Word: pills
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Familiar, pleasant stuff. Yet what is remarkable is not that the thing is done, but that it is done so well. Writing from the viewpoint of an out-of-control character, Author Davis unobtrusively maintains order in her novel, limiting her scope sharply to Camilla's indrawn and pill-whacked consciousness...
...drunk Harvard junior and a very stoned Radcliffe freshman went back to his room and spent the night. The next morning he woke up very hung over, and she woke up possibly pregnant. Rather nonchalantly, but slightly nervously, she went to the Health Services and received the Morning After pill. For five days she took 50 grams of the artificial estrogen diethyl stilbestrol (DES) a day, was very nauseated, and felt ill the whole time. Yet, at the end of five days, she knew she wasn't pregnant. What she didn't know is that she was also very lucky...
...Food and Drug Administration banned the use of DES in cattle feed after a Nader task force reported it to be carcinogenic, i.e. cancer-causing. Yet in the Morning After pill, a dose 168,000 times as great as that found in food from DES-fed cows is given to unsuspecting women. Though banned from our food, the FDA has not banned DES from our bodies. The danger, according to Dr. Herbst of Massachusetts General Hospital, is that this massive dose of DES might "stimulate the growth of already existent pre-cancerous cells." According to a fact sheet published...
Even these deaths can be prevented if doctors exercise more care in prescribing the Pill. Some women who ask their doctors for the Pill are now handed prescriptions after only cursory examination. Clinic patients may be asked few, if any, questions about their medical histories before they are given supplies of oral contraceptives...
...Stanley Birnbaum, acting chief of obstetrics and gynecology at New York Hospital, believes that such laxity is more perilous than the Pill itself. Doctors should examine each patient and question her carefully before prescribing the Pill, he says. They should exercise extreme caution in giving it to anyone with a personal or family history of circulatory problems. Other doctors require Pill users to report regularly for examination to check for high blood pressure. Some even go so far as to insist that women on the Pill stop smoking. Among the stroke victims studied, 73.8% were smokers...