ONTD Political

Holding Birth Control Hostage

7:30 pm - 04/30/2012
Doctors still require women to submit to cancer screenings and pelvic exams to get birth control pills. Scientists say that shouldn't happen.

Recently, my doctor gave me an ultimatum: Come in for a pelvic exam, or I won't refill your birth control pills. The problem arose after I tried to get my prescription refilled before going on vacation in March, only to be told that the doctor's office wouldn't sign off on the refill because it had been a year and one month since I'd had an annual exam and a Pap smear. A nurse grudgingly gave me a monthlong reprieve if I promised to come in for an exam when I returned from my trip.

I really, really didn't want to go in for an exam. I've had two kids, a false positive Pap test and all the ensuing misery that comes with it, and spent enough time in the stirrups to last a lifetime. All I really wanted were my pills; I was pretty sure the exam could wait another year or more.

The science was on my side.

Just a few weeks earlier, the US Preventative Services Task Force, an independent group of national experts that makes evidence-based health care recommendations, released new guidelines declaring definitively that women over 30 don't need a Pap smear more than once every three years unless they have a couple of risk factors, which I don't have. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said that birth control pills can safely be prescribed without a full-on exam.

Doctors, though, don't seem to be in any hurry to give up old habits. After I got back from vacation, I emailed my doctor, citing the new guidelines, and asked if he could give me a new one-year prescription for birth control pills without a pelvic exam. He wrote back, "Yes, one can argue about whether or not you need a pap, but current recommendations are still for an annual exam, blood pressure readings, updating family history, ('torturous pelvic exam,' I'm afraid), etc. So I would still like you to come in. See you soon?"




Indeed, all this excess treatment has serious negative effects. Mandatory pelvic exams often deter women from seeking contraception in the first place. Failing to get contraception puts women at risk for the much more likely problem of an unwanted pregnancy, which is far more dangerous than getting birth control pills without a pelvic exam.

Despite not being very good at detecting cancer, annual pelvic exams are great at turning up stuff that if left alone would never cause a problem—things like noncancerous fibroids and ovarian cysts the patient never noticed. Discovery of such "problems" in exams usually leads to a surgical intervention. "The clinical trial data show no evidence that pelvic examination improves the early detection of ovarian cancer or diagnosis of other conditions in women who have no symptoms," Westhoff says. "Overuse of the pelvic examination contributes to high healthcare costs without any compensatory health benefit."

Westhoff and her colleagues suggest that the mandatory annual pelvic exam is one reason American women have twice the rate of hysterectomies as their European counterparts. And the Pap smear, of course, has its own issues with false positives, which can be as high as 10 percent. One of the treatments often recommended after a positive result can double the risk of a premature delivery for women who go on to get pregnant.

Getting a false positive is no walk in the park, either. About a year and a half after the birth of my second child, I had an IUD put in for contraception, which isn't a fun procedure and is also very expensive because much of it isn't covered by insurance. A few months later, I had to go in for the requisite annual exam. My Pap test came back with problems. So I had undergo a really painful and ultimately negative endometrial biopsy, which couldn't be done without taking out the IUD I'd just had put in. Not only was I out hundreds of dollars, I also spent a week or two stressing out that I might be headed for chemo, hair loss, and dying before my children get to high school. The psychic trauma from unnecessary tests is real.

"It's harder to get doctors to quit doing certain things" than to embrace new procedures, says Shannon Brownlee, a health policy expert at the New America Foundation who wrote a book about overtreatment in America. Part of the problem, she says, is that the primary way doctors learn about new science is through continuing medical education, which they have to do to keep up their medical licenses. Most continuing medical education is funded by drug and medical device companies.

"'Don't do it' is not a message that the drug industry and the medical device industry is all that excited about," Brownlee says. Guidelines from the government trickle down very slowly to doctor's practices. And patients raise these issues at their peril, Brownlee notes. "When you have that conversation with your doctor, you often get labeled as a noncompliant patient." The health care system is also plagued with irrational incentives that reward doctors for doing more rather than less, even when it's in the patient's best interest to be judicious. Doctors need to keep their waiting rooms full to keep their practices open.

There is one way to change the system: Make the Pill an over-the-counter (OTC) drug. If women could get birth control pills from a pharmacy, like they do in other countries, and could decide for themselves whether they should have a pelvic exam every year, the country could experience serious health care savings. Unnecessary health care treatment overall is estimated to cost at least $158 billion a year.

The FDA has been considering making the Pill available without a prescription at least since 1993. But with the recent debates about health care reform and the contraceptive mandate in the new health care law, the issue has come to the forefront again with new urgency. The Pill is one of the safest regularly used drugs on the market. Not surprisingly, though, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists hasn't signed on to the campaign, no doubt because of the prevailing view in the profession that if women could get their pills without a prescription, they wouldn't come in for annual checkups.

Prominent ob-gyns Michael Cackovic and Michael Paidas, writing in the journal Modern Medicine, reflected this view in a 2008 op-ed against the OTC pill, writing, "women who [get] OTC pills could have little motivation for annual exams, sexually transmitted infection screening or Pap smears, which could possibly manifest as less screening for cervical cancer."

Theirs is a common and paternalistic view of women patients. After all, men are never required to, say, have a colonoscopy as a condition of getting blood pressure medication, Viagra, or even a vasectomy, even though men are much worse about going to the doctor and getting checkups than women are.

Women don't need to have their birth control pills held hostage to get needed cancer screenings. That's not just my opinion. There's hard data to prove it. In many places in the world, the pill is already available over the counter, so some smart researchers have taken a look at the behavior of women who get it that way.

Dr. Daniel Grossman, an ob-gyn and senior associate at Ibis Reproductive Health, coordinates a working group pushing to make the Pill available without a prescription. With colleagues at the University of Texas, Grossman has studied women in Texas who are able to get the Pill from pharmacies in Mexico without a prescription. As it turns out, the women who make the trip, he says, "had very high rates of getting all the preventive screening tests, higher than the national average." Not only that, but women who got their pills without the hassle of an exam were much more likely to stay on the Pill continuously, a factor that research shows is directly related to fewer abortions and unplanned pregnancies.

Still, the Pill wasn't going to be available over the counter soon enough to solve my problem. Fortunately, I discovered that there is one health care provider that's a pioneer in disconnecting birth control pills from mandatory pelvic exams: Planned Parenthood. So I went there.

Passing through the bullet-proof, bomb-proof entrance to the DC clinic was a little unnerving; while I sat in the waiting room watching The View with a bunch of young women and solo men, I got slightly paranoid about errant bullets or bombs from anti-abortion nuts. But the visit turned out to be painless. After I filled out a lot of paperwork asking about my medical history, a nurse took my blood pressure—which, unlike a pelvic exam, is actually related to the potential risks of the Pill—asked me some questions about my history, and then wrote me a prescription. And unlike my doctor, she even offered to write it so that I could get three packs at a time instead of one.

Without insurance, the visit would cost $130, which isn't cheap, but it's still likely to be much cheaper than a full-on pelvic exam and all the related lab work. (Planned Parenthood also charges on a sliding scale, so the cost can be less depending on income.) It was worth it, mainly because I got my prescription without having to take my clothes off. And in a year, I might go back for a checkup with a doctor. But if I do, it will be because I think it's the right thing to do, not because I don't have a choice.


I tried bolding it the best I could since it's a long article
stevie_jane 1st-May-2012 01:54 am (UTC)
I hate is because it's controlling, paternalistic and unnecessary. HTH.


Maybe read the article?
phoenixblaze 1st-May-2012 02:36 am (UTC)
Yeah I did. But you know, I'd rather be safe than sorry and if it's a pelvic exam that might tip my doctor off that I could have cancer then I'll do it, even if that exam alone won't diagnose it. Also, you don't know the rest of my medical history so don't judge me. If it's unnecessary for nearly everyone else then there's no need for birth control to be held hostage over it. Blood pressure should probably still be checked since that's relevant, which oh I did say that irrelevant testing shouldn't be required. But that's okay. You probably didn't read my comment in your seething rage and need to take it out on me.
effervescent 1st-May-2012 03:43 am (UTC)
I think it's just that you're coming across as a bit dismissive, that's all. You're diminishing the feelings of other women by saying you ~just don't get it~. Anything that deals with a woman's control over her body (ie, being denied birth control) and having to submit to exams that can be considered invasive is going to be a sensitive topic.
kaelstra 1st-May-2012 03:50 am (UTC)
I am an abusevictm that does not want to submit to painful, upsetting exams when I am low risk, and just wanted birth control.

So the "scathing anger" is justified, and your comments seem really dismissive.
liret 1st-May-2012 03:58 am (UTC)
You totally have the right to think a yearly exam is best for you. That's great.

Thinking that because you've decided this, it's 'over the top' for other women to get upset at not being given a choice? Not so great.

No one is saying you shouldn't get a yearly pap smear. No one. We're saying it shouldn't be mandatory for all women, regardless of risk factors and medical history. And honestly, I don't think 'scathing hatred' is an inappropriate response to the fact that the only way to get birth control is to go through an exam that is, for some women, expensive, highly uncomfortable, and not medically relevant.
mirhanda 1st-May-2012 08:12 pm (UTC)
If you read the article and the comment above yours, then you would know that a doctor isn't going to know whether you have cancer by doing a pelvic exam.


They have to do tests to find out, which I hope your doctor is doing. If he or she is just doing a pelvic, then you are putting yourself at risk.
illusivevenstar 1st-May-2012 09:24 pm (UTC)
you ask people not to judge you when you are judging other women for having reactions that you don't understand?

maybe you should read your own comments.
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