A Pill To Stop Female Menstruation

skinney writes: "Preliminary findings now suggest that it may be possible in the near future to reversibly suppress menstruation using new progestin antagonists, a class of drugs that includes the controversial abortion pill RU-486." If these pills make it to human trials and then to market, I wonder how much longer it would take for them to become over-the-counter.

Comments

Not so new, really

[Galvatron]

In addition to RU-486, the same chemicals are in your run-of-the-mill birth control pills. In fact, you can get the same effect as RU-486 by taking a bunch of birth control pills at once. Don't know the dosages exactly, but I'm sure it's not too tough to find out.

Anyway, my girlfriend already prevents menstruation by just taking the pill month-round. Ordinarily, one week of the pill is just a sugar pill, but if you instead take the full strength pills the whole month, you can prevent menstruation. My guess is, this is more or less the same idea.

A couple notes for those of you who want to try this at home: first, yes, it is considered safe. My girlfriend has discussed it with doctors, and originally read about it in a medical article (her father's an ER doctor). In fact, girls really shouldn't be menstruating all the time. Up until a century ago, women would basically spend half their time pregnant from puberty to menopause (or until they died in child birth), so what's going on now is pretty unnatural.

Second, make sure you have full strength pills. Many pills have stepped dosages, so only one week would actually be full strength, two weeks would be partial strength, and one week is just a placebo. You need the ones with 3 constant dosage weeks, and one placebo week. Just toss out the placebo week and keep taking the regular pills.

Third, 9 weeks seems to be the limit for my girlfriend. After going through 3 sets of pills, even if she continues taking full strength pills, she goes into menstruation. YMMV, but this is probably not something you can do forever.

The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.