The Washington Post Article on Birth Control… I have thoughts with Dr. Jessica Drummond

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:00:03) – Hi and welcome to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, and I am so thrilled to have you here as we dive into today’s episode. As always, innovating and integrating in the world of women’s health. And just as a reminder, the content in this podcast episode is no substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your medical or licensed health care team. While myself and many of my guests are licensed healthcare professionals, we are not your licensed healthcare professionals, so you want to get advice on your unique circumstances. Diagnostic recommendations treatment recommendations from your home medical team. Enjoy the episode. Let’s innovate and integrate together. Welcome back to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m Doctor Jessica Drummond, your host. And today we are going to get into a hot topic together. So in March, March 21st, 2024, The Washington Post published an article all about how, you know, influencers are spreading misinformation about the birth control pill and that women are coming off it in droves and how dangerous that is.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:01:31) – Well, I have thoughts. So and I really want to hear your thoughts as well. We’re going to get into my thoughts. stay with it. Follow through my entire thought process, not just about this article and the kind of inflammatory nature of its title and the the backlash on social media, but how we need to utilize this kind of media attention in our practices as women’s health and wellness professionals, and how we need to show up and present ourselves as educators, as influencers, as clinicians, as, you know, people who are thought leaders on this topic, how we can challenge ourselves to be even better, resources for the women in our communities who are confused about these topics and overwhelmed and kind of feeling tossed around by the media and social media information battle. So join me as I share my thoughts and perspectives on this article, this topic, and how it applies to every women’s health and wellness professional out there. Whether you have a large media or social media platform or not, or you’re talking with women one on one in your practices or both, I’ll see you there.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:02:59) – Let’s dive into the episode. Let’s dive into the episode now. Hi and welcome back to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. My name is Doctor Jessica Drummond. I’m your host and founder of the Integrative Women’s Health Institute, where we train women’s health and wellness professionals to go deep and get top 1% excellent skills in functional nutrition, lifestyle and regenerative medicine and health coaching and how to get your practice started. So today, okay, let me tell you a quick story. This past week, I was on our live coaching and Q&A call with our women’s Health coach community students, and one of them asked me about the hot Washington Post article that was published in March of 2024. In fact, I’ve got a lot of notes for this podcast today. It’s just me, and we’re going on a little rant together that I hope you will learn something from, especially if you’re working as a women’s health or wellness practitioner or you want to get into this field. So she asked me my thoughts on the Washington Post article. It was published March 21st, 2024, and the title of this article is women are getting off birth Control amid Misinformation Explosion.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:05:19) – What a great title to click on, right? For those of you SEO and digital marketing, that’s a great title to get people’s attention. So we had a really great conversation among our women’s health coach, students and myself about this article, and really a broader meaning for what it means to people who want to work in the field of women’s health and wellness, what it means for women’s health coaches and women’s health educators, and for people who are doing a lot of education in the media or on social media platforms, which there’s a blurred line these days between social media and media marketing, education, journalism. This was such a good conversation that I thought we needed to do a broader podcast about it, so that all of us in this community can share and talk about our thoughts about this article, and I think the broader lessons that we can learn from it. So let’s talk about the things that, first of all, let me tell you what how I answer that question. And I’m going to go a little deeper into it.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:06:30) – But essentially the student who asked this question is not from the United States. So I had to give a little bit of context regarding our media, our society in general, and our health system within that society. One of the key points that we ended up discussing was that, look, in the United States, there is a profit motive for nearly everything. That’s simply how our our country functions. It is functioned and our government is set up, our media is set up, our corporations are set up, our healthcare system is set up to be profit driven. That is how it works. Now, you might have thoughts about that, about the ethics of that, about whether it’s right or wrong. I certainly have some thoughts about it, and especially in the realm of health care. But sometimes we just have to acknowledge that’s the reality. That’s sometimes why even women’s health or wellness professionals who work in private solo practices don’t take insurance, have to charge relatively high rates for health care. What is why it’s so expensive to do certain fitness programs to do certain wellness programs? Because at the end of the day, our whole society is built on a profit driven model, and so individuals need to make enough money to sustain themselves in a in a country that does not provide a safety net style, whether it’s health care or housing, food, etc. we’re a very rich country in general, and that there are certain people with quite a lot of money in certain corporations with extensive amounts of money and certain individuals with extensive amounts of money.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:08:27) – We’re going to talk about one of those in just a second. So all of us living in this soup do have to acknowledge that is a core driver of basically everything. And so the United States has a profit driven culture. Our government is. Profit driven, and corporations can essentially can participate in the political process as if they were individuals. They can donate money to, to candidates who they support and who will support their ability to make more profit. So that’s important to understand. And I think it was eye opening for our students who don’t live in the United States. So that’s important. And then if we think about how this article fits into that. So our media is also owned by corporations. So is our social media. So Facebook owns Instagram and TikTok is owned by a Singaporean business owner, Facebook is owned by Mark Zuckerberg and other shareholders in that company. So The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Since 2013, it’s been owned by Jeff Bezos. He is the founder and head of Amazon.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:09:52) – You’ve probably heard of them. He’s a billionaire, just Mark Zuckerberg. And I don’t know if the guy who owns TikTok is a billionaire, but if he’s not yet, he probably will be. So we have these various outlets, the person who owns LinkedIn, the person who owns Twitter, we know who that is, Elon Musk. So all of these media organizations have a certain bias and profit driver. And so now there are individual journalists who work for the Washington Post, for example, who are held to certain journalistic standards, who have their own biases. But I do believe that actually they have good intentions. They are trying to get to the root of the matter. But again, how it gets edited, how it gets published is going through a certain lens that is primarily profit driven with a particular bias to it. And the Washington Post, to some extent has a sort of Democrat or left leaning bias, but that can in it doesn’t. It’s not necessarily progressive. It can be in alignment with certain corporate interests.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:11:05) – There’s the foundation of what The Washington Post is, and they’re trying to the bias of this article is that sort of corporate driven, aligned with larger medical companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, etc. even if the individual journalists are trying to get to the bottom of the story and Facebook, Instagram, all of those owned by meta again have a profit driver that those that corporation meta does invest in politicians on both sides of the aisle, as I’m sure Jeff Bezos and Amazon also does. So people who individually say things on social media platforms may be amplified or less amplified, depending on what they’re saying and whether or not it aligns with the overall mission of the organization. So remember, you might be putting out your own content on social media, but ultimately you don’t own that platform in the same way that the journalists who are writing for The Washington Post are working for that platform but don’t own it, so they don’t have the final say in what the article says. So as a women’s health coach, educator, influencer, thought leader, and clinician, whenever I have a perspective on something, I try to prove myself wrong.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:12:30) – And I think this is one of the things that we have to challenge ourselves to do as health and wellness leaders, influencers, educators, clinicians. Because all of the information that we are taking in, even from peer reviewed primary literature, which is the best source, but still that there’s bias there. Who funded the studies? Right. There’s bias in everything. So anytime I have a strong opinion about anything in women’s health care, I do my very best before I talk about it publicly to prove myself wrong and see both sides of the issue. Sometimes there is a both side, sometimes there really isn’t. There’s a stronger side. And because we’re talking about individual health care, there’s always the consideration of who is this being, this information being applied to, what is that person’s circumstance? As an example, am I talking about hormonal birth control in the context of a woman with endometriosis, of which about 30% or so respond to hormonal birth control as a pain management tool? And let’s say this hormonal birth control works.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:13:47) – Really? Well as a pain management tool for my client with endometriosis who may really deeply benefit from surgery, lifestyle medicine, good skilled excision surgery, lifestyle medicine, gut healing, nervous system regulation, all the things that we do here. But in the short term, maybe for the next three months, maybe for the next six, six months, maybe for the next year or three years. Also, utilizing hormonal birth control as a tool to help symptom management could be really valuable for this client versus someone who doesn’t have that health concern and is simply using it to prevent pregnancy. There are lots of other tools, and maybe she has some significant mood side effects that were until she started learning about the side effects of hormonal birth control from those sort of evil influencers and health educators on social media. She didn’t know that there is a high risk of mood disorder, and now she can have a better, more informed conversation with her primary medical team, who knows her own circumstance. More than that educator influencer would know.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:14:59) – So I think that’s step one. If you’re going to be a responsible educator, you really do. Anytime you have a strong opinion about something based on your own story, based on a story of a friend or family member, based on one of your patient stories, think about how you could disprove yourself before. Get all of the information that you can. Try to prove yourself wrong. And I’ll give you a couple of examples of why this. I was actually interviewed for a movie, gosh, probably six, eight years ago now called The Business of Birth Control. And the problem is, that movie had a particular bias about how birth control is harmful. And again, it does absolutely have some significant side effects hormonal birth control in particular, in fact, all sorts of birth control. And we’ll get into that in a minute. I’m going to give you my perspective on birth control in general and the options. But so I talked about how there are circumstances where hormonal birth control, let’s say you’re in a situation where you don’t have a lot of autonomy, you’re being repeatedly raped, you have endometriosis, and hormonal birth control really helps your symptoms.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:16:18) – It really helps the symptoms. For some women with Pmdd or heavy bleeding who are at the point of anemia, it can be very helpful for some women who have acne, and it’s really damaging to their self-esteem to how they can show up in life now. Are there deeper root cause ways to ultimately heal the gut? Optimize immune nervous system digestive health to help that acne? To help that mental health challenge, to help that heavy bleeding? Absolutely. But sometimes we need a relatively short term, fast solution. And also, some women don’t want to do the work of what it takes to really do the gut healing and the immune regulation and all of that. And so if there is another option that they can be made aware of, I fully support that if it gets them the result that they want. So my position is very nuanced, and I didn’t fit in with the bias of that movie. So essentially it was cut out of it, that interview. On the same token, I was also interviewed for, I believe it was a New York Times article related.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:17:33) – So very similar to this Washington Post article. The reporter kept trying to lead me. She was asking a lot of questions about, do we educate our health coaches to essentially talk badly about the birth control pill on social media and I was thus causing women to lose access to hormonal birth control and all that stuff. And essentially I said to her, absolutely not. I am fully supportive of women to have all access to any kind of birth control that’s available, all access to all the women’s health tools that they have available, all kinds of abortion I have I want women to have access to everything that we have, because I personally never know what the situation is. That woman and her health team who know her best and she has chosen them. I want her to to have that full autonomy as well, to make the decisions that they need to make. I am not in her shoes, so I am never of the mind that there’s only one solution, that all hormonal birth control is bad, that all birth control in general is bad.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:18:47) – Except for, say, the fertility awareness method. I absolutely do not believe that. So again, my statements were not included. So here’s my platform where I’m telling you what I do believe. So having a strong perspective on one extreme or the other, whether we’re talking about traditional media like the Washington Post or the New York Times or social media is going to be amplified of far above voices, of understanding that there is nuance in these decisions for every woman to choose what kind of birth control makes sense for her, whether or not she wants to use birth control at all, what kind of health care she wants to utilize in whatever situation she’s in, and that’s a really hard to sell. The algorithm doesn’t support that. It supports these extreme views. And same thing. The newspapers and online traditional media owned by billionaires, let’s just face it, have a profit motive. And if your view is not in one extreme or another, it’s hard to get the attention of our attention economy. As I said, that’s my belief that legally, women should have full access and autonomy about making decisions about their health.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:20:16) – And all available options for hormonal Non-hormonal birth control should be on the table, and women need to understand the risks and benefits to their own situation. There is not one form of birth control that is superior to the others. This is where it gets complicated, right? Because in the United States, that access to. So the other thing that’s happening at the same time as we’re in this media environment where the most extreme voices get the most attention, women are losing their rights to access lots of different kinds of women’s health care, birth control, abortion, IVF. It’s getting tighter and tighter, more restrictions, more bans depending on where you live in the United States. So again, I was trying to explain this to our student who lives, I believe she lives in Europe, the United States. Each state is almost like a different country in some ways in terms of women’s health care, in that certain things are restricted in some states that are not restricted in other states. So women may need more access to more birth control options in places where they have less access to other women’s health care options.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:21:34) – As we get these political restrictions, bans, these legal restrictions and bans, which probably soon will also include certain forms of birth control, this becomes a challenging thing to talk about because the reality is there are risks to hormonal birth control and other forms of birth control. But because women are losing in the United States their ability to access all of the health care they need, just talking about those risks is a risk because it’s being utilized by certain political forces to limit access under the name of keeping us safe from these dangerous tools. So, so informed consent is what I believe is to be the most important thing. And I’m looking at my notes here because I wanted to be sure I was very detailed about this. We do know of a number of the risks of various types of birth control. We’ll talk about those in just a second. but we have to be careful because as we talk about these in public platforms as a form of education, those words are being twisted by certain political perspectives. So for example, there I saw this right wing political commentator Thomas literally said, this is the quote, birth control messes up women’s brains.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:23:09) – Now, there’s a grain of truth in that statement. But what are they trying to do with that information? They’re trying to restrict access to birth control under the guise of protecting us from the risks, the danger of birth control to our brains. That statement comes from a very well written and researched book published in 2023 by Doctor Sarah Hill. She has a PhD in evolutionary psychology, and that book discussed how being on hormonal. Birth control pills can influence who women are attracted to and may influence who they choose as partners. And there are other challenges in the literature. For example, hormonal birth control pills increase mental health concerns among women by more than 23%. They can increase mood changes by over 43%, and it’s actually worse. It’s about 60% for women that have pre-existing mental health issues. Hormonal birth control pills do increase suicide risk in teenagers. There’s a slight increase in blood clot risk and they can mask those symptoms. So while they can be powerful, powerfully used to reduce the symptoms of period pain, of anemia, of endometriosis, of heavy bleeding, of Pmdd, they don’t address the root cause.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:24:46) – So at best they are a short term solution for those symptoms. But they’re such a valuable solution for those symptoms so people can live their lives while they’re addressing those symptoms from the root cause, or in case they don’t have the capacity to address those symptoms at their root cause, given their financial resources. Right. Access to health care in the United States, everything is profit driven. So maybe they can’t access better resources for health care to get the better health care that they actually need. So that statement of being on birth control messes with women’s brains has some grain of truth in it, which makes it all the more enticing. But the reality is that is not true. If women are very well informed and don’t need laws and legislators to protect us, that we can understand the risks of hormonal birth control while also choosing the benefits if they make the most sense for us. So what are some of the benefits of hormonal birth control? So again, always try to prove yourself wrong if you think hormonal birth control is hugely risky.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:26:09) – First of all, it absolutely protects against pregnancy, which in certain regions where there are restrictions on abortion and other women’s health care or bans, that is much more much healthier than being pregnant, which has a much higher risk of death and complications. Benefits also of birth control pills is that they can be very valuable for symptom suppression. In these various cases, as I mentioned, period pain, heavy bleeding, anemia, endometriosis, Pmdd, and so forth. So now that we know okay. Media is profit driven social media, traditional media. There is a bias to it. Nuanced voices are not heard in very loudly in these environments that are controlled by algorithms and hormonal birth control, and all forms of birth control have their risks and benefits. I’ve talked about at length here. The risks and benefits of hormonal birth control pills. There are also a wide variety of kinds and doses of hormonal birth control pills, and that can also matter in individual cases about whether these medications are helpful or not, helpful or detrimental, or making things worse for individual women.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:27:35) – So again, having a good relationship with your practitioner. So if you are a practitioner, understanding all of these issues on a nuanced in a nuanced way, and the fact that they can vary widely from individual to individual, is your job. Taking that kind of general education that we get from media and social media as individual women patients, and then having deeper conversations with our providers is the key and why we educate professionals and health and wellness educators and health and wellness coaches at the Women’s Health Institute, because the goal is that those relationships built and those teams built centering the women clients help women to make better risk benefit decisions for them individually, and so they can take what they might have learned on TikTok or in The Washington Post or on Instagram, and have a conversation about that with their own health coach, their own pelvic physical therapist, their own occupational therapist, acupuncturist, obstetrician, obstetrician gynecologist, PA and PE, whatever the whole team can give some insight related to that unique client’s situation. So the other thing I wanted to talk about, in addition to the risks and benefits of birth control, is that you know what? There are risks and benefits for every single form of birth control.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:29:08) – We could go deep into IUDs and condoms. We can talk about all kinds of birth control. If you want me to do more of an episode on that, we can. I also would strongly recommend following one of our women’s health coach graduates, Nicole Jardim. She has a lot of great education, social media, women’s health, education on the risks and benefits of all different kinds of birth control. And her bias tends to lean towards not preferring any forms of birth control to the fertility awareness method. Also super valuable, and has its benefits and risks. One of my other colleagues, her name is Lisa Hendrickson Jack. She is who I send my own daughter to learn about fertility awareness method. I strongly recommend her education and her training and fertility awareness method. So hormonal birth control pills have a success rate for preventing pregnancy between 91 and 98%, depending on how how well the method is used. If it’s used correctly, if it’s the pills are taken at the right time, yada yada. Woman’s not on antibiotics or some other medication that conflicts with the pill that they know or don’t know about.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:30:26) – Whereas the range of protection for fertility awareness method is between 77 and 98%. So it can have maximally the exact same effectiveness as hormonal birth control, but it’s a little bit more difficult to implement in the day to day lives of women compared to just taking a pill. Now, for many women, this makes a lot of sense to do. They really want to get to that root cause it would be okay if they were pregnant. That’s something that wouldn’t be a major problem for them for many reasons, one of which could even include that they have access to abortion services and other women’s health services. But there are also downsides to this method. It has to be done very precisely. You have to track your temperatures. You have to understand how your cervical fluid fluctuates. It’s difficult to use with irregular cycles, not impossible, but more difficult. And you not it’s not able to be used if women drink alcohol really at all, because that will impact the temperature shifts just slightly. So it can be difficult for women who want to be able to drink alcohol.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:31:44) – So again, there are risks. And benefits to everything. But that’s not what you’re often hearing. You’re often hearing a strong bias in 1 in 1 direction or another. I like both methods to be accessible, that all women are educated on all of these methods. IUDs. By the way, IUDs are the number one birth control method chosen by gynecologists themselves. And one of the best things about this article. So by and large, this article was very biased and actually just speaking in this punitive tone to oh, what are these women? No, they’re spouting about their own experiences with birth control and how they had side effects. They probably didn’t really have side effects that were that bad. It’s very rare to have bad side effects. That is not true. We just heard from the primary literature how common it is to have pretty significant mood side effects on hormonal birth control, and there are physical side effects as well that are well documented, including blood clot risk, etc.. So we could go even more down that rabbit hole.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:32:55) – But bottom line, excuse me, but bottom line, hormonal birth control has its place. IUDs have their place. Condoms have their own place. I don’t know if sponges are back on the market. Cervical caps, like everything. Diaphragms, fertility awareness method, all of these methods have their place. But we need to keep open dialogue within the media and within those private conversations among women and their practitioners. And this is where the media information, whether it’s from social media or from traditional media, and no matter how biased it is, comes into play to inform those decisions between the practitioner and her patient. So there’s one part of that Washington Post article that I really liked. As health and wellness professionals, it’s not always it shouldn’t always be the job for our clients to come to us with that new information they’ve learned on social media or in the media. We need to understand that information as well, what the biases are and challenge ourselves to think differently. And in that article near the end of that article, Doctor Jenny Wu, gynecologist resident at Duke University Hospital, shout out to Duke.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:34:22) – I used to work there. I noticed that her Gen Z patients were refusing to were not choosing to use IUDs, and she started asking them why. Right? So as professionals starting to use our coaching skills, ask our clients, listen to them. What are their concerns about hormonal birth control? What are they afraid of? What are their risks? What do they need it for? What are they trying to protect themselves from? So she was listening to her clients and they essentially told her that, look, I’ve been watching all these TikTok videos about IUD insertion and it looks like it hurts terribly. I don’t want to go through that. And I, quite frankly, had an experience of that with my own daughter. I’ve never had an IUD. I took her, there was no pain management and it was a very intense experience. I would not recommend doing that without pain management. And what’s so good about this article is that Jenny Wu, Doctor Jenny Wu at Duke, listened to her clients, went and watched all of these TikTok videos and thought, My patients are right.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:35:31) – This is a very painful procedure. Unnecessarily. Let’s change that. And now she offers her patients pain management a wide array of pain management options when they are having their IUDs inserted. So this is what is the ideal outcome to me. We have complex conversations around these issues in the media, in social media. All voices are valued health educators and doctors. There’s not a hierarchy. We all have access to the same primary literature, and we all have our own experiences as women. And we all have these conversations among our friends. And then those conversations that are held in the media are then taken to those conversations between a client or patient and her health and wellness team. And she then has the autonomy to make her own decision without any influence of legislators. We don’t need that. Women and women’s health professionals can make these decisions on their own, and we need to lift up the voices of everyone in this conversation. So those are my thoughts on the women. The Washington Post and Birth Control article from March 21st, 2024.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:37:01) – I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks so much for being with me today on the Integrative Women’s Health podcast. Let me know what do you think about having these conversations in the media, on your social media platforms, and why it’s so important that individual autonomy of the patient or client. Is respected. Listen to and maybe some of us who are professional practitioners change how we do things by being influenced by the influencers. See you next week. Bye. I hope you enjoyed that episode, and it’s encouraging you and inspiring you to think differently about how you share information on your social media platforms, about how you use the media and social media to connect with your individual clients and patients in your practice. How you approach your own health and I can’t wait to hear your thoughts. Please don’t forget to share this episode with anyone who might be interested your colleagues, your friends, your neighbors, your patients and clients. And click that follow button. Thanks so much. It really does support the show. I’ll see you next time.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:39:39) – Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. Please share this episode with a colleague and if you loved it, hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast streaming service so that we can do even more to make this podcast better for you and your clients. Let’s innovate and integrate in the world of women’s health.