The Medicalisation of Menstruation: Its Scope and Limits.
Conventional western medicine has very determinately ‘technologized’ its approach to health
and the human body. While there are many benefits evinced from this conventional orientation, there are also disconcerting liabilities. One dimension of the emergent problem is that while medical science is quick to extol the virtues of its chemical and surgical discoveries, it is irreconcilably slow in recanting the indiscretions of their adverse side effects.
Lamentably, there exists an imbalance in the level of propaganda dominance of conventional medicine that marginalises the legitimate role which alternative medicine is actually capable of playing within the traditional medical framework. Although, there is no doubt that conventional medicine makes an enormously valuable contribution to health, it is salutary to remind everyone that it does not provide a complete approach to health.
Dr. Christiane Northrup, MD, and past President of the American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA), argues that one reason girls now commence menstruation at a much earlier age is a dietary, and not a medical problem. In her view, it is the high fat diets our children now eat that have caused the shift to earlier puberty at 12 to 13 years old.
The coordinated hormonal interplay amongst the ovaries, the pituitary gland, and the hypothalamus are the predominant factors regulating the monthly menstrual cycle. Estrogen levels are thus critical to the biological processes required for reproduction.
It is at this point that the balance between estrogen and progesterone production is critical. The estrogen levels diminish, while the progesterone levels increase to form a dense cervical mucous plug in the cervix to prevent any bacterial contamination and the loss of sperm.
Women Health Open J. 2017; 3(3): e25-e26. doi: 10.17140/WHOJ-3-e015
