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

Thursday, May 24, 2007 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: women's health, menstruation, health news

Conventional medicine has, for decades, preyed upon the "symptoms of womanhood" and attempted to transform every female activity from childbirth to menstruation into a disease requiring chemical treatment. Today, the FDA approved Lybrel, a daily pill for women that stops periods... forever.

The concept behind such a pill is based on the false idea that menstruation is a disease requiring a medical fix. Most sane people would agree that menstruation is, in fact, a natural biological function and not a disease. So why take a pill to stop it?

If you ask the women taking this pill, it's because their periods are extremely painful or inconvenient. Taking Lybrel to stop the period is a typical Western-mindset approach to all ailments: Mask the symptoms and ignore the cause. Painful periods have a cause, mostly related to hormone imbalances caused by poor nutritional habits, lack of exercise and exposure to toxic chemicals in foods, medicines and personal care products (which contain hundreds of hormone-disrupting chemicals). Rather than addressing these underlying causes of poor health, many consumers wish to simply mask the symptoms and make them disappear at any cost, including ingesting potentially toxic prescription drugs whose long-term safety record is entirely unknown.

This desire to eliminate the symptoms of disease rather than addressing the underlying cause of poor health is a uniquely Western approach to health treatment. Americans mask joint pain with deadly COX-2 inhibitor drugs, they mask nutritional deficiencies with antidepressant drugs, and they mask poor cardiovascular health with statin drugs and blood thinners (which are made from rat poison chemicals, by the way, and that's not an exaggeration). It's like taking your car to a mechanic and instead of the guy fixing your engine, he just takes a can of spray paint and sprays over the engine warning lights on your dashboard. Problem solved! No more engine warning lights!

Women who take Lybrel to stop their periods are, in my opinion, doing the same thing with their health. And they're potentially taking a huge risk since no one knows the long-term consequences of such blatant disruption of normal hormone cycles. You can bet, however, that the results won't be positive. Although this is just a guess, I believe that long-term use of such synthetic chemicals may greatly increase the risk of hormone-related cancers such as breast cancer and cervical cancer. They may also cause blood stasis in the abdomen and could very easily, in my view, result in increased endometriosis and severe reproductive problems.

Both the manufacturer of this drug and the FDA, of course, say this chemical is perfectly safe. Then again, FDA-approved pharmaceuticals are right now killing 100,000 Americans each year, even when used as directed. Just one drug, Vioxx, reportedly killed well over 50,000 Americans according to the FDA's own senior drug safety whistleblower, and yet the FDA voted to put that drug right back on the market!

This is a critical point to understand here: The FDA believes that a drug that kills 50,000 people is not dangerous enough to pull off the market. Once you understand that point, some questions come to mind about Lybrel. How many women might die from the side effects of this drug? No one knows. It could be zero or a hundred thousand. If no more than 50,000 women are ultimately killed by it, the FDA likely claim that's still within a safety margin and that "the drug benefits outweigh its risks!"

What, exactly, is the level of fatalities required for the FDA to consider a drug "too dangerous?" Because apparently a drug that kills 50,000 people is not dangerous enough for the FDA to restrict its use. In fact, the FDA has never announced what level of fatalities it considers high enough to trigger a drug recall. It may be that a drug killing 100,000 people would also be considered "safe" by the FDA. Or perhaps even 250,000 people. Technically, there is no level of death that cannot be declared "acceptably safe" by the FDA. (An herb, on the other hand, is pronounced as "dangerous at any dose" if it causes even a single fatality. This extreme double standard is standard operating procedure at the FDA, where all herbs are considered dangerous until proven safe, and all drugs are considered safe until proven dangerous.)

The hysteria of modern medicine

In my opinion, any woman taking Lybrel is embarking on a foolish experiment with her own health. It is not merely a dangerous course of action to pursue, it is the ultimate surrender of personal responsibility for one's own health. It also admits to a male-dominated medical system that womanhood is, indeed, some sort of terrible disease that requires treatment.

Note that the words hysteria and hysterectomy (the surgical removal of the uterus) have the same word roots. That's because a hysterectomy was a procedure originally developed by men and used as a surgical weapon to make women "less hysterical." It was long believed that the uterus was an organ that caused insanity! In reality, the organ that no doubt causes the most insanity is the penis, but that's another story... notice that you don't see male doctors recommending penisectomies as a cure for male insanity. Although, indeed, we would all be much safer if the arrogant men pushing these nonsense pharmaceuticals weren't so cocky to begin with. Only women are advised to have their organs removed for emotional reasons. You ever notice that when it comes to cancer treatments for such organs, there's a cry to "Save the testicle!" but "Remove the breast!" ?

(The word menstruate, by the way, has its roots in Latin, where the word mensis means "month." It has no relational meaning to the modern English word "men.")

Men have always dominated Western medicine, and they have always used chemicals and surgeries to control or dominate women. Even today, the male-dominated breast cancer industry is a for-profit system that preys upon women through harmful mammograms that actually cause cancer and produce shockingly high rates of false positives. As I've stated in previous articles here on NewsTarget, mammography harms 10 women for every 1 that it helps. Conventional breast cancer treatment is largely a medical hoax where men use fear to control women by corralling them into treatments where they can poison them with chemotherapy or slice off their breasts. (Sound insane? It is.)

My advice to women is to learn from your painful periods rather than trying to dissociate yourself from them. A painful period is a messenger that's trying to tell you something. Perhaps you need to take a new look at your diet, your lifestyle and your use of toxic cosmetics and skin care products that disrupt normal hormone cycles. Painful periods can be transformed into painless periods through natural medicine. Chinese medicine is especially good at supporting this transformation. Diet plays a huge role, too.

Take responsibility for your health rather than abandoning it

Solving the health problem rather than simply masking it is the responsible thing to do with your body. It's not an overnight solution like the seductively easy Lybrel pill, but it is a far wiser and more wholesome solution that honors your body rather than hijacking its natural functions. Chemical are not the answer to your health problems. They are merely seductive, harmful synthetic substances that will inevitably produce harmful side effects.

If you think your periods are painful today, just imagine the emotional pain of being diagnosed with breast cancer, undergoing chemotherapy that nearly kills you and having a mastectomy. Once you start down the path of chemical suppression of symptoms of pain, you begin a journey into the world of harmful medicine that will only leave you diseased and bankrupt, addicted to a dozen pharmaceuticals and suffering from liver failure, kidney disease, brain fog and chronic pain. Think carefully about what you're doing to your body. It's the only one you've got, and nature intends for a woman to have periods. Menstruation is not a disease. And womanhood is not a medical condition. Don't fall for the male-dominated quackery that passes for medicine today, and don't play pharmaceutical roulette with your body by taking Lybrel.