It always feels weird when a doctor’s receptionist at a regular wellness check asks me for my “list of medications”. I’m not so ancient I’m supposed to be on a bunch of meds, am I?
My other personal favorite is when a nurse asks, “what do you take for your pain?” What pain? Why am I supposed to be in pain? It’s a regular, routine visit. Why does anybody assume I’m medicated for pain?
The sparklage us due to having two events today, one of which consists of me grading students on their sociability. Somebody will need pain meds after that but I hope it won’t be me.
Clarissa's Blog 
When I was 68, I went to the hospital for cataract surgery. The nurse who got me ready for surgery asked me what prescription medications I take, and she was genuinely shocked when I said “none.” She said she’d never met anyone my age who was not on at least one prescription medication.
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Congrats on your staunch refusal!
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I started getting this question the moment I turned 30. 30! How is one supposed to be on a list of meds at 30?
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When someone has autoimmune illnesses and other chronic conditions. I have a list, but I’ve managed to shorten it over time (before diagnosis or with incorrect diagnosis you can end up going through a lot of medications).
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I was asked what I thought was a weird question at one of my annual checkups; “What are your health goals for the next year?”
I said”I want to live forever and hope you never die.”
I have a prescription for higher strength Ibuprofen that I take only when experiencing a psoriasis flare. I get the same reaction as ‘bluebird’ when I tell any medical provider, other than my regular ‘doctor’, that is the only prescription med that I ever take and when I take it. They all think that anyone that is 80 must be taking a blood pressure med and a statin drug.
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My favorite question from the OB-GYN is “do you still have sex?” The “still” part kind of hurts.
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Ouch!
When I was 21 years old and unmarried, I had a doctor ask me when the last time was that I was sexually active. I told him I was a virgin and the poor man looked stunned. I’m pretty sure he didn’t believe me.
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OMG, same here, except I was 20. Hadn’t had a period in 4 months and she wanted a pregnancy test. Well, pretty sure you still have to have sex for that to happen… but also, I was really sad that the default for a single woman my age was sexually active, and almost unbelievable that I was having the problems I had, and still a virgin and didn’t want to be immediately put on hormonal contraceptives. Like, what kind of factory conveyor belt have I fallen onto, and how do I get off? And then it took me another 9 years to get the PCOS diagnosis I should have gotten right then. That still pisses me off. Like, I came to see you because my hormones are broken, and your solution is… break them some more??? Why?
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(I did finally figure out why: because if you’re on The Pill, you have to come back for regular follow-up appointments and now they have a regular customer: cha-ching! $$)
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Bingo. Hormonal contraception is big business and obscenely profitable. As a bonus, they also get to sell you other expensive drugs to counteract the nasty side effects of the contraceptive pills.
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Exactly. First hormonal contraception was presented as a no-consequence trifle, and now we are hearing that puberty blockers are easily reversible and consequence free. There’s never a ceiling with these things. Once they start, they go on and on to the ever-greater insanity.
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And if the drug in question is likely to cause infertility or sterility, so much the better, from the point of view of the anti-population crowd.
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@Bluebird
I think there may be more to it than that, though when you say it out loud it’s tinfoil-hat-ish. Back in the day, the prominent and popular sex researchers (who were really personally invested in normalizing promiscuity and kink for whatever reason), had a complaint: when it comes to sex, there are two types of women: 1) women who are willing to have multiple partners, but aren’t very responsive in bed, and 2) women who are risk-averse, prefer monogamy, not willing to sleep around, and are exquisitely sexually responsive. Surprisingly little overlap between those trait sets, too. They (the researchers) really wanted to find a solution for getting the “shy” hyper-responders out into the multiple-partner sexual marketplace so profligate arseholes like themselves could enjoy them. “Why is it”, they whined, “that the women who can easily have eight orgasms, only want to do it with their lawful husbands and don’t want to be passed around like used kleenex between dopes like us? Why are prudes having all the fun?”
I think those guys merged into the ZPG crowd at some point. It’s all about adult hedonism, which has no room for children. And HBC, started at an early age, offers a partial solution to both parties’ desires: it contributes to long-term infertility without the informed consent of the user, and it alters women’s brain chemistry to make them less risk-averse:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12716133/contraceptive-pills-change-womens-brains.html
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I think you nailed it.
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Because we live in a culture that considers virginity a form of sexual deviance.
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IKR? That woman made me feel like a total freak.
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Join the club…
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There’s also the charming practice of putting 13-year-old girls on hormonal contraception to get rid of skin breakouts. Take a teenage girl to a dermatologist, and that’s the first thing that will be suggested.
This all aims to normalize the idea that hormonal intervention is a trifle, an unimportant, routine thing nobody needs to worry about. Yes, it guarantees life-long customers not only for the pill followups but for the inevitable reproductive issues that will occur.
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Watched this with younger female relatives. It’s not for the acne. It’s busybody doctors deciding they know better than both the parents and the teens, what’s good for the teens, and thinking they will just jump in and proactively get the kid on HBC so that when they become sexually active, they won’t have to talk to their parents about it.
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Sad but true.
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People sincerely think it’s not a big deal because nobody talks about the consequences even when every adult woman who’s been on these things knows there are consequences.
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But hormones in the milk or eggs or cheese or meat at the grocery store are cause for outrage.
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Hormones in the milk and meat is an outrage.
It is a total mystery why people don’t get that the much greater exposure from HBC is also an outrage.
I know, I know “muh sexual freedom”. Which amounts to what? Screwing with your hormones so that you’re less likely (but no guarantees) to get pregnant, but still susceptible to disease, so that your callow 17yo boyfriend who whines that condoms are “uncomfortable” can have “safe” sex with you without being inconvenienced, even though you are never in the mood for it because your hormones are f****d?
It’s clear how worthless man-children benefit from this, but I have no idea what women (or even considerate men– do they like sleeping with sexless women? Or do they not know the difference because everyone they meet is drugged?) get out of it, that makes it worth the trade. Social status points from having a “partner” who won’t actually commit to you, and with whom you definitely don’t want to reproduce? That’s a primo case of “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
Putting girls on HBC when they’re 13 seems like a conspiracy to deprive them of ever experiencing healthy sexual maturity, finding out that they have a libido, that it responds differently to different people, and that this matters. It’s sick. Right up there with female genital mutilation.
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Exactly. You are free to have sex but not really to enjoy it because these pills seriously impact the libido and can cause anorgasmy. It’s turning women into glorified rubber dolls. And we are supposed to celebrate how liberating that is.
And don’t even get me started on how bad these pills are for blood pressure. Abortion is “women’s health” but women’s health apparently doesn’t include concerns about hypertension which is a major cause of death.
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Meds include supplements like Vitamin D or melatonin Most people are under-supplied, but it is possible to OD, for example. It is also useful to know what you are taking a lot of, if it turns out that your blood work shows a deficiency.
There are also occasional use items such as loratadine, or (if it gets bad enough) norepinephrine.
“For pain” refers to if and when you take pain relievers. I use aspirin for example maybe 1 or 2 times a year. Post menopausal women sometimes also add 88mg as a supplement to offset the loss of estrogen.
No fan of the med-sammys, and increasingly dubious about allopathic practitioners, nonetheless this question is relevant to understanding what is going on in your body.
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Eh, I grew up American, and used to do what everybody else does: feel bad, take something. Had some serious chronic pain issues so that ended up being a lot of NSAIDs, which do interact with other stuff and do nasty things to your liver, so it is important for the doc to ask. Of course, after some years those things laid waste to my guts and caused a truly horrible rebound feedback-loop thing with the migraines, and I had to stop taking anything and just learn how to deal with pain. I do sometimes wish I could still just take a couple pills and get back to my day, but… pain’s a very effective teacher and I’ve learned some things that I wouldn’t readily trade now, for an easy fix.
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