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Eliminate Pesky Periods For Good!
Bought a bunch of magazines last night at the CVS by the corner of Falls Road and Cold Spring Lane. I am researching how information is delivered in that format and the types of language marketers use and abuse to sell nonsense to people. One of the magazines I picked up is called Heart & Soul and is aimed at black ladies who want to feel “Healthy. Wealthy. Wise”. The magazine as a whole is quite revealing, and I will post about that separately. But there is a short article on page 16 in the Oct/Nov 2007 issue that blows me away.
It’s about eliminating menstrual cycles.
Forever.
That’s right. Forever. How good does that sound, ladies? Fellas? Pretty awesome, right?
The article opens with, “For years, Melanie Jackson suffered painful menstrual cycles only to feel ‘normal’ for three to five days after they ended and before a new round of PMS would start again. After trying various remedies, she found one that finally worked: using birth control pills to eliminate her cycle all together.”
It then goes on to advertise two drugs (the whole magazine seems to be a run-on drug ad, actually), Seasonale and Lybrel. Then they insert the name of a random ob/gyn with the letters MD prominently featured alongside the quote, “This is safe,” which is backed up by the further addition of “No toxins are building up in your body by eliminating your period.”
Fucking. Hell. Is the build-up of toxins really the only thing to be concerned with here? Should you really be trusting a magazine full of not-so-thinly-veiled drug advertisements to give you objective health advice? I mean, what does a $3.50 magazine that you buy at the drug store know about the human menstrual cycle above and beyond what Nature herself knows about such things?
But hey, if you’re feeling a little discomfort (or a lot, I know that shit can seriously hurt), why not just eliminate altogether one of the primary functions of your body? I mean, you won’t have any toxins build up - and besides you can fuck until the cows come home and not get pregnant - so what’s the real downside?
This, my friends, is exactly the crisis which confronts us now. Convenience and comfort chosen over life and nature. I certainly don’t know how to make women’s periods less painful, but I know that a radical shift in personal priorities is the only way to overcome this kind of bullshit being foisted upon us as authentic medical advice.
October 9th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
There is also an “article” (advertisement masquerading as content) for how botox helps eliminate excess sweating:
http://www.botoxseveresweating.com/
October 9th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Supposedly throughout history women had very few periods. That’s because they were either pregnant or nursing and always malnourished. That’s not the case now but since it’s not we do have to deal with the fact that menstruation eliminates toxins.
While were on toxins. Your appendix holds good bacteria in storage in case you get dysentery etc. People in countries with bad water, like India, have a very low rate of stomach cancer while people in countries w/clean water like New Zealand etc. have a high rate. They believe that if you survive one of the various water born diseases you gain immunity and science is trying to make vaccines from this knowledge. Some cases of Asthma are thought to be causes by a lack of exposure to certain bacteria in dirt. Also fodder for a vaccine.
October 9th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Here’s a weird but related story. When I was in my previous (unhappy) marriage, years ago, I used to get the most painful periods imaginable. I can’t even describe it. I would pass out from it. I would curl up in a ball and cry until the painkillers kicked in, and they only barely made life bearable once they did. I thought this was how it was going to be for the rest of my life.
Very shortly after I left that guy and moved to live up in the mountains with some friends, the pain just stopped. One time about three months into living there, I forgot to preventatively down some painkillers, and to my disbelief, found out I didn’t need them. I don’t know if it was living in the mountains (I suspect that was part of it), the fact that I was no longer in that intensely stressful, unhappy relationship, or something else, or some combination of factors, but there it was.
So as with so many things that people are coerced into suppressing with drugs, there is something more fundamental, even psychological at the root of the problem. If nothing else, moving into a much more natural, much less stressful environment seems to make all the difference. So what’s that about? But yeah, it’s easier to just down some pills, continue living your, at best unhealthy, at worst self-destructive lifestyle and just not think about it. I guess that’s what passes for “Healthy, Wealthy and Wise” these days?
I remember being sold on birth control pills for awhile to ‘regulate’ my periods and reduce the pain, but even that I stopped after awhile because I had this nagging intuition that something was very wrong with messing with my hormones. Hormones are kind of really important to a lot of things, from what I know. So to be messing with them to the point that you stop your periods altogether? That’s ultra-fucked. I have no serious research to back that up, but I’d rather err on the side of trusting Nature than trusting the word of some shady magazine drug pusher with a serious financial agenda.
PS: If the pain’s really bad, you can always just take 3 Ibuprophens and an extra-strength aspirin. That’ll take it down to a mild ‘character-building’ level of pain, and as far as drugs go, it is the far lesser of two evils, far less removed from nature and even supposedly has some health benefits. And it’s only for a couple days out of the month so it’s basically harmless. (I’m going on the word of my husband on that. He used to be a pharmacist, stays current on drug research and cares about me, so I trust his judgement)
PPS: Or there’s always whiskey.
October 10th, 2007 at 2:01 am
Totally.
You should put that in your tag line sheet, which you should also make (?)
Whiskey, yeah. There are natural ways to alleviate these things through energy work though, and I have done it but I don’t know enough about how it works to adequately transmit meaningful knowledge about it.
And there also seems (from the outside looking in) to be a heavy psychological component as well, having to do with the body/emotion level of connection, for how strong it is in people, or how suppressed.
To me, it sounds like having bad periods in bad relationships may have obvious roots of your actual body trying to forcibly reject insemination efforts - to be sterile-sounding about it. But who knows. I certainly don’t; I don’t even have a vagina!
(And that should be on *my* tag-line page!)
October 11th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Ha!! : ) I don’t know what a tag-line page is yet, but that most definitely needs to be on yours. I’m being serious.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
[…] I first mentioned this idea here, but wanted to bump it up into a full-fledged post. Basically, the idea would just be to put together a page of cool quotes you have said or written. You know, like those quote pages you can find online for famous people. […]