Have Menstrual Cups Gone Mainstream?

It's been about 9 years since I first started talking about using menstrual cups as an environmentally friendly alternative to using tampons or disposable menstrual pads. I'm curious to get your input on the State of the Period when it comes to menstrual cups. Have they become more popular/acceptable?

So, just out of curiosity, tell me what you think...

Locked up in the menstrual hut

I haven't polled y'all on this topic in a long while and thought it would be a good time to check in with you. On what, you ask? On "feminine protection". It has such a dubious double meaning to it. I'll refrain from ranting about that one for now.

Anyway, I was thinking the other day that I hadn't hosted a DivaCup Challenge in a long while and I figured it was probably not a bad thing since, for some reason, I got it into my head that everyone already used one.

And, then, I realized that I must have been smoking crack or something because it seemed unlikely that everyone already used one since most women have never even heard of the damn thing. Call it temporary environmental insanity.

In any case, that got me a wonderin'. What the heck are women using these days for "feminine protection"? And by that, I mean you (or your lady friend).

What the heck are you using?

1. Conventional tampons (plastic, cardboard or no applicator)
2. "Green" tampons (made from unbleached and/or 100% organic cotton)
3. Conventional pads
4. "Green" pads (made from unbleached and/or 100% organic cotton)
5. Reusable menstrual cup (DivaCup, Mooncup or the Keeper)
6. Disposable menstrual cup (Instead)
7. Sea sponge
8. Reusable cloth pad (LunaPads, GladRags, etc.)
9. Other
10. Nothing - I'm stuck here by my lonesome in the menstrual hut

No ma'am, no mammogram

I went to the doctor recently for a long overdue "annual" exam and since I'm now of a certain age, the topic of mammograms came up. I've read a bunch of conflicting information on mammograms lately, mostly revolving around the number of false positives, overdiagnosis and the medical machinery one gets trapped in if something does show up. My doctor did mention that other countries, Western Europe mainly, don't start doing mammograms until women are 50.

I asked her what the recommendation was and she said that it's every year starting at forty and if you have three clear years, then you can do it every other year. Which sounded like a lot to me, given the fact that they don't seem tremendously accurate and, given the fact that I know of women who have had something show up on a mammogram and freak out over it and get a ton of treatment and all the while they aren't sure exactly if treatment was actually necessary in the first place.

There are other diagnostic tools, but they are expensive or have higher amounts of radiation and I'm still at a quandary of what to do. I don't have any history of breast cancer in my family, took low dose birth control pills only briefly, breastfed for two years and have no history of anything suspicious. My doctor was in the middle of offering me choices of where to get it done (there are three nearby facilities) when I told her I wanted to think about it. She was kind of shocked, I think, and then stated, "well you did just turn 40." Like I was a ticking time bomb.

New guidelines suggest that screening mammograms should be done every two years beginning at age 50 for women at average risk of breast cancer. But the Mayo Clinic still recommends screening mammograms start at age 40. What the heck are we supposed to do with this conflicting information?

I discussed this with my husband, who knows all about cancer and it's happy fun times and false info. He suggested I take her advice and get a base line mammogram, and if there's anything that shows up, ignore it and get tested again in a year.

I told him that's all fine and good, but there's no way anyone can comfortably ignore a potentially cancerous tumor once you know it's there, even if it's just a spot. You're going to want to aspirate it and fall into the cogs of treatment. Not to mention that increased exposure to radiation from all those mammograms increases the risk of cancer and the fact that compression can increase the risk of cancer cells spreading if, in fact, they do already exist in the breast.

I haven't decided much of anything yet, so I thought I'd ask my readers what you do, did or what you think about mammograms and their necessity in women under 50, or 45, for that matter. What say ye?

Getting skinnier as we get fatter

I was just minding my own damn business last night when reader, Kevin, was kind enough to forward a bunch of pictures of some artery-blasting food "creations" that apparently have cropped up in the American food space. Since I'm mostly vegetarian, I really can't comprehend eating any of these items. Even when I do eat meat, it's generally grilled fish and light cuts of meat. I can't stand anything remotely resembling gristle or fat - I get the gags. Well, not really, but I've been greasy meat averse my whole life.

So, wonderful items such as these don't do it for me:

• The Double Bacon Hamburger Fatty Melt: Three bacon-stuffed grilled cheese sandwiches for buns, cheese, bacon and two four-ounce beefs patties
  
• The Hamdog: A hot dog wrapped in a beef patty that’s deep fried, covered with chili, cheese, onions, served on a hoagie bun topped with two fistfuls of fries and a fried egg
  
• The Bacon Explosion: Two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce

I'm sure there's a market for this stuff out there but why, in god's name, would anyone go out of their way to invent such a thing, let alone eat it? Is there some sort of pride in bragging about ingesting a full 5,000 calories and 100 grams of fat? "Dude! I just shaved 2 years off my life and probably moved up that quadruple bypass by at least 6 months!"

And, while the average American gets more corpulent, the people we look up to (no, not intellectuals or politicians, but celebrities, silly!) get skinnier and skinnier. When someone's head starts getting so disproportionately large in comparison to their body, you know something's wrong. Or, as someone joked (I can't remember who) you know a celebrity has reached success when they are five pounds away from organ failure.

Is it because the average American is bordering on obese that we are so enamored of the skinny? And, as we get morbidly fatter, our "dream girls" get morbidly thinner? Now, I know most guys are not pushing the skinny chick trend and some blame the clothing designers for this trend, but I think there's a hefty amount of blame to be placed on the female consumer. It's the women that buy the women's magazines and products that feature these cachectic bodies.

In the meantime, model Heidi Klum (at right), has recently been declared as being too "fat" to model on the runway. If she's fat (and, mind you, this woman has had three children), what does that say about the average American woman? Thirty years ago, the average model weighed 10 pounds heavier for the same height as they do today. Speaking in terms of numbers, the average model today weighs 115 pounds and the average American woman weighs 147 pounds. And, that's not even considering the height differences.

American women are 24 pounds heavier compared to a generation ago. Ironically, I don't think many women are the target market for those delightfully meaty products I mentioned above. I don't know what that says for the average male waistline. So, as we get heavier will this trend continue? Something has to give because we're starting to head towards celebrity starvation camp territory already and there's not much wiggle room. What do you think of current trends in fashion/celebrity weight? Do you like the bobble headed look or do you prefer a more curvy figure? Or, do you just ignore it altogether?

Fertility drugs and cancer

I decided that I wanted to start doing some sort of Science Friday postings based on either something I wanted to discuss or on some science news that I had recently read.

Since we were discussing a few weeks ago whether or not there was an increased risk to women undergoing fertility drug treatment to harvest eggs (both as egg donors and for women undergoing IVF treatment), an article in the December 10th issue of New Scientist, Fertility Drugs Increase Cancer Risk, caught my eye.

Based on this most recently published study, ovulation-inducing drugs seem to have increased the risk of uterine cancer in a group of women who were treated with the drugs over 30 years ago. In a sample size of 15,000 women that had been followed for thirty years, the women in the group who had received the ovulation-inducing drugs had three times the incidence of uterine cancer than members of the group who had not been given these drugs.

For the women who were getting a specific type of drug which tricks the body into making extra eggs by blocking estrogen receptors (clomiphene), the risk was over four times greater. There were also smaller but significant increases in breast cancer, malignant melanoma and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma associated with taking the drugs.

While it's difficult to draw too many conclusions from this particular study, one thing it does do is bring attention to the fact that more research needs to be done. I think it's also important that the women receiving these drugs be aware of any potential risks so they can be monitored for them.

Now, I am in no way (as I said before in my previous post) against IVF or trying to dissuade women from using IVF as a method of fertility treatment. But, since I have friends who have donated eggs multiple times and my husband worked in IVF for a number of years, this has always been something that has nagged me at the back of my mind: what's the long and short-term risk?

It was one of the warnings on the consent form my friend signed: at the time they did not know what the long-term effects were from the fertility drugs. Mostly the unknown was related to future fertility. So, I wonder if there will be any new information or education (based on this study) given to women receiving ovulation-inducing drugs, or if the results aren't considered that statistically significant to warrant any additional warnings.

Would knowing that you are at a small, but increased risk for a variety of cancers prevent you from using IVF as a fertility treatment if you were a candidate? Would it prevent you from being a donor?

(Image: MBI/Alamy)