April 2009
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Mar		May »
	1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Apr

THE SIZE OF THE PROBLEM OF PAIN

It’s a fair bet that you either suffer from period pain yourself or know somebody who does. It’s possible that you’ve already tried aspirins or Panadol, or some other well-advertised pain-killers and they haven’t been much help, or have produced side-effects you weren’t too keen on. It’s possible that you’ve been to a doctor who has been quite sympathetic, but too overworked to do much to help you. It’s possible you’ve been to a doctor who hasn’t even been sympathetic. You may have been told that the best cure is to get married, or to have a baby, or to grow older, or to try to ignore it. It’s quite likely you’ve been made to feel you are making a lot of fuss about nothing. After all, as the popular argument goes, it’s a normal function so it shouldn’t be painful. If you’re in pain then there must be something the matter with you. It’s probably psychosomatic— ‘all in your mind’.

So let’s get that particular myth out of the way. Period pain is not in your mind. It’s very real and it’s in your body. You might feel it in your womb, which is low down in your abdomen, or in your thighs, or in the lower part of your back. It can cause sore breasts, a swollen belly, migraine, depression, extreme fatigue, irritability, clumsiness, vomiting or constipation. And you are not imagining any of it. In fact being told ‘It’s all in your mind’, or ‘You’ll grow out of it’, or ‘You’re not like other women’, doesn’t help, but simply makes you feel worse. And, of course, it’s not true. It’s pretty generally accepted these days that if you’re afraid, your fear will make the pain worse.’ But fear or anxiety won’t give you the pain in the first place.

You are not abnormal if you suffer from period pain. Most women do. The trouble is that most women also suffer from a feminine conspiracy to keep it secret. It’s a sad fact that period pain is the one pain most women don’t admit openly. The young man who sprains his ankle playing football over the week-end will talk freely about the discomfort he’s in and gladly allow his friends to rally round and support him until he recovers. A woman in pain rarely admits it, and she certainly won’t expect the men she works with to support her. We still have a sneaky feeling that anything unpleasant that happens to us as a result of our sexuality is somehow our own fault. So we keep quiet about it. Or most of us do.

Fortunately, thanks to Dr Katharina Dalton, a stalwart campaigner on our behalf, and doctors like her, there are now plenty of facts and figures available about periods and period pain. Because of Dr Dalton’s work, we now know that there are two different kinds of period pain, and that about seventy per cent of women suffer from one or the other at some time or other in their lives. In other words, pain with a period is the norm in Western society. So if any group of women could truly be said to be ‘abnormal’, it’s the lucky thirty per cent who never experience any pain at all!

There’s one last myth to tackle before we get down to the practical details. It’s still quite common for women who suffer from period pain to be told by friends or relations, or even by some medical personnel, that there’s not very much they can do about it. That might have been true twenty-five years ago, but it isn’t true today. There are all sorts of things you can do to help yourself.

Not all of them work for everybody. Some will provide dramatic relief, others will help to reduce the pain to bearable limits and some will have no effect at all. We all need individual treatment.

*2\177\2*