The Pill Will Kill You!

Kila

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0627/1224299635921.html

A mostly boring article in the Irish Times about the Youth Knock Festival, until the bottom, where a teenager who's attended a talk on "Love and Relationships" has come away with the idea that contraception is bad because the pill will kill you.

Seriously? It's not ok to just lie because you don't want people to use contraception...

I was so irritated I blogged about it, but would like some other opinions too. Have you come across this before? Lies about effectiveness of Natural Family Planning, dangers of the Pill, etc.?

Knasher

I'd imagine the churches teaching in relation to condoms in the AIDs stricken parts of Africa would fall into the same sad group. Luckily they no longer have the political clout to enforce their policies here, because our adoption of contraception certainly had nothing to do with the church changing their mind.

seamus

Kila wrote: »

Seriously? It's not ok to just lie because you don't want people to use contraception...

There's a big gap between lying and misleading information.

The pill in itself does have side-effects, and as with all side-effects there will always be a chance of death. A side-effect of a blood test (for example) is a small cut in your skin. There is a one-in-whatever-billion chance of contracting septicaemia from that procedure, and dying.

So to say that a blood test can kill you is not lying, just abusing the facts in order to mislead.

Likewise the contraceptive pill has been shown to slightly increase the incidence of breast cancer in women immediately after they stop taking it. So, small chance of death there.

In reality provided that the information they're peddling isn't factually incorrect, then there's nothing one can officially do about it, especially when it's in a pseudo-private forum such as the above one.

Likewise many doctors will peddle the "circumcision is best" line, despite how incorrect or misleading that may be. That's the problem with medicine - it's not black-and-white. And since many/most people are quite poor are critical examination of what they're told, they will accept the argument from authority as gospel (pun intended).

There is also an "other side" to the pill debate. You will find many people who will say that all girls should be required to take the pill from a certain age, regardless of the potential risks. If you speak to women, you will also find that many doctors are very aggressive in pushing the pill.

One doctor in Rathfarnham for example is notorious for recommending the pill to treat hormonal or other non-specific illnesses in women under 40, and also for discussing contraception with women who haven't come in to discuss fertility.
The risks (both minor and major) are also often glossed over or omitted altogether when the pill is prescribed for women of school and college ages. There's an attitude of "they should all just take it and shut up" in many quarters.

So abuse of facts can occur everywhere, in interests of pushing either "good" or "bad" agendas. I wouldn't specifically condemn religious sects for abusing statistics, when their counterpoint are doing precisely the same thing. Ultimately the information provided to an individual must be considered and weighed by that individual on their own personal basis. Though that's idealism, I accept.

I have an issue without outright lies and misinformation, obviously.

kylith

It's horrific that a group can give out such misleading information about something that teenagers need proper information about. Words cannot express how angry I am about this. I want to know where this person is giving their talks so I can stand outside with a placard that says "On the pill a decade; still not dead".

AhSureTisGrand

What the femi-nazis don't tell you is that 100% of women who take the pill will die

Turtwig

AhSureTisGrand wrote: »

What the femi-nazis don't tell you is that 100% of women who take the pill will die

I'd also like to add that while the average life expectancy of a woman in Ireland is 80.3 yrs. If a female reading this today who uses the pill was to stop using it her life expectancy will be greater than the average by about two years..:)

Please note that while I am telling the truth the notion that you gained you two years in your life from not using the pill is utter bullsh1t. Hopefully you can see why.

pH

seamus wrote: »

There's a big gap between lying and misleading information.

I'm not sure I agree.

When people talk about freedom of speech, one of the things mentioned is that "you don't have the right to shout fire in a crowded theatre". If you lie, and people act based on that lie, and then suffer because of it then you are responsible.

It's time that this thinking was used in public health, if you attempt to lie and mislead people, such that they take actions that are to the detriment of their health, then you are as guilty of causing those injuries as you are for the trampling and crushing you cause when you shout "fire" in a theatre.

And no, there are no weasel ways around this.

What you seem to be saying is If you shout fire in a crowded theatre and cause panic - it's OK as long as you're technically correct and have a lit lighter in your hand at the time - Now it's merely "misleading", and not a lie.

Tricking and panicking people on matters of public health is serious, it has serious consequences, and it's time that people who attempt it face criminal prosecution.

dearg lady

in fairness the girl interviewed was paraphrasing. She's picked it up badly, now whether that down to the girl in question, or the way it was told to her, that's unknown surely?

Zombrex

pH wrote: »

I'm not sure I agree.

Me too. Giving someone mis-leading information for the purposes of ensuring that they have a false impression of reality is, in my book, lying.

If I say 100% of people on the pill will die for the purposes of giving you the impression that what I meant was that the pill kills 100% of people who use it, this is lying to someone.

Kila

dearg lady wrote: »

in fairness the girl interviewed was paraphrasing. She's picked it up badly, now whether that down to the girl in question, or the way it was told to her, that's unknown surely?

That's true, although it is noted that the guy giving the talk, Patrick Reynolds, is a skeptic of the Pill and of condoms, so it's likely she wasn't too far off the mark. Also, she must have been shown information compelling enough to remember that the pill will "kill you" if that was how she paraphrased it, which to me would imply that the information was perhaps presented in a skewed manner.

When I blogged about it, I did some research first, and so ended up not just focusing on that talk in particular, but more on the fact that there are several groups and people who do this kind of thing, and he's just one of them.

mikhail

On the subject of the pill and health, this article is very long, but truly fascinating: http://www.gladwell.com/2000/2000_03_10_a_rock.htm

seamus

Wicknight wrote: »

Me too. Giving someone mis-leading information for the purposes of ensuring that they have a false impression of reality is, in my book, lying.

I know it's a week later, but I've been thinking on this, and then I saw the Irish safe sex ads on TV, and one line stuck out to me:

"You have 350 million chances of getting pregnant from unprotected sex"

Factually correct? I guess, taken at face value. Misleading? I think so
Thoughts?

robindch

seamus wrote: »

"You have 350 million chances of getting pregnant from unprotected sex" Factually correct?

Almost certainly not, unless the lady concerned is enjoying an evening in with some gentleman who's managing to producing sperm in horse-like quantities. I believe the current average is around 50 million per ml, of which around one third are usually viable, and the total volume ranges from around 2ml to 6ml, giving an rough overall range of 30 to 90 million viable little fellas.

Both the number-per-dose and the quality of human male sperm has been declining for years and there's evidence to suggest that it may be reaching the point at which it's going to start be a problem. Younger males have been let down by their 'nads more than those of us of a less tender disposition -- so do feel free to give us a shout if your ladyfolk find they're lacking that extra little something.

From here:

Shiva Dindyal wrote:

For a healthy male, typical seminal fluid analysis values should be:

Volume - 2-6 ml
Density - > 20-200 million ml
Motility - > 60% motile.

However, according to the ever-increasing literature on sperm counts, these “normal” values are steadily decreasing and only a minute proportion of males will have semen values that satisfy these ideal figures in today's Western industrialised countries. Not only are sperm counts decreasing, but also are the average sperm volumes which contain a greater proportion of deformed spermatozoa that have reduced motility's.

Professor Niels Skakkeback, a Danish scientist, first alerted the world to the possibility of a substantial fall in male fertility levels in 1992. He did this by showing that sperm counts in healthy men appeared to have dropped by more than half in 50 years. Professor Skakkebaek's work attracted worldwide publicity at first – and then ridicule. He and his team in the Department of Growth and Development at Copenhagen University had reviewed 61 international studies involving 14,947 men between 1938 and 1992. They found that the average sperm count had fallen from 113 million per millilitre in 1940 to 66 million in 1990. In addition, the definition of a “normal” sperm count fell from 60 million per millilitre to 20 million in the same period. Critics who reanalysed the Danish data pointed out a fundamental flaw in the calculations which, they said, ruled out any significant decline.

Subsequent studies have confirmed and strengthened Skakkebaek's findings. A survey of 1,350 sperm donors in Paris found a decline in sperm counts by around 2% each year over the past 23 years, with younger men having the poorest-quality semen. In another study at the University of Helsinki led by Jarkko Farjarinen, testicular tissue was examined at post-mortem from 528 middle-aged Finnish men who died suddenly in either 1981 or 1991. Among the men who died in 1981, 56.4% had normal, healthy sperm production. By 1991, however, this figure had dropped dramatically to 26.9%. The average weight of the men's testes decreased over the decade, while the proportion of useless fibrous testicular tissue increased. Adamopoulos et al in Athens examined 23,850 men between 1977 to 1993 (17 years) and found similar results to Farjarinen.

In Edinburgh a recent study by Irwin saw a 25% decrease in sperm count over 20 years, the results are shown in table 1 below. The worrying thing about this downward trend is that a sperm count less than 20 million sperms per ml is interpreted as being infertile, if this downward trend of counts were to continue then values less than this will be the average in the next millennium.

"A+A: Here to Help!"

pts

robindch wrote: »

"A+A: Here to Help!"

Time to change our strapline?
"A+A the finest purveyor of sperm related trivia since 2005"

Galvasean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6wlyDoDS1c