It’s marketed as period control for patent purposes!

Does anyone ever catch Target: Women with Sarah Haskins on Current? She’s consistently annoying. I just got linked to (by this story on TimeOut Chicago’s site: Online Gambling: Sarah Haskins tries to make her own luck by Steve Heisler) one I’d forgotten about, and had to rant about it. Here, watch this shit:

Personally, if I can kick my period the hell out of my life, I’m going to do it (and have in the past, probably will again). I’ve considered the physical and philosophical arguments on both sides — in my case, they don’t really know what it does to your body, but it might decrease your chances of some cancer, and I have *never* bought the “natural is better and healthier” argument for anything, so just because my body naturally produces a river of blood every month doesn’t mean I should or will deal with it. It does it for a purpose (reproduction) that I’ve chosen to have nothing to do with for now, so I think I’m fine without the side effects, as well.

I’m fine with my decision, so… boo to all of you who might disagree. It’s your body, you do what you want with it. I’ll do what I want with mine. That’s not my issue with any of this though…

The thing that pisses *me* off about these commercials is the fact that these birth control pills are absolutely NO different from the pills that are already out there. The pharmaceutical companies have just discovered that now that their patents have expired, they can either lose a lot of money when the generic versions come out (in some cases they’ve been out for a while), or find novel uses for their existing drugs that they can get approved by the FDA and use to sell their pills at full price for a while longer. All they have to do is sell several packs of birth control pills together as one pack, and skip the sugar pills altogether, or replace them with one week of a lower dose of hormone.

(By the way, Sarah… see the title of this entry. This is why the pills are marketed the way they are. They’re just advertising the novel use they presented to the FDA in order to get their patent, durr.)

Here’s a tip for those of you who might want to try Seasonale (three times one month of 0.15 mg levonorgestrel and 0.03 mg ethinyl estradiol plus one month with three weeks of the same shit and a week of placebos) but don’t want to pay full price… all you need to do is take a generic version of Nordette (there are several available) for three weeks, and immediately start a new pack. They have exactly the same levels of exactly the same hormones. This is exactly what I have done.

As Seasonique (same as Seasonale, but the last week of the first three months is replaced by seven 0.01 mg ethinyl estradiol pills), I’m too lazy to seek out a substitute for the fourth week of pills in the first three months of , and don’t know if an exact generic exists, but I would imagine you could manage the same thing by finding the lowest dose ethinyl estradiol only pill available out there (might not be FDA approved as birth control, but I will assume a 0.01 mg pill exists for something, since estrogen is used for things other than birth control — a doctor could figure this out).

You can pretty much do the same thing with any birth control pill — just skip the placebos. Probably works with the patch or Nuvaring as well. But don’t tell Duramed that I told you, and definitely don’t share this information with your doctor for evaluation. Those poor drug companies need their money.

Either way, Sarah Haskins, if drug companies can claim that their birth control pills are able to accomplish something other than birth control (and they sure can — personally, I’m not sure why they don’t advertise that they can make your tits bigger, because that’s definitely the effect they have on me, in addition to causing me not to be a weepy freakface), why shouldn’t they? Some people take birth control pills, even though they’re not sexually active. Because guess what… birth control pills are not all about birth control. Sometimes they’re about acne control. Sometimes they’re about crazy control.

And maybe you’re not forgetful, and won’t forget to take your pill on a daily basis. I not particularly, either (but I certainly don’t blame anyone that is — it’s hard to remember to take pills at exactly the same time daily if you have an erratic schedule). However, I also take medication that makes me nauseous and messes with my digestive system. I’ve used NuvaRing because I’m not confident that the pill will be metabolized completely or properly. Especially not if I puke the damned thing up.

So all in all, the only argument I have against any of this BS is the one she didn’t make. Which is more or less the same reason I get irritated every time I see this chick on TV. See, I’m also a sarcastic, dry-humoured bitch, but I make a point of knowing way the hell too much about anything I rant about before doing so. I don’t just say whatever random crap comes to mind.