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Medicine Stories

63. Your Cycle, Your Self: Period Empowerment, Fertility Awareness, & the Risks of Hormonal Birth Control - Dr. Elizabeth Wade

Medicine Stories

Amber M Hill

Herbs, Health & Fitness, Ancestry, Alternativemedicine, Herbalism, Alternative Health, Dreams, Healing, Society & Culture, Psychedelics

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2020

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Modern medicine now recognizes the menstrual cycle as the fifth vital sign. By simply paying attention to what our periods are telling us, we greatly increase our body literacy and quickly regain the deep self knowledge that is our birthright. Whether you want to avoid pregnancy, optimize your chances for conception, or gain insight into the state of your health, cycle charting and fertility awareness is a safe, effective, and empowering choice.

IN THE INTRO:

  • Why rest is vital for bleeding bodies

IN THE INTERVIEW:

  • How Naturopathic medicine synchronistically found Dr. Elizabeth
  • How getting pregnant despite being on hormonal contraceptives (HC) brought fertility awareness (FA) into her life
  • Root cause healing v masking symptoms
  • The deceptive history of the pill (it’s not your period, it’s a “withdrawal bleed” calculated for a specific psychological purpose)
  • What HC actually does in the body is completely shut down communication between the ovaries and the brain, which has many consequences
  • Millions of women have been told that the pill tricks the body into thinking you’re pregnant, but women’s bodies aren’t that dumb
  • IUDs and inflammation
  • There isn’t one hormone in the body that HC doesn’t effect; it creates full body dysregulation
  • Common side effects of HC- including changing your physical anatomy down there (!)
  • The adverse effects build the longer you’re on HC
  • Dr. Elizabeth blows my mind and connects a lot of dots for me by explaining what happened to me when I got the depo provera shot at age 17
  • The menstrual cycle is now recognized by modern medicine as the fifth vital sign, and FA gives crucial insight into our overall health
  • FA is *not* the rhythm method, and is 99.4% effective when used correctly
  • A deep dive into what happens in the body each month during the menstrual cycle
  • How FA both frees and empowers female bodied folk
  • When our periods are used against us
  • Tuning into and honoring our natural cycles of creativity and rest
  • Breaking down the two key tracking methods of FA: cervical mucus and basal body temperature
  • How long to chart before you rely solely on FA for birth control
  • We aren’t raised to trust ourselves
  • How charting your cycle and fertility signs can alert you to health problems that might otherwise go unnoticed, shine light on whether infertility is caused by lack of conception or by recurrent miscarriage, and help you know right away if you’ve gotten pregnant

LINKS:

(If you're seeing this on an app that doesn't support links, find this episode at https://mythicmedicine.love/ to get them)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

you know the signs and you're really in tune with your menstrual cycle and know the signs and you know it's just a few signs to kind of track every month then you can really have a deeper understanding into your overall health. So you you know, it's not just for women who aren't trying to get pregnant

0:16.6

or want to get pregnant because it can be used either way, you know, as a contraceptive

0:20.2

measure or, you know, as a way to actually time intercourse so that you can get

0:25.6

pregnant when you're ovulating but it's also you know even if that doesn't

0:28.4

apply to you it's just a really good way to track your overall health. Hello friends and welcome back to Medicine stories where we are

0:49.6

remembering what it is to be human upon the earth. I am your host Amber Magnolia Hill. This is

0:56.4

episode 63. Today I'm sharing my interview with Dr. Elizabeth Wade. We talk about our periods as our body's fifth

1:06.2

vital sign alongside temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and

1:10.8

respiration. Modern medicine now recognizes that what is happening

1:15.7

with our menstrual cycle can tell us a lot about what is going on more deeply with

1:21.0

our health and knowing this really

1:23.2

empowers us to be aware of some things that we might otherwise miss

1:27.6

and just to cultivate the body literacy that I would hope for everyone.

1:33.8

And we also talk about the fertility awareness method,

1:37.2

which is not the same as the rhythm method.

1:41.4

And we really get into the nuts and bolts of how to chart your cycle to help you either

1:46.1

avoid or optimize your chances for pregnancy and we get into some of the many health risks of using hormonal birth control.

1:57.0

I want to say here at the outset that both Dr Elizabeth and I recognize how complicated the issue of birth control is and how for some people it is going to be worth it to take on the risks associated with hormonal contraception in order to avoid pregnancy.

2:17.6

We are just here to advocate for full awareness of the risks and benefits and to talk about the best alternative.

2:28.9

So I've been talking about periods forever in my online life on the

2:36.2

podcast mostly in episode 20 with my first and most important herbal

2:41.4

teacher, Tammy McBride.

...

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