Hormonal Birth Control Side Effects (Episode 316)

Full Transcript: Episode 316

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: This is the Fertility Friday Podcast, episode number 316. Welcome to the Fertility Friday Podcast, your source for information about the fertility awareness method and all things fertility. I’m your host Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of the fifth vital sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery charting journal. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones.

I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys. I know, I know, I’m a busy girl, but I managed to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health.

And I’m so excited that you’re here with us today. Today’s episode is powerful. I’m so excited to share my conversation with Mike Gaskins with you today, author of In the Name of the Pill. And in this episode, we’re really talking about what we should be talking about for those of you who may not know: the pill was the first medication ever developed to treat healthy individuals for something that was not a health condition. Essentially, women are treated for their own fertility, and so it is the first medication to shut down a natural process in the body in healthy people, and that is something you can certainly do your own research on to verify.

I talked about it in the fifth vital sign and I cite all of my sources in there. I talked about it in the pill chapter which is one of the most explosive chapters of the book. I mean this is well documented. There’s so many interesting pieces of information about the pill. Something else you may not know about the pill is that drug companies were not required to provide detailed inserts outlining all of the possible side effects until the pill. So there were so many issues with the pill that it was central in creating this mandate, creating this requirement for drug companies to disclose a detailed list of side effects for their medication.

So before the pill and before all of the issues that arose out of the fallout of it, that wasn’t even a requirement. So the pill plays this really central role in history. It plays this really central role even in the way that we manage medications and the rules and regulations around how drug companies have to disclose medications. And so it’s not a small thing. And part of the reason is that a certain percentage of women who take birth control die. It is one of the medications that has a black label warning, black box warning. I remember when I was writing my book and I had my editor, she was going through it, and I remember she commented.

She’s like, “Man, I had no idea that the pill had a black box warning. I had to go and look it up.” And then I realized, oh my goodness, I didn’t even know. So a lot of us didn’t know. I mean, for those of you who’ve been listening to the podcast for a while this is not new information, but for any of you who are new to the podcast or for whom this information is new, it’s really interesting to think about it because we look at it as this benign medication that we don’t even think of it as a medication and how many of us have been on the pill and been asked to list any medications that were on it.

We don’t even list it because we don’t even think of it as a medication, yet still it is actually a medication that has lethal side effects in a certain percentage of women. So that and much more is what we’re talking about today. Without further ado, let’s jump into my conversation with Mike Gaskins. (upbeat music) And I’m really excited to be here today with Mike Gaskins. He is the author of “In the Name of the Pill”, which we’ll be talking about today. He isn’t a doctor or a woman, but he is passionate about exposing the very real dangers of hormonal birth control.

He is a media writer/producer who began his journey as a women’s health advocate after a world-renowned physician lied to him about birth control side effects. This chance encounter triggered a passion for research that led Mike to discover many shocking levels of deceit and misinformation surrounding these potent drugs. He’s recently collaborated with a group of leading physicians and women’s health advocates on a citizen’s petition to the FDA asking for new and stronger black box warnings on all hormonal contraceptives. So you can already imagine what we’ll be getting into in today’s episode.

We’ll be talking about hormonal birth control, the side effects and just really getting into this issue around informed consent. So without further ado welcome to the show

Mike Gaskins: Thank You Lisa. It’s great to be here. I’m excited to have you. I think in your intro it gives us a bit of background as to what brought you into This work and becoming essentially a women’s health advocate But I’d just love to hear from you if you would like to share your story as to what brought you to this point where you’re actively Publicly campaigning around hormonal birth control side effects. Yeah, absolutely to go To go kind of all the way back Early on in my wife and my Relationship She went to the doctor for something else and came home with a pill and we had never really discussed it before We neither one are big on taking medications if we don’t have to so I guess it was kind of A natural thing for us that we hadn’t really thought about the pill to that point But that said we were happy to have it because we we weren’t really happy with other things We had tried for as far as contraceptives And so we were like this is great.

This this sounds perfect and about two or three months in She was opening the package and I happened to be there with her in the little patient information pamphlet fell to the lore and I picked it up and started unfolding it and started reading through it and it was pretty alarming to me to see some of the side effects that were mentioned and she had a family history related to some of the things and it kind of scared me and I asked her if the doctor had told her about all these side effects and it was the first she had really heard of it and since it had been on the market for decades she never really thought to question at safety.

It ended up being a pretty in-depth conversation. It’s one of those things that sticks in your mind. I still remember us talking about it vividly to this day. Ultimately, it came to me saying, “Hey, look, I’m not going to tell you what you need to do, but in my opinion, if this means we get to spend one less day at the end of our lives together, I really don’t want you taking them. And she immediately, it was like this weight had been lifted off of her shoulder. I remember the look on her face, she was just, she was so relieved. She said, she felt like they had been making her crazy.

She didn’t feel like herself. And she really hadn’t liked taking them, but she was afraid of disappointing me. And so she stopped taking them at that point. And I think that for me, looking back on it now, in retrospect, the sad part of that story is that’s where it ended. It never crossed my mind to have that discussion with my sisters or nieces or cousins or anyone else in my family because it didn’t feel like it was my place. And honestly, in our culture, it almost doesn’t feel like it’s your place as a husband to have an opinion about birth control.

But now I feel like I wish I had been more proactive at that time. I wish I had started digging deeper and thinking about how it was affecting other people in my family then. But really, it disappeared from my radar. It had kind of been resolved in our lives, so I didn’t really think about it much anymore. Until many, many years later, I was at a medical conference. I do a lot of live events, stuff in my work. And the keynote speaker on the first night was a gentleman they called the father of autoimmune disease. And he’s the world renowned authority on autoimmune disease.

He had discovered, he actually came up with this concept of the body’s immune system attacking itself when he was studying Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and rabbits in the late ’50s. And so they had him there as a keynote speaker speaking to all these doctors of different specialties and he kind of was giving the broad brush strokes of autoimmune disease and he said we’ve known from the beginning estrogen plays a key role because of what it does in a woman’s body and for her immune system in her reproductive years especially. And we know that you know nearly 80% of the diagnoses are women so we knew estrogen was a key factor in all of this.

And as he started talking about the immune system and the T cells, being the soldiers of the immune system and how they have these estrogen receptors on there and chemicals getting their body and mimic natural estrogen, and they attached to these soldiers and suddenly the soldiers armed, but it doesn’t know what to attack because it’s not our natural estrogen. And so the deeper he went, I kept thinking about a chemical that mimics natural estrogen. I had never heard of endocrine disruptors before and didn’t really know what he was talking about. So the only thing I could think of was hormonal birth control.

And the more he talked, the more it sounded like he had to be talking about birth control. So anyway, at the end, I went up to him, I approached him, and I said, “So what role does birth control play in all of this?” And he said, “Oh, none at all.” And I was flabbergasted. You know, I believed him ’cause he’s the world around authority. But I was just, I was blown away. And I said that, you know, I see that seems counterintuitive based on everything you just said. And he said, no, no, there’s never been any evidence linking any of these diseases to birth control.

And I was blown away. So I ultimately accepted what he was telling me. I got back to my hotel room that night and it was still gnawing on me. So I Googled, I just picked lupus out of thin air. I Googled lupus plus oral contraceptives. And I found this new. doesn’t mean women should stop taking birth control for some small increased risk of developing lupus. And I was, I was immediately flooded with anger because he had flat out lied to me. And I thought, well, okay, maybe he just thinks I’m a simpleton. And it was easier just to tell me there was no evidence.

But the fact was, he said there was no evidence. And I think at that moment, I felt kind of gaslighted, you know, it’s like, why would he would he why would he lie about it? Why would he you know at the very least why would he not address it or hide it from me or whatever and I think that just kind of set the wheels in motion for me and kind of lit the fire of passion to start digging deeper and I just kind of continued from there digging and digging and the wormhole just rabbit hole seems to get deeper and deeper.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Wow that’s a really interesting experience that you have.

Mike Gaskins: Yeah, there’s so many different parts of that story. I mean, the first most basic part, and this is something that I, I often find just to be really strange, like really weird, for lack of a better word, that you can have some of the most intelligent, highly accolated humans on earth who Don’t make the simplest connections So when you what you were describing was essentially this world-renowned Expert in autoimmune disease sharing specifically this process where Estrogen triggers this autoimmune response and and so he’s sharing the research sharing the knowledge but then when you ask him about making the connection to birth control which obviously is a significant source of exposure to synthetic estrogens.

He, you know, no, there’s no connection. And then there is research and yeah, so I’m not even, yeah, it’s just, when I hear that, what occurs to me is just there seems to be so much a medical dogma that often health professionals are not able to reach outside of whatever they’ve been taught to actually look at what the science is saying because it doesn’t agree with their opinions about what it should be. I struggle with that a lot. I wonder at what levels do everyday doctors make this connection? There are doctors out there who have, but like you say, it’s a very dogmatic profession and almost by necessity it’s dogmatic because if you’re seeing patients day in and day out, they’re counting on you to know what’s wrong with them when they come in presenting all these strange symptoms.

And I imagine you have to be confident. You don’t want to give them the sense of, “I have no idea what’s happening to you.” So you have to be very confident in your training, right? And if your training has told you, this is nothing to worry about. These have been on the market for 50 years. They’re completely safe and they’re not tied to any kind of, you know, iatrogenic effects or whatever. You want to believe that because you want to believe your training is the best and that you’re prepared to face these patients every day. And I think that has to play a big part in why it’s so hard for doctors to see that.

The more cynical side of me thinks, “I actually had an OB/GYN tell me birth control accounts for about a third of their business, so it’s really hard for OB/GYNs to think of alternatives or to turn women away from birth control because I have an Upton Sinclair quote in my book. It’s hard to get someone to see a truth when their income depends on them not seeing it.” I don’t know what the factors are that play into doctors not being able to recognize or admit that birth control causes so many of these problems

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, it seems like it’s a systemic issue. So What you described you were reading this paper and the paper is basically showing this pretty significant connection between you said I mean, it’s a correlation and anyone who studied Anything science in school knows that correlation doesn’t mean causation. So we can’t draw the conclusion that one causes the other simply because we have a correlation. But what you mentioned is that there was a study and then the women who were on birth control had, did you say 50% greater chance of developing lupus?

Mike Gaskins: Right.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: And so there’s this connection. So we don’t, obviously this warrants for the research, what we can see this connection, but you mentioned that the doctor’s response on, in the paper was basically like, well, this doesn’t mean that we should, that women shouldn’t use birth control. And so I mean, my audience, especially listeners who’ve listened to the show for a long time, you know, we talked about the birth control pill and other hormonal birth control a lot on the show. And we talk a lot about the different side effects. And when diving into the research, it doesn’t take long when there’s research specifically directed at medical professionals, there’s this error of minimizing the side effects.

And if there are any proven side effects, for example, that the pill increases the chance of liver cancer, cervical cancer, breast cancer, it’s immediately followed up with, but it’s been shown to reduce the chances of ovarian cancer and in vitriol cancer, So the overall effect is positive. So whenever there even is a proven negative side effect It’s combined and presented in a way that completely dismisses and minimizes any type of actual risk and the final message is always but you should just take it Because it’s better

Mike Gaskins: Right, and you know that was one of the things that really enraged me after that first encounter, reading the doctor’s statement that this doesn’t mean women should stop taking the pill. It really rang a bell for me. It’s like, I’ve kind of tiptoed around this, even with my wife not wanting her to think I’m telling her what to do, because I don’t want to come off as patriarchal, which is a valid concern. But reading him saying that, it’s like, wait a minute, that’s very patriarchal. You’ve got these studies that come out, and I read it time and time again in all these different diseases that I would research.

You would read articles, and most of the time it was an older man saying, this doesn’t mean women should stop taking the pill. And it’s like, hang on, dude. Why don’t we just give them the information and let them decide if they should stop taking the pill. It’s a very wrong approach to, like you said, immediately you get information and all of a sudden you’re trying to mitigate it or downplay it or play it off as something else and then you also set this artificial threshold, but you never establish what that threshold is. You just say, “This isn’t enough to convince us,” but you never say, “What would be enough to convince you?” And that’s kind of where I always want to twist it.

It’s like, Okay, how many women have to die before you say the benefits don’t outweigh the risks? Give me a number. How many women are you willing to sacrifice before you say hey wait a minute? Maybe this isn’t worth the risk and I think that would be a very curious answer if you could get an honest answer to it

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: well, so I was reading a research paper yesterday and I actually Screenshot screen shot it and sent it to a friend of mine because I was so annoyed by it. So this is basically exactly what you’re saying. So if you’ll indulge me, I’ll just read a little bit of it. So essentially, this is an article talking about the side effects of birth control. And it was addressing the breast cancer risk. So it actually, the section is called counseling talking points. So right off the bat, this is for physicians so that they know how to discuss this risk. And it says breast cancer risk relative to benefit of pregnancy prevention, there was a very slight increase in breast cancer in women using hormonal contraceptives in the Danish study.

And then it goes on to have multiple paragraphs explaining that. So this one says risk of pregnancy prevention failure, maternal mortality. So now they’re comparing the rate of breast cancer or the chance of breast cancer with dying from having a baby. Right. By comparison the rate of maternal mortality is considerably higher than either of these risks in the United States, specifically the most recently available rate of maternal mortality. So they’re basically saying like we don’t need to worry about the brisk risk of breast cancer because if you get pregnant you’re more likely to die.

Right. So it says most women who develop, And this is a quote, “Most women who develop breast cancer while on hormonal contraceptives will survive their cancer long term, and most would agree that while neither is desirable, death is a worse outcome than the development of breast cancer.” And quote. And so this is what you’re describing is a systemic issue. And in your book, you listed a few different. So in your book, you said, search for a new story on any side effect related to hormonal contraceptives, and you’re likely to find at least one of these responses somewhere in the story.

One, this doesn’t prove a connection. Two, this doesn’t mean women should stop taking the pill. Three, this only affects blank women per 10 ,000 or something like that. Four, the risk is greater if you are over 35 or smoke. Five, the benefit still outweighs the risk. So, I think you touched on a huge point, which is why I’m hanging out here for a minute, which is that with birth control, we’re never allowed to talk about the side effects and just actually talk about the risks and just understand them. Because when you’re reading the literature or even when you are speaking with a physician and I know there are women who are listening who have had this conversation with their practitioners, any risk is immediately minimized and downplayed and compared to something much worse?

Mike Gaskins: Yes. Yes, and I’ve seen it over and over. I’ve started researching and kind of delving into the possibility of a second book looking specifically at long-acting reversible contraceptives. So like injections, IUDs, implants, and I’ve been running into more and more of that, especially with, say, the copper IUD. There’s this assumption that there are just no side effects. And when these women go to the doctor and say, “Hey, I’m developing all of these symptoms since I got this thing in, I want it out,” doctors are refusing to take them out. Give it at least six months.

They’re accusing the women of being crazy. They’re gaslighting, but they’re telling them their body needs, you know, whatever, totally minimizing and dismissing any concerns the patient has. And it goes back to another thing I have in the book about, I forget who it was at the Nelson Pill Hearings, I think it was Dr. Ratner who brought up this, you know, Plato’s concept of the doctor to the free man versus the doctor to the slave. The doctor of the free man should have this open discussion with the patient and not move forward on any kind of game plan until the patient is in agreement that…

and this notion of informed consent is is little more than theater much of the time and to get back to what you were saying about breast cancer it’s really interesting to you can always make that argument right that that you can’t really prove that this is what caused this or that but the numbers are pretty daunting you know if you if you go back to the Nelson Pill Hearings, which happened in 1970. Dr. Max Cutler testified and said that one out of every 20 women develops breast cancer in her lifetime. And there was a lot of talk about this concern over breast cancer as early as, you know, this was 1970.

So these things hadn’t really been around that long, but they were already recognizing this, this had a potential to cause a serious impact as far as breast cancer was concerned. And so at that time, 75 to 80 ,000 women in the United States per year were diagnosed with breast cancer. And Dr. Hugh Davis warned, he said, if we even see a 10% increase, this is going to be tragic. Well, today we’ve seen a 210% increase. One out of every eight women now develop breast cancer. It was one out of every 20. Now it’s one out of every eight. And this year, we’ll have about 270 ,000 new cases diagnosed of breast cancer.

You know, that’s, you know, you can’t prove the connection, but these gentlemen were kind of prophetically stating we could see a serious rise in the incidence of breast cancer and we have. So again, it’s, you can’t prove it, but it’s certainly questionable. It’s definitely worth considering. In the article that I shared with you, just that little quote basically saying that it’s just not women might be getting breast cancer but they’re not gonna die, most of them aren’t gonna die. So it’s really just not that big of a deal. It’s interesting what you mentioned with regards to like the free man versus the enslaved man, what they’re being told by their doctor.

I’m not really sure what to make of that necessarily, but there’s a systematic way that doctors are trained to minimize the concerns of their patients. And I feel confident in saying that because I’ve read words like that in the research. And it seems as though the goal is just to get women to use it. I often quoted this one paper where they, the purpose of the paper was to identify the specific characteristics of the women who complained about side effects on the pill, which already has my backup because I’m like, “You have all this money and time and this is what you’re studying?” Right.

So, I’m already annoyed. But the conclusion, so it was an interesting study, 50% of the study participants experienced side effects, half. And so, I find it interesting and important to always critique and look at research with a critical eye because a different researcher might look at that and say, “Well, that’s unacceptable.” If half of the women have side effects that they don’t, that aren’t favorable, then we should be either changing the formulation or doing something different because there’s obviously something wrong with this medication, but no.

The researchers looked at that study and said, “Well, it’s hard for physicians to recommend the most effective methods of birth control without unduly discouraging their patients. And it was basically trying to find a way to isolate the women who complain so that we can say that there’s something wrong with them. And also to find a way to minimize these concerns, so women will just take the medication. Right. And it’s funny how history repeats itself. You know, that makes me think of when they were doing the initial trials in Puerto Rico and somewhere I think north of 60% of the women were complaining about side effects and wanting to stop the pill and of course they didn’t even realize they were on a trial.

They hadn’t been informed that it was a trial, they hadn’t been given information, they thought it was a safe and tested drug that was already on the market. But many of them were dropping out and Dr. Pincas who was testing the drug, talked it up to the, and here’s a quote, emotional superactivity of the Puerto Rican women. Yeah, so I mean, the more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s that’s always kind of been the mentality. And I think it’s more so with women, they just have this assumption that, you know, she’s just being emotional. She, they just completely dismiss it for whatever, however they do it in their mind, they completely dismiss it.

And it seems to be a theme that really hasn’t changed much over the decades.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, and you mentioned something. So you shared at the beginning of the episode that this insert from the pill fell out in the bathroom and you picked it up and looked at it. And in the book, you mentioned like you opened it and opened it and opened it and opened it. And it seemed like it was just so big. And the pill, before the pill, there was no requirement for drug companies to provide a detailed disclosure statement about the side effects of the medication. So the pill, because of all of the side effects and all the problems and all the controversy, was instrumental in creating those policies.

And I was reading something that back when they were doing the pill trials, there wasn’t even a requirement for doctors to advise the patients that they were part of a trial. Doctors could just put people in a trial and not even tell them. And so it’s interesting because now we technically do have access to that information because it is disclosed in this pamphlet handout. The drug, if you’ve ever gone to the website for your favorite brand of birth control, it’s very different than typical websites. It doesn’t look like the gap. It typically has like a warning right off the bat and all of the information assisted.

But even so, even though we are now, these companies are required to provide this information, we’re not, our medical providers are typically not sitting us down opening the pamphlet and reading it. They’re typically not going through all of the possible side effects. And often women will report that if they do experience certain side effects and they go back to their doctors, they’re maybe put on other medications and the doctor doesn’t even advise them that their side effects could be related to the birth control. So I’d love to hear you to speak on that a little bit.

Mike Gaskins: Well, that brings up one of the things I’ve been discovering with. So Depo-Provera has a black box warning right on its information pamphlet saying it’s not a long-term birth control. And I hate to speak to a specific formulation, but this is just, I find this really fascinating and it’s a pretty good example of how doctors approach this stuff. So it takes a lot for the FDA to get to a point where they’ll actually put a pretty significant warning on these things, you know, for whatever reason they still have this kind of diplomatic immunity. But so Depo-Provera actually has a warning that it’s not intended to be a long-term birth control contraceptive and they say longer than two years.

So they set a window of two years and it’s primarily due to what it does to your bone mass density. But I’ve heard woman after woman who has been on this injection for 10 years or 20 years and when they ask their doctor about it, when they find out that you’re only supposed to be on it for two years, the doctor says, Well, as long as you’re taking a calcium supplement, you don’t need to worry about that. And to me, that just– it really brings out a lot of snarky things, I want to say. One, doctors are normally insulting supplements and talking about how supplements are useless.

A lot of doctors– but then they’ll turn around and tell the woman, you can completely disregard this black box warning as long as you’re taking a calcium supplement. But again, that’s kind of their approach, right? It’s just this notion of whatever is out there, I’m going to explain it away. And you’re absolutely right. I mentioned the Nelson Pill Hearings earlier. One of the major outcomes of the Nelson Pill Hearings was that hormonal birth control became the very first drug ever to have a patient information booklet in each package. You had the information for the patient.

That’s great but you know the downside to that is it kind of covers the doctors and the drug companies as far as informed consent because hey you’ve got it right there in your hands. But the flip side is like you said earlier nobody really reads it but so convoluted and there’s so much legalese and it’s kind of hard to work your way through it that it really doesn’t accomplish a lot. And even with that, you mentioned the petition that I was involved with earlier, an Ivy League doctor from Penn was going through and researching, and he started finding a lot of the same research I did, connecting the pill to lupus and multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease and all these things, and he was kind of becoming overwhelmed with, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize there was research connecting the pill to all these diseases,” and Then he started looking at the patient information pamphlets and realized that even as big and convoluted as they are, they’re missing a lot of the science that’s out there.

A lot of these things aren’t even mentioned in the patient information booklet. They’re incomplete even in their jargon dump over the top state that they exist.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, I think one of the challenges I find is that, I mean, nobody goes to med school because they wanna cause people to be sick and ill. Doctors, for the most part, genuinely want to help their patients. And so it’s easy to blame an individual and say, my doctor didn’t tell me this. But I think that if we’re looking for real change, so for the women who are listening to this episode, what are you supposed to do about this? I think the first thing is to recognize this is a systemic issue. These types of oversights that women experience every single day reflect the standard of care and also reflect how doctors are educated in medical school about these particular medications.

So I do a Pill Reality series on my podcast and I don’t know the number but I’ve interviewed 20, 30, 40 women I’m not sure at this point, who’ve taken birth control. So it’s very interesting, and I’ve interviewed women who’ve taken different kinds of birth control. And over the past several months, one of the things I’ve interviewed several women who had either stroke or pulmonary embolism. And each time I’ve interviewed these women — and again, this is not scientific, right? — there are a few things their stories have had in common. One is that they had symptoms beforehand: they had migraines, and they started at some point and then gradually got worse, So obviously they’ve been struggling for however long until, I mean, I feel like no one just walks into a merge.

Like we have to take that into consideration. So they go to a merge and the doctors are basically like, what do you want, pain meds or whatever. And so they’re not really addressed and they’re basically told to go home. And then it’s at that point, either that day or several days later that they collapse and etc. But that particular story has come out on several of these episodes where these women are actually having these life-threatening side effects of risks. And so then my question isn’t to the specific doctor in that situation, but it’s more to the profession.

Why is it then that doctors are not necessarily like what is going on where you could have a patient on birth control? We know birth control increases the risk of stroke and pulmonary embolism and other life-threatening side effects. How can we not be aware that if a woman is having migraines on the pill that she should be further evaluated and potentially, I mean, I would say immediately removed from that medication. But how is it not, how is that not a standard procedure that is taught in medical school?

Mike Gaskins: Boy, I hope you’re not asking me to answer that.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, I just love to hear what you think

Mike Gaskins: Yeah, no, it’s it’s it’s one of those things that just it breaks my heart Honestly to think about the number of women that we’ve lost needlessly One I’ve become friends with several families who have lost daughters my pulmonary embolism from birth control and To hear their stories and and to hear the the denials of doctors or or whatever it just I don’t know I’m torn somewhere between just being really devastating devastated and sad and just angry and wanting to throw things. One mother told me she lived in a kind of a mid-sized town in Wisconsin and when her daughter went the doctors in the emergency room told her they see I think it was five to six women a week just at that one hospital in the emergency room with migraines or showing symptoms of pulmonary embolism from their birth control and yeah you know when you think about the numbers it’s I don’t know there can’t be a good answer you know somebody has to recognize it somebody somebody who’s developing the curriculum in the medical schools has to know what’s going on and they have to see it and why that hasn’t been changed, I really don’t know.

I mean, I’ve come up with a thing where I’ve started sharing on social media, you know, three women today, where essentially we’re losing three women every day in the United States to blood clot related birth control. I mean, birth control related blood clots. I mean, you think about that, losing three women every day, that’s substantial, that’s significant, that’s So that’s enough that somebody should be looking at it and saying, “Wait a minute. We need to dig deeper. We need to think of a different way to approach birth control. This is not worth the toll it’s taking on our society.” And there’s a part of me that wonders, I don’t know how much you want to get into this, but there’s a part of me that wonders how much underlying is still what, you know, it came out in the Nelson Pill Hearings that essentially when they approved birth control, several doctors at the hearings essentially admitted that they changed the benefit to risk paradigm.

They were so concerned about overpopulation that they changed the way they approached the benefit to risk. It was the first drug in history where they looked at the benefit to society versus the risk to the individual patient. So in other words, they were they were willing to accept that some women were going to die taking this drug. But in their mind, the benefit was still worth it because they had to do whatever they could to slow down population growth. And to me, a lot of the signs I see make me think, okay, that’s that’s still at play, at least under the surface.

It’s still affecting the way decisions are being made at the top. There still seems to be this sense of, okay, we’re willing to accept some collateral damage because the overall benefit is greater for society. And I fear that may be why we don’t see a lot of change in the way they approach what’s happening with these drugs.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, I really appreciate you for articulating that. I feel like that is one of the most succinct explanations, and it immediately resonated with me. I mean, over the years of the podcast, I don’t typically go straight there, but it’s been mentioned many times, this strange push for United States to jump into other countries in the world like run to Africa with Depo and particularly the the harshest medications that maybe aren’t as favorable that aren’t as well tolerated here so they have all these drugs that they made so they have to find a place to put them, and where better than right here? so there’s this push to enforce population control and everybody and this whole concept of of the greater good.

I mean, if you think for a moment like what role does that play in the push of birth control, then it’s clear because when you read the literature, that’s actually what they’re saying. And they’re posing the threat of pregnancy to be equal and worse than a potential increase in breast cancer risk or a potential increase in dying of a stroke or whatever. So they’re minimizing those risks of birth control pill use to say that it doesn’t matter what the risk is. It’s still better than an unplanned pregnancy. Anything is better than an unplanned pregnancy.

Mike Gaskins: Right. And Betsy Hartmann has a really great book called Reproductive Rights and Wrongs. And she kind of goes into this notion of, okay, if the contraceptive mentality was really built around women’s health and concern for the woman, it would look very different than what we actually have today, which looks like it’s based entirely on reducing population growth as fast as possible. And she really breaks it down and looks at why haven’t they put more money into developing better barrier methods or things that would actually protect a woman from an STD as well or all of these other concepts that are just kind of thrown by the wayside to get women on these potent drugs and to downplay the risks.

And I really think it, you know, it goes down to that. And when I was reading the transcripts of the Nelson Pill Hearings, that was by far the biggest epiphany I had in any of my research. When I read a point, there was a point where Senator Nelson. Okay, so Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970, he held these pill hearings. It’s also the same year that he started Earth Day. So he’s an environmentalist and everybody knew he was concerned about conserving the planet. And so I think a lot of the doctors kind of felt like he was on the same page as them because he was this environmentalist.

And there’s almost like a wink and a nod kind of when they were talking to him about how they approached this and at one point he grew really uncomfortable and kind of stopped down the hearings and said you know essentially I agree with what you’re saying about population being a great concern he said but I’m a little worried by friends of mine and doctors that I’ve spoken with who have taken it upon themselves to play big brother and they feel like we can’t tell women about these side effects for fear they’ll stop taking the drug.” He said, “I don’t feel like it’s a physician’s place to essentially sacrifice a patient in the name of a greater good.” It’s uncomfortable to think about, but there’s definitely that sense of we have to stop this population growth no matter what it takes was definitely there.

For me, one of the really eye-opening things I found was there was a Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Frederick Robbins, who spoke to the Association of American Medical School colleges, so the deans of these medical schools were there, and this was 1969, and he said the dangers of overpopulation are so great that we may have to use certain techniques of conception control that may entail considerable risk to the individual woman. And that was, you know, that was covered by the media. That was, I know at least Morton Mintz and Barbara Seaman wrote that quote so it’s it’s definitely something that was said and it was definitely a mentality that was out there at that time and like I said I feel like it’s probably still present they’ve just learned to be a lot more covert because it’s not very palatable to the population at large?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, and I’ll just add for emphasis, it may increase the, I’m not saying it exactly as you did, but the risk to the individual woman. You know, recently there’s been a lot of discussion about the push, like is there gonna be a male contraceptive, are they gonna do some sort of hormonal contraceptive for men? And there was a study that was released that went viral and people talked about it because a safety committee stepped in and shut down the study because the men had very similar side effects to the women, depression, anxiety, erectile dysfunction, so sexual issues.

It was basically the same side effects that women experienced in the male version. And that was just immediately considered unacceptable. And obviously they stopped the study, Because nothing has ever stopped this uncontrolled experiment that has been going on for the last 60 years. We’re painting a lot of doom and gloom. We don’t have enough time in an hour to actually go through all of the side effects that you brought up in your book, some which my listeners are familiar with and some that aren’t. You described the link between the pill and we mentioned autoimmune disease, lupus, thyroid disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, which there’s a lot of interesting research about, migraines, stroke, heart disease, hair loss.

I mean, that’s basically scratching the surface. There are this hormone with the synthetic estrogens and progestins affects so much of the woman’s whole, like the idea that it was only ever going to affect fertility has long But what, so if you could wave a magic wand and change something, what would you want to do? Like would you want to get rid of this medication altogether and scrap it given what it’s meant for women and how many women would vehemently and still be like, I don’t, I don’t believe women shouldn’t have access to medication. So I actually, if I could wave a magic wand, I don’t think I would necessarily get rid of it, but would you want to get rid of it, or would you want to change, like, what would you want to change to make it better for women?

Mike Gaskins: Well, I do think it’s done a lot of damage and and I know people are concerned about there’s this This idea of people trying to take away a right to birth control, but I’ve honestly I mean I’ve I’ve been with some pretty extreme people on on kind of far right and far left people Who you know, who are against what’s happening with this drug and the way it’s being presented. And I’ve never heard anybody throw out the idea of banning them or having them removed from the market. I just don’t think that’s, I don’t think that’s feasible. You know, I think you could waste an awful lot of energy trying to get legislation passed to bandies and it’s just never gonna happen.

If I could wave a magic wand, honestly, I would be happy to just to wave it and have birth control kind of go to the same place that cigarettes are if you see someone smoking a cigarette today you feel pretty confident they know the risk they’re taking. They know the damage they’re potentially doing to themselves. They have been informed they would have to be living under a rock to not know what harm that cigarette can be doing them. I would like for the same thing to happen with birth control, not just hormonal birth control, but even the IUDs. I would love to feel like if I know a woman is taking birth control, I would love to feel like she truly knows what the potential risks are and what danger she could be facing.

And like you mentioned migraines, that she would know, “Hey, if I’m having migraines, I need to stop this now.” And that’s one of my concerns too, with starting to look into these injections and implants and things of that nature, if you get one of those things, you can’t just stop taking it. If you have a negative reaction, you’re pretty much buckled in for the long haul. That concerns me a lot. I think in my deepest desires, yes, I probably would like to see some of those things removed from the market just because I think the danger is escalated so much that it’s not worth it and there are so many other options that if we could at least get rid of some of these more dangerous things that a woman can’t easily back out of, I would probably like to see those gone.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, because you mentioned a real challenge for a lot of women, particularly let’s just the hormonal IUD for example, one of the things that I keep hearing. So many women are told by their doctors that this is localized and the hormone stays in your uterus or whatever. And I mean, if I can go to the mall and walk through the makeup counter and smell perfume and that perfume can contain estrogenic chemicals that can disrupt my immune system. If I can smell it or if I can put it on my skin and it can go through different parts of my body. Don’t you think that sticking a hormone-releasing IUD in your uterus is going to cause the hormone to go through your body?

Doctors learn about the circulatory system in medical school. I am confident of that. It’s things like this that women are being told. I’m going to get off the soapbox, but it’s things like this that women are told that it’s completely aggravating and insane. Then when you have a woman who is using a long-term birth control option like whether it’s hormonal or non-hormonal. I mean obviously it’s a different situation if it’s non-hormonal but regardless if she is experiencing side effects or if she has an implant first of all she typically had to pay for that and it’s you know an investment and then if she does have side effects often she’s being told that it’s not related or all that kind of stuff and then having a difficult time having it removed and then having to convince or having to go to multiple doctors to finally find one that will actually take it out and so you raise a really important point when it comes to the longer and then with the shot there’s nothing you can do you just have to let it run its course.

Mike Gaskins: Right. So you raise an important point when it comes to the long acting options especially because you can’t I don’t know you can’t like dig into your own arm it’s not recommended to pull out your own IUD so these are things where you’re actually requiring somebody to help you to place or remove. And you have doctors who are refusing to do it. I mean, doctors flat out refusing to remove it because you haven’t left it in long enough. And then you go to a different doctor and the doctor won’t touch it because another doctor put it in. That’s quite a predicament.

And that’s one thing. It’s funny. I’ve joined several support groups for copper IUD support groups or birth control support groups. And it’s funny because you hear so many great things about birth control in the media, women don’t even think about looking for a Facebook group that’s a support group for birth control because they assume it’s all positive and they only find these you know support groups after the fact. But yeah I’ve heard story after story of just doctors refusing to take out an IUD or to help a woman get off of you know a birth control.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: And I’ve got a question for you. I’m curious, because I’ve been seeing this more and more. Do you ever encounter women who talk about PTSD in terms of after they’ve had issues with their birth control?

Mike Gaskins: Well, I suppose the follow-up would be in what context? I mean, I’ve had women who had a really traumatic insertion or removal of the IUD. Therefore, it’s traumatic and it can cause them to, but I’m not sure if that’s what you’re getting at. Yeah, it’s something that’s jumped out at me. I’ve been seeing it more and more lately, and it just kind of raised my awareness, and I hate to admit it, but the first time I saw a woman talking about, she kind of mentioned PTSD, and I automatically thought she was just kind of using the term tongue and cheek. And so I’m guilty of kind of dismissing what she was too but but then I saw it again I was like oh wait this this is a real thing and then I saw another woman who was talking about very real PTSD like symptoms from seeing the paragraph partial on television you know the woman in the sundress dancing around and it just made her physically ill because of the horror she had lived through with you know with her IUD made her physically ill and she had all of these symptoms that sound like PTSD.

And I thought, well, this is an interesting thing. I wonder how widespread it is. Well, I mean, some women have just a very negative experience with birth control, and that’s putting it lightly. I mean, if you’ve spoken to a woman who’s actually experienced a stroke or pulmonary embolism, or I can’t stress enough the insertion and removal of these IUDs. Most positions do not offer numbing agents to the women. Most women don’t even know that they could ask for it and many women who are getting IUDs have never had children so there for anyone who doesn’t know the cervix is different before you’ve had children or after or if you’ve ever had an abortion or a DNC.

And so before you’ve had children, cervix is quite closed. And although it dilates slightly around ovulation and during your menses, yeah, it has just never been open. And so the insertion can be extremely painful for women. And in those types of situations, I mean, I interviewed one woman for my fertility awareness reality series And she, the insertion was so painful and excruciating and the doctor attempted multiple times to insert it unsuccessfully that she actually like, she was like, I’m not doing this. And she left. Right. So she didn’t get it in because it was just so painful.

So in situations like that, I mean, like any traumatic experience, of course, but I would say like your average woman, I’m But in yeah, I mean more so in cases where their experience has been particularly traumatic Right. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I’m sure it’s related to to bad experiences, but I was just curious if you had encountered that Yeah, no, that’s that’s really interesting

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: So, you know as we bring our call to a close one of the last topics that I wanted to ask you about we’re Back to some of those side effects. We did talk about the, you know, the link between contraceptives and autoimmune issues, but I’d love for you to go into that a little more. Tell us more about what you found in the research. What do women need to know about the link between hormonal birth control and autoimmune diseases?

Mike Gaskins: Well, like I said, this was my very first introduction to just how broad the side effects could be with birth control. Essentially, what’s happened and take over your immune system and activate your immune system and here’s the thing autoimmune diseases are genetic right and I don’t know how many women I’ve talked to that have developed symptoms and the developed disease shortly after they start taking birth control and they go to the doctor and they say you know I feel like my birth control has caused this and the doctor says no autoimmune diseases are genetic well true.

They are genetic, but this is also something I learned on that first night. Environmental triggers are huge and they are key to actually initiating these diseases. Studies on identical twins have shown that I think it’s only 20% of identical twins when one of them develops an autoimmune disease, the other one does. Environmental triggers are huge. If you are already genetically predisposed to an autoimmune disease from Hashimoto’s thyroiditis to lupus to multiple sclerosis, then you are, you’re essentially taking an environmental trigger every day with these synthetic hormones.

And so research has borne out and shown, you know, I mentioned the lupus study that showed that women who took birth control were 50% more likely to develop lupus. Some of the other studies are studies that show that you triple your risk of developing Crohn’s disease with hormonal birth control. You’re 35% more likely to develop multiple sclerosis. You’re increasing your chances of actually triggering and initiating this disease if you are already genetically predisposed and a vast majority of us are genetically susceptible to these diseases in one way or the other.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That’s huge and really significant. And you mentioned that with these types of connections between autoimmune diseases, these specific things aren’t always noted on the insert because the inserts have a lot of information on them. I think anybody who hasn’t read them would be very surprised to find that some of it might be worded in a way That is a little bit kind of minimizing, so mood changes and stuff as opposed to intrusive thoughts and paranoia, right? I mean, mood changes sounds a lot better, but ultimately most of the side effects are there, but interesting that a lot of the current research that’s being done showing these links is not necessarily going to be on your insert.

Mike Gaskins: Right, it’s not going to be there, and if I can go back to one thing you mentioned earlier, you know, obviously we cannot prove, but we can’t say A is B and therefore B is C or whatever. We can’t prove necessarily that just because there is this correlation that is there. But lupus for me was really interesting because that was kind of, that was my journey into all this was through lupus essentially and researching lupus and if you look at Dr. Giles Bole Jr. who testified at the Nelson Pill Hearings again this is 1970 so this is 50 years ago. He’s describing lupus to the senators as this really rare disease and he’s kind of telling them what it is and his curiosity was peaked by the fact he was suddenly seeing young women come in with this disease that in his practice he had always seen it as an old person’s disease so he knew something was up and he started to make that connection that okay why would this suddenly be happening in all these young women well what’s been introduced it’s birth control so he started to make that connection and he testified at the Nelson Pill Hearings.

Well you fast forward 50 years to where we are today and a woman I encountered on one of my Facebook groups went to the doctor, and he told her she had early signs of lupus and her ANA test was positive, Numbers were kind of high But the doctor told her it was impossible for her to be developing lupus because she was 32 and she was too old to be Developing lupus so in 50 years the which is totally bogus in another discussion But in 50 years we’ve gone from being an old person’s disease to where now we think of it as primarily a young woman’s disease, 90% of the diagnoses are women and the incidence of lupus has tripled in the past 40 years.

So we can’t prove that it’s all birth control related, but there’s certainly a lot of circumstantial evidence.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, and this is where the dogma rears its ugly head. So an example that I shared with you of these women who I’m interviewing, they’re having the most egregious side effects of birth control and they are having signs and symptoms congruent with that ahead of time. They’re going to the emergency room and the doctor’s looking at them. One of the women who I interviewed who had the pulmonary embolisms, she had looked it up online. Like she’s a very astute young lady and she looked it up online and she’s like, I have, she told her doc, like I have all the symptoms of pulmonary embolism.

Can you do the test? And the doctor said you’re too young to have that, you know, basically like a home, have a nice day, stop using Dr. Google. And then she obviously ended up having it. So when I say the dogma, I mean, even going back to the unanswerable question that I asked you, like why, you know, aren’t doctors, we can talk this in medical school, it’s like from interviewing doctors, because I’ve interviewed a number of physicians and whenever I do, you can imagine that I ask them about their training because I am curious and fascinating. And so when I ask about the training, I’m often told that in medical school, they are taught about the risks, obviously, but they’re often taught that women who are over 35 and who smoke are more likely to have X, Y, and Z.

So that kind of primes them to not think about that for a younger woman. And so when you actually have a literal woman in front of you who’s having these symptoms because of what you’re taught and this dogma, you ignore what’s happening in front of your face because it conflicts with what you learned in medical school. And so I feel like as women, we need to know this information so that we can understand what we’re up against. It’s very common for women not to be believed and to be dismissed and to be gaslighted when we have symptoms that don’t align with whatever dogmatic beliefs that your medical professional has.

So, I mean, in all the work that you’ve done, in the, you mentioned that you know a lot of families who’ve lost children to these issues. And what, if anything, would you want the listener to leave with from our conversation? Like, how can women empower themselves to even navigate through these appointments with their doctors? And we’re talking about one medication. There are millions. And I’m sure that The birth control pills and the only medication that has problems

Mike Gaskins: Right. Absolutely. I think that’s I think that’s the word empowerment, right? You know, that’s The notes I get from women that make the hair on my arms stand up or the women who say after reading your article or reading your book I feel empowered to to walk away from these drugs. I feel empowered to share this with my friends I think that’s the thing women have been gaslighted so much that they feel almost like they they can’t even be honest with what they’re experiencing. They’re afraid of being the abnormal one because everybody also saying these glowing things about the drugs.

They don’t want to be called out for you know, why is it making you feel crazy because all you find on the internet is great things about this drug that clears your skin and does whatever. I think women need to accept that to be empowered and to know that, “Okay, this doctor doesn’t know what he’s talking about or she’s talking about, I’m going to find a doctor who does. Don’t be afraid of leaving a doctor. Don’t be afraid of going to a naturopath if that’s what it takes. Go to try a different doctor. This is that.” But the other thing is to men, I expected, it’s funny, Holly Griggs-Ball introduced me to another woman’s health advocate And the first time we spoke on the phone, she said when Holly was telling me about you, she was like, wait a minute, some dude wrote a book about birth control.

And then she was apologetic. She was like, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to say you’re some dude. And I’m like, no, that’s perfect. I’ve been trying to figure out what I am because I’m not a doctor and I’m not a woman. Who am I to be talking about it? That’s it. I’m just some dude who got interested in this and became passionate about it. And I think more men need to add their voice to it as well. Because, and again, it’s not about telling women what they should do, but it’s about supporting women in knowing the truth about what these drugs are doing and letting them know that you’re concerned about it.

I have not encountered a single woman who’s gotten mad with me for talking to her about her period or her birth control, because they know I’m not trying to impose myself on them. I’m genuinely concerned about them. If they go to the doctor, and like you said, they’re having migraines, and the doctor’s acting like it’s no big deal, but in the back of their mind, they still know this shouldn’t be happening. They’re relieved to hear the facts about, “Okay, you’re at a much higher risk of developing a stroke if you have migraines. You really should probably try to stay away from these hormones.” They’re happy to hear it, and I think we all just need to feel more empowered to discuss this openly and honestly and kind of drown out the silence coming from the medical community.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I really appreciate what you said. In the work that I do working with women, I teach women how to use fertility awareness charting as a natural form of birth control. So there’s no way to really do that in a relationship without having many conversations with your partner. And at the end of the day, I don’t know, yes, sure, we can say it’s a woman’s issue, but is it? I mean, this affects everybody. Everybody has someone in their life who is menstruating or has menstruated or will menstruate, whether that is a daughter or a niece or a mother or a partner or a friend.

This affects everybody. And I really feel like if we’re gonna make an impact. Everyone has to be on deck. We can’t just, and as a feminist, I feel like you can’t really make progress without, without men, without all people. And so you raise a really important point. I mean, I see no issue with a man speaking up on, I think more men need to speak up on it because for better or for worse, I can, I’ll speak for myself. I’ve had many experiences in my life where I’ve been saying something for years to Various people in my life including men and one man will get up and say the same thing and all of a sudden It’s like a new idea and men in my life will come to me and say did you know?

Da-da-da, and I’m looking at them like I have been saying this for like 10 years

Mike Gaskins: And so unfortunately or fortunately like however you want to put it we need like we need your help like some dude So all the dudes we need your help That’s the thing and and to me I mean and contacted me and said, hey, will you write about depot? Hey, will you write about IUDs? Will you write about this? And several of them have said, I just think coming from a man, maybe people will listen. And that’s really embarrassing to me. But it’s like, really, is our society still there? It is. When you look at how the doctors are treating women and you look at the gaslighting, it’s like, oh my gosh, yeah, we are still there.

It’s sad, and like I said, it’s embarrassing, but at the same time, I wanna do whatever I can and I wanna get more men involved and hopefully we can make a difference, but I don’t know, there have been so many things about this whole journey that have been disturbing, but hopefully we can make some changes, right?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, to make it more embarrassing and hopefully not uncomfortable, I mean, I’m a woman of color, So as a woman of color, I’ll just say, I mean, you’re using your male privilege for good, whether you believe it or not, there’s privilege in being male in this culture. And if you are not a person of color, so if you are a white person, there’s privilege in that as well. So whether we think it’s fair, whether we think it’s right, whether we even think it’s a thing, I mean, I’ll let everybody decide for themselves. But at the end of the day, I mean, if you choose to use that for good and use that cloud that you didn’t ask for and you might not always have been aware that you had but you do to share that message I mean that’s that’s what I think the true definition of feminism is and that’s why we need everybody on board.

Mike Gaskins: I agree wholeheartedly and and I beat myself up for how long I let myself drag my feet Because I was telling myself Exactly the opposite of that. I wasn’t seeing the kind of the privilege angle. I was seeing the opposite It’s like I’m not a woman. Nobody’s gonna want to hear from me. I’m not a doctor. What right do I have to be talking about this? People are gonna just turn their heads and I thank God for for Chandler at at hormones matter who kind of Gave me a platform to start writing articles and see that okay I do have something to something to say and it’s not bogus just because I’m not a doctor and I’m not a woman and kind of gave me the platform to say okay I can write about this and then it led to the book.

So I would think that’s another message for an entirely different thing don’t stop yourself from making progress because you’re talking yourself out of all the reasons somebody shouldn’t listen to you just just go for it share it spread the word.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yes Absolutely. I mean, we could talk for the rest of the day. This conversation has just been so informative and important. And on behalf of the Fertility Friday community, I’ll say we do appreciate, right? Like, I mean, I, I appreciate you for writing the book. And I mean, this is what I see every day, what I often tell my clients who are scared of coming off the pill for a hundred different reasons, like, well, you got to talk to your partner if you’re partnered because at the end of the day, like your partner wants you to be healthy. And as soon as, as soon as like a lot of partners, a lot of male partners out there and partners of all genders and, but when you realize that this medication could potentially have life threatening side effects, it can ruin, interfere with libido, it can have all of these different things.

I mean, any human being who cares about you and loves you is going to have a level of concern. And so, I mean more has probably been done to make change in this world by a group of concerned citizens And so if you’re a concerned citizen, you have the right to to make a bit of a ruckus. Thank you for making a ruckus So the book of the book is in the name of the pill By Mike Gaskins so let us know where we can go to find out more information of you about you where the listeners can buy your book And all of the good stuff that you have out there.

Mike Gaskins: Okay, and to wrap up that final thought, I still, the most important conversation to me is that conversation my wife and I had so many years ago, and I think more couples should have that, your wives or your partner need to know that you support them and that, like you said, their health is the most important thing, and now my daughters are getting to an age where I wanna keep that thing going personally, so this should be a part of everybody’s personal life, have that conversation. As far as me, You can find me on Facebook or Twitter at Mike Gaskins and then on Instagram at in the name of the pill

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Okay, great. Well, I’ll make sure to link all of those places in the show notes page for the listeners on the go And thank you again for coming on the show. This was a great conversation

Mike Gaskins: Thank you, Lisa. I really enjoyed it

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share with a friend You’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at fertilityfriday.com/316 I hope that you enjoyed my conversation with Mike. I know that we could have continued talking for a long time and I’m sure that I’ll have Mike on the show again because there were so many topics in his book that we didn’t even get to. Again, the book is in the name of the pill. It’s an incredible read and so important because what I’ve noticed, and this is something that I may have talked about before on the podcast, but I’ve been doing a lot of research, working on new projects and things like that.

And one of the trends that I came across recently when it comes to hormonal birth control was that tendency to really dismiss the lethal side effects. So when you’re reading the research literature, so the published peer-reviewed literature about the life-threatening side effects such as deep vein thrombosis, stroke, pulmonary embolism, cardiovascular risk factors, et cetera, there’s, It’s almost like there’s a party line that has to be said whenever it’s discussed. So for example, the risk of stroke is talked about, but it’s immediately downplayed by saying that a woman who is pregnant has a higher risk of stroke, therefore it’s actually safer to be on the pill.

And that is the strangest thing because I don’t know about you, but I am pretty sure, like 100% sure that the only options for women to exist on planet Earth are not on the pill or pregnant. So I feel that that is a misleading comparison to compare a woman who’s taking birth control to a woman who is pregnant because what we should be doing is comparing a woman who is on birth control to a woman who is not, and then comparing the risk factors accordingly. We shouldn’t be minimizing the risk of death because this means that there’s a certain percentage of healthy people who will die just because they’re trying to avoid pregnancy.

That’s something that we should discuss. We should talk about, we shouldn’t minimize, we should have numbers, and we should be clearly telling women about these risks. And if we did that, I think that it would also become paramount to talk about some of those early warning signs because as you know, for those of you who have listened to my Pill Reality series episodes, so you’ll find those over at fertilityfriday.com/pillreality. I’ve interviewed a number of women who have had strokes and pulmonary embolisms and survived and what is really consistent in these interviews that I’ve shared is that they had pretty severe symptoms leading up to these events that were dismissed by medical professionals.

And so it’s, from my perspective, I mean, if we just acknowledge and talk about it, there’s always a sphere that women are going to be dissuaded from using birth control. Well, you know, there’s a lot of things out there that are air quotes bad for us that we use anyways. There’s plenty of people who smoke cigarettes and plenty of people who eat all kinds of things that we could classify as unhealthy, like we could go on about it. So at the end of the day, I feel that we should be able to treat people like adults and provide the information and allow that person to make the decision.

So when you look at the risk factors, if we just tell you what it is. And we talk about some of the risk factors that might make you more likely or less likely and talk about some of those side effects. So one thing that I really feel passionate and strongly about is that for women who are on estrogen containing birth control methods, to be aware that if you do experience migraine with aura, that could put you at a greater risk of actually having a stroke, especially if you start to experience them more frequently or more severe, that is a huge red flag that your type and choice of medication should be looked at because there are certain women who can’t be on estrogen containing birth control because it raises their risk of developing these serious side effects far too much for it to be considered safe.

And if we can just have a conversation about it, then we can talk about these things. And then in my perspective, we can reduce the risk of a person dying Because if we’re really clear on some of those early warning signs and everyone is counseled, then you would be able to identify at least in many cases beforehand and be able to have that conversation with your doctor and potentially switch to a different type of, even if it’s a different type of hormonal method that doesn’t contain the estrogen or, you know, whatever the conversation used to look like.

But at the end of the day, with that, if we don’t talk about these things, if we minimize them in the literature and if we don’t make women aware about the very real risks associated with these birth controls, even if they’re small, then how are we helping anybody? I don’t think a woman should have to die to prevent pregnancy when there are multiple ways of preventing pregnancy that are extremely effective when used correctly. Of course to differing degrees, but we have the ability to combine methods and to combine fertility awareness with barriers and to do all of these things consciously so that we can minimize our risk of pregnancy but also support our health, right?

It doesn’t have to be one or the other. So anyways, I hope that you enjoyed my conversation with Mike. Like I said, it’s such an important… I think that women fall into three categories when it comes to these types of things, when it comes to conversation about pill risk factors. Some women are going to hear about the risks, are going to hear about the side effects and say, okay, that’s not for me. I don’t want that. Some women are going to hear about those and say, okay, you know, I’m glad that I know about these risks and I’m glad that I know about these side effects.

I’m going to take it and maybe she’ll end up taking it for less time or more time, but she’ll be able to make an informed choice about taking it, as well as how long she takes it. If she has experienced the side effects, she’ll be able to modify her use, but she’s making this choice with coming from an informed place. And the third category are women who would just take it for just as long. They wouldn’t modify their use. They’re really good and comfortable with the side effects. They’ve done their research and they feel fine. So it’s not to say that no one should use it or whatever the case may be, but this is the world that I picture.

I picture a world where we’re provided with information. It’s not hidden from us. It’s not minimized. And we can just make these decisions for ourselves, because ultimately no one cares more about our health and our body, the state of our fertility and our menstrual cycles more than we do. And so we have to be able to make those informed choices about what’s best for us. No one else can really dictate what’s best for us, from my perspective, of course. So with that said, I want to thank you so much for tuning into the show today. If this episode resonated with you, if you know somebody who could really benefit from hearing this episode, make sure to share it.

So again, the link to share fertilityfriday.com/316. I want to thank you for tuning in, for being a part of the Fertility Friday community, for helping to spread the message about fertility awareness and body autonomy and really just this concept of informed choice and all these different things that we talk about on the podcast. So I really appreciate you for being part of that. And of course, as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.