The Blessings of the Curse: No More Periods?

by Susan Rako

'Dr. Rako discusses a growing body of information that deflates the notion that menstrual suppression is a viable option for women."
-The New York Times

Encouraging healthy menstruating women and even teenage girls to do away with their normal menstrual cycles by dosing themselves more or less nonstop with hormones (a multi-billion-dollar-per-year industry) is, in a word, reckless. What every woman and her doctor MUST know about the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595386555
• ISBN13: 9780595386550
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A Timely Medical Resource

I can't say enough in praise of the much-needed critique of society's harmful attitude toward reproductive options for women. The solid medical research book only serves to confirm what I have instinctively believed since I was a teenager-- that fertility and the accompanying cycle was an empowering gift with which we should not lightly tamper. Susan Rako has provided an invaluable resource to every woman seeking a knowledge-based approach to her reproductive choices. Whether you are a die-hard birth control believer or a natural babe, the clearly presented, easily understood information provided in The Blessing Of The Curse will increase your ability to make more educated reproductive decisions. It should be required reading at every gynecologist's office!

An Essential Read for Every Woman in Today's World of Corporate Medicine

As a medical professional with Masters Degrees in Public Health and Education from Harvard University, where I too have spent countless hours researching the stacks of Harvard's Countway Library, I am impressed with the thoroughness of Dr. Rako's responsible research. Finally a medical professional, unbiased by pharmaceutical conflicts of interest and unafraid to speak truths many would rather not to have to face, has done the work of laying out, in language we can all understand, that wholesale manipulation of women's normal menstrual cycle has costs to our bodies that the drug companies do not want us to know about -- and that too few of our own doctors know. How many of us know that "the shot" can cause osteoporosis even in young women -- and that the birth control pill is now known to contribute actively to cancer of the cervix? 6,000 American women -- many of them young women with young children -- will die this year of this cancer. In addition to the important well-documented health hazards of the pill, Rako draws attention to the fact that manipulating the menstrual cycle dislocates women from our fundamental nature. Finally, as a medical professional who was trained in graduate school to critique others' medical research, I can attest that this book is a balanced analysis of the pros and cons of doing away with women's periods. Dr. Rako has laid out the factors that will help each woman to make her own risk/benefit analysis, and will help those women for whom non-stop use of the birth control pill makes sense to choose this option. Thank you, Dr. Rako, for being a voice of sanity in a world focused on "convenience" at a cost we may know only when it is too late.