale started with more than 1400 women, of whom MORE THAN HALF DROPPED OUT OF THE STUDY before the year was up. That’s not something that the makers of Seasonale want to broadcast. It appears that only 682 women completed the study. Possible reasons for the drop-out rate include the fact that the progestin, levonorgestrel, makes women feel lousy — and that at the outset, there are several months of unpredictable bleeding and spotting.
I welcome any comments from readers of my book: “No More Periods? The Risks of Menstrual Suppression.”
Susan Rako, M.D.
http://www.susanrako.com
susanrako@aol.com
Amber
February 16th, 2005 at 2:54 pm
Yeah like, I am interested in this having 4 periods a year because I hate it so much. Still I am unsure because in one of my classes my professor was saying that women a couple decades ago had been suppressing their periods and when they stopped taking the pills to suppress it in order to get pregnant, thier periods neevr came again. Is this a risk of taking Sesonale. I would still like to have children