The Pill

A lot of my patients are likely to be women. One estimate is that higher than 75% of patients for Chinese Medicine are female. So women's health has always been on my radar as something to pay attention to. The pill, apparently, isn't just good for stopping those nasty periods, but is now also marketed as anti-cramping, anti-carcinogenic, tonifying for expecting mothers, regulating mood-swings, and preventing blemishes. Additionally, the placebo pills were introduced to make the woman have her period because the companies didn't think that women would be comfortable not bleeding for a whole year (or more). All of these claims of health and well-being may in fact be true, but what they do not do is treat the underlying imbalance that causes the symptoms. As is usually the case in western medicine, the goal is still "out there in the future" where discoveries can be applied to help fix the current "problem" of unintended pregnancy:

“The holy grail is a drug that would specifically target the ovaries and testes that would have no effect on any other organ system, so they would be side-effect free,” said Dr. James Strauss, who was co-chairman of a national committee on contraception research and is now dean of the medical school at Virginia Commonwealth University. “That would be based on the discovery of genes only present in those reproductive tissues. We know a significant number of those genes today, and that’s the fruit of 20 years of research. Unfortunately, that knowledge has yet to be translated into a product.”

I'm not sure this line of reductionistic thinking is actually healthy. Doesn't everything have a side effect? And just because we can't conceive of one today, does that mean that the side-effects that we may find in the future don't matter? I may not be a dean of a university but I know for a fact that my testes are pretty intimately connected to the rest of me. I'm just sayin.