From your digestion to your sleep to your cognition, exogenous hormone use has dramatic effects on your entire body. However, there is a subconscious idea that when a drug is taken it, it's actions and influence will stay within a tidy little box of ‘intended’ outcomes. The reality is, pharmaceuticals influence nearly every system in your body.
If that wasn’t enough, the chaos effect of a drug must be compounded with other variables such as the fluidity of a women's hormonal life course (puberty, perimenopause), an extraordinarily stressful physiological event (ie. competing or acute illness), or the ongoing multiple small daily stressors, like training at a high capacity without adequate nutrition and sleep. Needless to say, there are so many factors that on their own or together with others, can manifest in immediate, ongoing, and future health consequences.
But, these risks don't just come from drugs used for enhancement purposes either. Although the 'finger' is pointed at anabolic-androgenic steroids for causing massive system-wide dysfunctions within the body, steroids like oral contraceptives - espescially when taken at the beginning of a female's reproductive period - have the capacity to result in lingering effects for health.
Breaking down myths, speaking to the knowledge gap, and critically thinking about the information you read and receive will go a long way in helping to improve the current state of women's health. Blissful, willful and reckless ignorance won’t help the situation, or the women affected by it. Get informed, get critical, and build knowledge by breaking down myths.
Read the full write-up from EliteFTS here.