Kelly Brogan on her Problem with Birth Control - The Joe Rogan Experience

Hello freak bitches. It's almost just like if you embrace it then there's something just like everything's dead and miserable for a period of time and then it blooms and then you get to experience like this rebirth and then it you know flourishes and then it dies again. That there's another perspective on that actually being I don't know like if you work with it it's sort of like a woman who's on birth control has no idea that there's any point to you know a cycle of energy over the course of the month range sort of thinks that that's annoying but there's a way you can wrap your mind around it where you work with it. Okay so like if you're on birth control you have no menstrual cycle right so you're just like you're like a man you're like a flat line the whole month but there's actually something really empowering if you understand how to work with your energy shifts because naturally like a woman's natural I know this is really what you want to be talking about I do I don't I mean it's alien to me so I do want to hear it. So like I figured this out I'm 39 I was on birth control for 12 years so I never knew what it was what it meant to have like a menstrual cycle until very recently because then I had two kids breastfeeding so a couple decades into my life I'm just figuring this out but you have like totally different kinds of energy over the course of the month and you have to know how to work with that so there's a kind of energy that you know you want to go out and socialize or you want to stay in and work or you want to sleep more or less and if you don't know how to ride that then you could be sort of taken off guard by it but if you know how to work with it it's so much more powerful than just having this like artificial hijacking of your endocrine system. That's interesting so there's like some sort of analogy to be drawn between the cycles of nature and the cycles of your body month to month. It's very poetic yeah. Huh I would have never considered that I never even thought about it but I have thought about birth control before about how crazy it is that you give a woman a hormone that convinces her body that she's perpetually pregnant and that a giant percentage of women are on it for convenience or even for other medical issues like skin issues right. Exactly yeah I mean when I I've always been a feminist right so even when I was younger and very much asleep I identified as a feminist and I was one of those people who thought that birth control was like a female entitlement like how dare you not make this free and widely available. But as I began to research more about it and more about how it's in many ways like the ultimate you know not to sound too inflammatory but the ultimate tool for oppression of you know the modern woman now I find it incredible that we you know that we're still taking it because it seems like a good idea right who wants to deal with your annoying menstrual cycle who wants to get pregnant who wants to have endometriosis or polycystic ovary you know who wants to have acne or like hair growing in weird places but it's the magic pill illusion. There's no free lunch there's never going to be something that just fixes it for you and you just waltz off into the sunset there's always a cost and the cost is so much more vast like ranging from literally death all the way to just like subtle alterations in your personality in like the fear months you secrete you know and there there was just a million woman study in Scandinavia that showed about the vast increase in antidepressant prescribing for teenagers who are prescribed birth control so it's the beginning of sort of it's like a gateway drug sometimes for psych meds too. I heard I had a friend who one of his good friends his daughter died from some complications with taking birth control pills and smoking cigarettes. Yes pulmonary embolism probably. Smoking cigarettes apparently along with the birth control pills are extremely dangerous but so many do it. Of course and you don't even have to have that additional risk factor you know because birth control whether it's the pill or something called the Nuva ring by itself has that you know I'm contacted often by parents of girls who have died from pulmonary embolism who've now become like activists in this realm. It's because of birth control pills. Yeah yeah no it's like a known mechanism and it's a known risk factor like I think that's not being suppressed or hidden it's just that we are sort of entrained to dismiss the risks as we attach to the promise so we sort of like collude in ignoring that potential you know. That's so interesting because most people when they think about the birth control pill they think about it as something that liberated women because they can control whether or not they got pregnant and they were allowed for the first time to have careers and do whatever they wanted to because they didn't have to worry about being trapped. That's right right. That's the story. But that's the biological free lunch thing right. Isn't there also a lot of issues Chris Ryan was on here Dr. Chris Ryan the author of Sex at Dawn he was on here and he was talking about how women can like if you smell the clothes of other men you can literally tell the men that you are attracted to you would be biologically compatible with those men and that when they did these same studies on women who are on the birth control pill they couldn't smell the difference. That's right it's called the t-shirt study. Yeah. How does that work could you explain that? Well essentially the premise of pharmaceutical medicine is that you can just pull like one little thread of the spider web and leave the rest of it intact. If everything else is going to be fine we're only working on this one area. So with birth control for example the idea is we're just you know taking over the management of your sex hormones but the rest of your body is going to be totally unaffected and of course as we learn more about how all of these systems are totally and inextricably interconnected we have a better understanding of how you know when you interfere with sex hormones you also potentially have other effects including raising things called binding globulins including inflammatory response you're depleting a number of nutrients and we're having you know it's possible that we haven't even begun to look through the keyhole of the effects on brain and you know sort of neuropeptides in these arenas where we don't have any idea what fermonal secretion is about like we just have to defer to the probability that our bodies are more complex than we've right like begun to understand so your biology is meant to guide you it's meant to empower you and it's meant to you know create a sense of vitality if you can inhabit your body and be in a truce with it that's part of the problem with the mindset of birth control is I'm just going to you know take this over I'm going to manage this and so who knows maybe even it's a top-down like mindset thing that begins to sort of divorce you from your sensibilities we don't really know is the point that's gonna that's gonna be a common answer I think I have to give you is that we don't really know but it does make sense that you're you know the subtle nature of your biology that involves you know sort of guiding your human interactions and particularly sex related interactions is going to be derailed I mean low libido is one of ironically the most common disclosed side effects of birth control so you're you're taking it so that you can have unprotected sex we don't feel like having sex ultimately anyway so it's not even really that well thought out I think by most of us it's very bizarre but what other alternatives are there I mean if you're a woman and you want to have control of whether or not you get pregnant there's not a whole lot of options other than weird ones like IUDs which seem real weird yeah I mean there is some of my patients use what's called a copper IUD you know it's funny because I had one put in and two and a half it cost like seven hundred dollars and two and a half weeks later I had it taken out because I just felt weird about having like a pharmaceutical metal in my body was felt like a tracking device if you feel it in there no no no no it's not really a thing it's just like psychologically felt weird but I use something called a daisy which is like this highly calibrated thermometer and you track your you know because you have six fertile days a month this isn't you know like some major sacrifice you have to make in order to learn how your cycle works and then you get the benefits of being in your hormonal milieu you know like it's not it's not that complicated but it there's a learning curve you know requires like learning how to be a woman and also sharing the onus because you know with all of these side effects we've been talking about you know there was like a male birth control study that was just terminated because of how many side effects like the men didn't want to deal with you know so there's such a socio-cultural double standard around this but if we're talking about six days a month like how about we collaborate and try and figure something out you know that doesn't involve a risk of death perhaps so this daisy thing just monitors your temperature and tells you exactly what's going on yeah I mean it's a little more sophisticated than that it actually has the efficacy like above 99 percent efficacy if you listen to it that's part of the you know room for human error but it basically just tells you like have sex now if you want to conceive or if you don't then don't it's a little like a little light it's green red or yellow how many women are on birth control if you had a guess nationwide you know I would that's a good question I don't know the stat offhand upwards of like 10 million I would say that's a staggering number of people taking some sort of a substance that alters the very nature of who they are exactly yeah I mean my interest in it really came from looking at the psychiatric side effects because I'm very interested in medications that have potential you know gateway effects around psychiatric meds that we aren't informing women of before you know they start the prescriptions so you know whether it's like acid blocking medications you know or antibiotics you know birth control vaccines these things have known a psycho biological effects if you don't know that then you'll never connect the dots and then you end up in the polypharmacy realm where you're taking multiple meds right without ever knowing where the dominoes like started to fall