Period #8, open this one today for mysterious reasons!
Barnes and Noble is having a 25% off all pre-orders sale and it ends tonight (Friday Jan 27). If you’ve been wanting to pre-order my book now would be a great time.
As often happens, my research life and teaching life are coinciding in interesting ways. In class this week my students considered the difference between being “critical” of science and “skeptical” of it. They shared nuanced ideas around what it means to commit to making something better, versus taking potshots at it. Something we only started to touch on was what turns some people from critics into skeptics… what lived experiences, mistrust, or incentives to intentionally promote inflammatory ideas produce people who reject even trustworthy ideas formed through processes of revision and scientific consensus? Why are there so many different paths to skepticism… and which are paths that people take because of the ways they have been harmed (e.g., institutional betrayal) versus ways they choose because it improves their status (e.g., the doctor who once scoffed at anti-vax positions who finds an intense and reinforcing audience when they start “asking questions”). And of course, what happens when those paths converge?
These paths overlap and even converge quite often when it comes to uterine science and health. We have been so underserved and harmed, for so long, that there are a lot of people out there who have become skeptics of what we can know and trust about menstrual cycles, pregnancy, birth, and more. The consensus understanding of these processes – and the more cutting edge work that is not yet consensus but is looking like it will be that way soon – doesn’t even make it to much medical training. So if the people diagnosing and treating people do not have access to the best knowledge about uteruses, it's understandable those being diagnosed and treated often do not either. (It’s also fair to say that in plenty of instances, it is not necessary to be up to date on the latest and best knowledge about how a uterus works to be able to appropriately care for a patient.)
But medical betrayal happens often enough, to enough people, to hurt and even radicalize people to the point of refusing to accept what most scientists are comfortable saying is true about the body. And sure, some of this is in bad faith. But most of who I encounter in my work are not believing or promoting disinformation out of bad faith, but because they or their loved ones were betrayed one too many times by a problematic system.
This is why I do what I do and study what I study.
I know it’s dorky, but I REALLY REALLY want folks to read my book. I have already grown as a scholar and have parts of it that I wish I could change. For instance, I crack a joke that I won’t be providing IUD self-removal instructions in the introduction, and you know what? If I were rewriting that section today I probably would provide those instructions because my anger at the reproductive coercion that goes into LARC-first contraceptive counseling has only grown. But on the whole I am proud of the book, proud of what it says and does and what I think it can do for my own field and for menstruating people.
Is this whole situation messed up, that the main way I can get buzz about my book is to constantly harp on pre-orders? Is it true that how much support you have for publicity and marketing from your publisher plays a big role in how much attention you get (by the way the whole PUP team from start to finish is AMAZING so I’m doing great there)? Sure. But I’m happy to tell you about this (and I imagine you don’t mind or else, why subscribe to my newsletter?) if it means you might read the book, and even better, love it enough to encourage a friend to do the same.
Ok ok ok, linky time.
A few cool links
Am I… am I talking about COVID again? Sure am! Still a pandemic last I checked and the death rate has strangely not abated for something that has stopped receiving any kind of meaningful attention from our government! Here’s a great rebuttal to that awful WaPo piece that falsely claimed covid deaths are overcounted. Surprise! They’re not.
Want to know who is funding Cop City (and if you don’t know what that is the article will tell you that, too)? Truth Out can tell you. For the most part it’s exactly who you think. And Waffle House.
I have gotten a number of questions lately from folks who want to know if hormonal contraception might increase the risk of long COVID. The reason they ask is that hormonal contraception can increase the risk of blood clots. COVID is a vascular disease, and one proposed mechanism to explain long COVID is microclots. So there are feasible mechanisms there that might make one concerned. The problem is there are zero high quality studies to help us determine the relationship between hormonal contraception and COVID outcomes, let alone specifically risk of long COVID. Here’s a Cochrane review that does its best to review the scanty evidence out there – if it helps the evidence does not point towards an increased risk with contraception. But again the existing work make it very hard to assess whether the lack of relationship is real.
One weird period fact
Do you want to reduce your period flow AND you happen to have decent predictive power as to when your period will start AND you tolerate ibuprofen well? Ok that’s a lot of conditions but guess what? If you want to reduce the amount you menstruate one way that works for a lot of people is to start taking ibuprofen before you start menstruating. I tried to find a decent article on this and couldn’t, but because I cannot and do not offer medical advice I wanted to pass along this piece that quotes an ob/gyn who tells you exactly how much (800mg three times a day about a day ahead) to take to see if this method works for you.