PMS, the Pill and your teenage daughter

Every week I see women in my practice, mostly in their mid-thirties, who were put on the birth control pill a few months after they started menstruating because their menses were very difficult. For most of them this means more than fifteen years of unnecessary and risky medication.

The propensity of medical doctors to prescribe the pill for "new menstruaters" illustrates one of the differences between a scientific vs an organic understanding of the human body. The scientific approach works best with systems that change very little and very slowly, like the stars and computers. Since it is very difficult to calibrate the hormones in the birth control pill for the rapidly changing state of a teenage reproductive system, all a medical doctor can do is impose an unnatural uniformity on a changing system and hope that a young woman isn't killed by a wandering blood clot on his watch.

One alternative would be to give the patient's reproductive system a change to "get the training wheels" off. For the young women we are discussing, without some kind of other kind of intervention, this path would involve physical and emotional pain. Moreover, without a little help, the system might never correct itself and function in a healthy manner. Fortunately, acupuncture is very successful at eliminating menstrual discomfort of all kinds. And the rates of success are even higher for young women, for whom the energy of growth and change--if not stifled by a pharmaceutical--is the energy of healing. All it needs is a nudge in the right direction.

If you'd like to know more about how acupuncture can regulate your menstrual cycles, please feel free to give me a call: 617 312 7650.

peas,

Daria