At Our Bodies Our Blog: Sorting Out Plan B Availability
Posted by Rachel on July 15, 2009
There have been new approvals for generic, one-pill, and OTC access for 17-year-olds related to Plan B that – to me, at least – make figuring out what is available to who (whom? I never get that right) kind of confusing. For example, there’s a new generic version, but women 18 and older can’t officially have it yet, but they maybe could as an off-label prescription. Yesterday at Our Bodies Our Blog, I went over the new approvals and products, and included a handy (I hope) table in an attempt to clarify the availability issue for the current situation. Head on over and take a look.
On a semi-related note, I keep meaning to take a photo of the instructions that come with my oral contraceptive, instructions that fold out to the size of a person. I have a graduate degree, and there are things in there I’m not sure I’m interpreting correctly. Hmph.
W said
On an even more semirelated note… I’ve been doing a lot of research on why people have twins lately. Turns out if you go off the pill your chances of having twins are a lot higher in that first month or so. So if you decide to quit taking your oral contraceptive you may want to use another method for a month.
I’m still trying to track down some actual study on that so it could be wrong though.
Rachel said
Weird! Let me know if you do find it – I may take a look, myself.
Edited to add: I did some quick looking, so here’s a bibliography on the topic. Note that many of these are older articles, so the dose of the pill was likely higher than what most people use today.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/collections/public/1Fy4h9ve9k9EYx47zdcstuh/
(note for medlib nerds: this is the first time I’ve used the new sharing feature for collections in MyNCBI!)