Re: FDA approves pill that stops periods; is womanhood a disease? (opinion)

This is a very well written article, but it's still an opinion piece. Personally I think this is an unnecessary drug and will probably be pushed heavily by the manufacturer. However, I think that the author of this article is trying to be a little too sensational with some of his points.
I don't think that anyone in the western world views menses as a disease that needs fixing. I do believe that many women do have problems with their menses in terms of irregularity and pain, and in some cases birth control pills help. I also believe that many women dread "that time of the month" for various reasons, including pain and simply inconvenience like the author states. I'm not quite sure that this drug will be a big seller although it will definitely make many curious. Depo-Provera shots, another type of birth control, eventually causes many women to stop having their periods as well. There is already the oral birth control that has 4 periods a year. Also, if you somehow manage to breastfeed year round you won't have a period either. Thus, the concept of not having periods is not completely foreign. Some conditions, like Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, or anorexia, also cause women to stop having menses.
I do agree with the author that painful periods may be an indication to other problems in the body, and there may be other ways to fix it, and longterm safety is still unknown for this drug. We do know that not having a period most likely is not dangerous for a woman, although it might represent another process going on. Some religions in fact preclude a woman from electively stopping her menses electively.
I'm not even going to touch the issue of the FDA because numbers can be manipulated for or against its practices easily. i.e. if a study shows that taking a drug results in a 0.1% incidence of death, you can say: out of 100% that ain't bad! but if 1 million people take it, 1,000 people will die which sounds pretty bad right? except if you look at the rest of the study and it says that there was a 0.1% incidence in death in people who took placebo too. Plus he's not citing his information so he could be making it up for shock value for all we know. Not saying he's wrong, but I'm just saying.
The part about the hysterectomies is historically accurate, but that was 80 years ago. Now hysterectomies are done for better reasons than "man that lady is batshit." That thing about the testicle thing is not true either. For most cancers that arise from testicular tissue, the surgical treatment is removing the testicle. Ask Lance Armstrong. Breast Cancer surgery has changed towards conserving tissue whenever possible, instead of taking out the breast and even the chest muscle in the past, most surgeries call for removing a lump of tissue and sparing as much of the breast as possible. Mammography most likely doesn't give you breast cancer. Want to know why there are so many women that have Breast Cancer after having a mammogram? Because the test picked up the presence of cancer. (Think of 100 people with a piece of wood or metal in their pockets. You find 20 people with metal by feeling their pocket. Then you take a metal detector and find that 60 actually had metal. The metal detector didn't cause there to be metal in their pocket, it just got a higher result because it was a better test.) This part about a misogynist approach to women's health is ridiculous. Maybe 80 years ago they did that, but that wasn't just the medical field.
This notion that drugs in a pill are chemicals while the compounds in herbs are not is irresponsible as well. THC from a plant and from a pill are the same "chemical". Herbs/dietary supplements and other remedies used the wrong way have the same capacity for harm as manufactured ones.
All in all though I do agree that this drug is unnecessary and would probably not rush out to tell every woman I know to get it, but then again I'm not a woman so I don't know what menses are like. In this same vein I don't think any male should wag their finger at a woman and tell them how they should deal with their own womanhood by saying "suck it up, your periods can't be THAT bad". Tweet