Another Scientific American article on a different subject, yet very much along the same lines as yesterday’s. After years of denial, the last few years have had tons of science stories about how birth control pills are not, in fact, superduper completely harmless yet amazingly powerful drugs that every woman should pop like candy.
“It found that birth control pills have structural effects on regions of the brain that govern higher-order cognitive activities, suggesting that a woman on birth control pills may literally not be herself — or is herself, on steroids.”
The results of studying men (albeit not in connection with their subtler cycles of hormones) vs. women on the pill vs. women not on the pill were pretty interesting, too. However, the article points out that this was a study with pretty vague methodology. (Exactly the kind of methodology that tends to show up when a subject suddenly becomes trendy in the scientific world after being ignored for a long time.) So it’s more of an indication that stuff is probably going on, than a study of exactly what and why and how and when.
