BellaOnline Forums Relationships Married No Kids Health Question

Get a new doctor if you can. How awful. Rude comments aren't just an American thing!

I was diagnosed with arthritis recently and have been told that I have fibromyalgia too. It does help to deflect some of the comments if you say you have a chronic condition which makes it "difficult" to have children. But you shouldn't have to make any excuse at all. We have the right to live our lives how we want and everyone else can sod off. Ha ha!

Take care!

Excellent point. The latest example of this to anger me is the whole thing about how kids that have gone to preschool are less prone to drop out of high school, turn to crime, etc, so they're trying to get more people to send their kids to preschool.

Now I agree with this in principle (I think preschool is a good thing), but nowhere does this *correlation* suggest *causation*. I suspect that families with more stability, income, access to different childcare choices, etc being more likely to *send* their kids to preschool. So it might be more about those other socioeconomic factors than preschool itself!

Sorry, ran off on a tangent there, but you see what I mean about statistics?

Hi all -- my first post here. As a doctor (though still in training I'm appalled at that pharmacist's advice. It is true that a lot of those gynecological cancers are fed by estrogen, which is produced by the ovaries. When a woman is menstruating regularly and has never been pregnant, she is exposed to a continuous level of hormones that women who are pregnant do not have. And the ovaries work overtime, making them more at risk for cancerous mutations. So we who do not spend our teens, twenties and early thirties pregnant are at higher risk of ovarian cancer and *some* kinds of breast cancer. Using oral contraceptives simulate the hormonal state of pregnancy as well as suppressing ovulation, so they do lower the risk of ovarian cancer if taken over a number of years. There is *no* association between uterine cancer and never having been pregnant -- the strongest lifestyle association with uterine cancer is obesity, and with cervical cancer it is the HPV virus and multiple sexual partners, etc.

Should a woman decide to get pregnant to make her 1% lifetime risk of ovarian cancer decrease to .75%? I think that overall, the risks of being pregnant and bearing children, as well as the stresses of childrearing must at least equal the increased risk of ovarian cancer, which is quite low in prevalence.

Sorry to get on a soapbox -- I couldn't resist! Nice to meet everyone and to have this board.

Julie