Member-only story
Doctors Think Your Period Should Be a Fifth Vital Sign
Physicians are learning to ask more questions about periods to get a better understanding of a person’s overall health
It happens monthly, for two up to seven days at a time. A woman will menstruate for about seven years during her lifetime, on average. And yet there are still plenty of unknowns and misunderstandings around the effect menstruation has on women’s health.
“There is tremendous variation in how girls and women think about menstruation and what they define as healthy and normal,” says Dr. Geri Hewitt, a professor of obstetrics/gynecology at Ohio State University, and a chair of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) adolescent health committee. “There is also tremendous cultural variation regarding expectations around menses.”
Some of the most persistent misconceptions about periods are that irregularity every month is normal, that super-heavy cycles are just part of “the curse,” that severe period pain is something everyone with a period experiences, and that you can’t get pregnant while menstruating. None of these are true.
The varying mores around periods means that a vitally important piece of information gets lost: That periods are a key indicator of women’s health.
This is due in large part to a lack of information. In the United States, menstruation is not always covered as part of sex ed classes — and comprehensive sex education is only taught in one-fifth of American middle schools. According to Hewitt, family members are usually the primary information source on periods, and that information can be incomplete or flawed: “If a mom had abnormal cycles or struggles with her menses, she may assume her daughter’s abnormalities are normal,” says Hewitt.
Periods are also stigmatized. A 2002 study found that people reported greater feelings of negativity toward a woman if they knew she was menstruating (the study had women accidentally drop a tampon out of their bag in front of people in the study). That stigma has knock-on effects within the scientific community, too: “Studies having to do with…
