Lifestyle and dietary changes, and nutritional and herbal supplements that balance your body, make you more healthy and bring natural symptom relief, but they are almost always much more difficult to fit into your life than simply swallowing a prescription drug pill every day.
However, drugs come with a big potential problem: side effects. Side effects of medication is one of the main reasons people seek out alternatives to drug treatment of all diseases, including PMS and PMDD. But sometimes those side effects are a lot more than just an annoyance, which is why two stories you may not have seen should concern you.
First, Attorney Brenda Fulmer writing from West Palm Beach for Injuryboard blog network tells us:
“There are now more than 7,500 individual lawsuits pending in state and federal courts involving girls and young women who suffered blood clots (leading to deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, heart attack, stroke, or sudden cardiac death) or gallbladder injuries as a result of ingestion of the popular birth control medications Yaz, Yasmin, and Ocella.”
Hormonal birth control has a very long history of causing blood clots, and while the current forms are safer than the birth control that was used decades ago, it obviously is still a big problem. And these drugs are some of the most commonly prescribed for PMS and PMDD!If there are 7,500 lawsuits, you just know that there are more girls and women injured by these medications who never made it to a lawyer’s office. Let’s call this Exhibit A in why we think natural relief of premenstrual issues is superior to a potentially dangerous drug approach.
On to exhibit B: The Food and Drug Administration last week put out a safety advisory for Celexa, one of the commonly used antidepressants for PMS and PMDD, letting cardiologists and psychiatrists know that doses greater than 40 milligrams could lead to potentially fatal abnormal heart rhythms. Although there appears to be no additional benefit to higher doses of the drug, the drug labeling information had claimed that some people required a 60 milligram dosage!
This is all very concerning in its own right, but as we recently shared with you, millions of antidepressant drug prescriptions are being written by non-psychiatric health care practitioners, who aren’t as adept at managing complications from psychopharmacological compounds—and who weren’t even targeted by the FDA advisory.
We think natural measures like diet and lifestyle changes and holistic, doctor-designed nutritional supplements are preferable to potentially fatal abnormal heart rhythms and blood clots. Now, if you’ve taken these medications and have found them helpful, and aren’t having any side effects, that’s fantastic. We recommend you check in with your doctor though, particularly if you think you might be susceptible to one of these problems. We think if doctors more accurately disclosed the risks of the drugs they prescribe, and if more women realized there is a way to treat the cause of PMS and PMDD, and make yourself healthier and get real natural relief at the same time, there would be a lot less of these types of scary stories.
