Letters to the Editor

• The Pill, heart disease, and research on women

  [Read the article: Does the Pill make women less interested in sex?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I really am sick of the constant reiteration among certain elements of the feminist community that if a certain problem affected men, it would have been solved ages ago. Or that if a problem for men hasn't been solved, it's because men don't want it fixed. Men die, on average, six years younger than women. This problem has not exactly been fixed by medical science, nor have the chief killers of men, the chief cosmetic complaints of men, and I don't know a single man who doesn't want a male Pill.

  The reason there is no male Pill and no female Viagra is BIOLOGY, not a lack of interest. Trust me, men as a class are incredibly interested both in protecting themselves against unwanted fatherhood and in making sure that the women they love maintain high libidos. But male erectile dysfunction has much more of an obvious biological component than female loss of libido (in fact actually there is no cure for *male* loss of libido if it's *not* simply a lack of an ability to get an erection; the psychological, "I just don't really feel like it" lack of libido women usually suffer from also affects men and Viagra doesn't do much for it.) And as djbollman pointed out, female reproduction has a biological shutoff switch, and male reproduction doesn't. So female Viagra and male Pill are *harder* to do, it's not that there's no market.

  Heart disease is a greater killer of men than women, but it is one of the primary killers of women. Part of the reason it's seen as a male disease, however, is that for many, many years medical research could not be done on women due to overblown fears of harming a potential pregnancy, and as a result we know much more about how men respond to certain well-known illnesses than women do. Women don't have the same symptoms of heart disease that men do. So we don't know nearly enough about heart disease in women... but heart disease still kills more men than women, despite it being better understood in men and more associated with men than women. This may be cultural -- men just don't go to the doctor as quickly in response to symptoms as women do -- or it may be biological. We don't know yet.

  As for the Pill, doctors don't tell you jack. I am not even sure most of them *know* jack. None of my gynecologists ever warned me that the Pill can cause depression, nor did my psychiatrist even consider it as a possible cause, but I nearly killed myself on Ortho-Cyclen. There are actually gynecologists out there trying to argue that the Pill does not cause weight gain. I have fifty pounds of disagreement with that position. No one mentions headaches, but Ortho-Tri-Cyclen gave me severe migraines for two weeks a month. Lessened libido *is* actually one of the few possible symptoms that were mentioned to me. So it is not exactly as if doctors are open and forthright about all the potential problems with the Pill *except* for the libido one. However, it is also true that there are about eight zillion Pills, and if you are willing to shop around, to be aware of what the potential risks really are and to monitor yourself for them, you *can* find one that lacks seriously troubling side effects, most of the time. Doctors should be more forthright with women and explain the possible side effects, but they should also explain that there are many different kinds of Pill and side effects caused by one might be eliminated by another.

  The position that no one cares if men die or suffer illness is just as ridiculous as the position that no one cares if women die or suffer illness. Obviously, judging from the pharmaceutical ads, Big Pharma cares for the health of *anyone* with the money to pay for a solution. But the solutions may not be easy to achieve, and unfortunately, Big Pharma is lazy and would prefer to market the hell out of a slight chemical change to Claritin than invest in any really difficult medical problem.

  Permalink Tuesday, January 10, 2006 04:07 PM