Endometriosis
endometriosis is a pain. Tissue like the lining of the uterus grows elsewhere, so that menstruation is not just unpleasant but extremely painful. As a reckless pretend expert on everything, I speculated that it happens because during menstruation some of the tissue (which is not just blood) doesn’t exit the vagina as it should but floats somewhere and starts over.
I think every menstruation implies a small risk of development of endometriosis and there would be advantages of menstruating less than 13 times a year (aside from the obvious ones). It is perfectly possible to reduce the frequency of menstruation (no names but I know a mom with a cute daughter who menstruated twice a year for years).
Birth control pills are not like other pills (and boys am I ever going to demonstrate my ignorance to the girls about now) because some are taken during mestruation. If only the other ones were used, the woman would not menstruate as her ovaries would think she is pregnant.
The idea (untested as far as I know) is that regular menstruation is unpleasant but necessary because it is natural for women to menstruate roughly 400 times during their life just as hteir great great great great grandmothers did.
This is obviously total nonsense. Women didn’t used to mestruate so often because they were pregnant much of the time and lactating much of the time. It just can’t possibly be that simulating pregnancy for much of a woman’s fertile life is un-natural, because pregnancy for miuch of a woman’s fertile life is natural.
We can let nature take it’s course and have a dozen kids each or we can meddle with nature and once we do that we have to decide how weird we want things to be and 400 menstrations are very very weird.
Some readers menstruate every 28 days or so. I don’t think any enjoy it. They are told that is the way nature made them (some are told by staff at Catholic hospitals that God wills that they ‘will bear children with pain). I am not a fan of natural childbirth but it is at least actually natural.
400 menstruations are not. There is excellent reason to believe that they lead to a syndrme which is sometimes treated by removing the Uterous, fallopian tubes and ovaries with the side effect of sterility.
I am not a doctor. I’m sure doctors can explain why they have women menstruate so may more times than their ancestors ever did.
comments are open
A lot of younger women I know use birth control pills to regulate their cycles. I gather the monthly course of drugs both regulates the duration and cuts the intensity of the cycle. It is generally considered a better approach than suppressing the cycle. Some of this may be the generally conservative nature of medicine. We have a lot of data on women who menstruate until menopause, but relatively little on women who modify their cycle and those women have often had their cycles modified for other health reasons. Biology is generally tricky, non-linear and often unpredictable.
The problem with using a word like “weird” is that it is so subjective. Which is weirder, having 400 cycles like billions of women have for centuries or having cycles twice a year courtesy of a hormonal treatment?
Kaleberg:
My wife did similar in the beginning for better control of the cycle.
@kaleberg as noted in the post it is just not true that for centuries billions of women have had 400 cycles. They had many fewer because they were pregnant or lactating most of the time.
the current approach of menstruating every 28 days except for 0 to 4 pregnancies is the novel experiment,and it sure seems to involve a lot of endometriosis