As a new quarter approaches, life for women in college continues to get busier and filled with more exams. On top of studying is the burden of menstruation. Periods visit at the most inconvenient times, and the fear of unplanned pregnancies loom over already present school stresses.
Expert Dr. Sophia Yen is working to make the feminine lifestyle easier. She co-founded the company, Pandia Health, which determines the best, individualized birth control option that can be directly shipped to all 50 states. This method, she explained, helps alleviate any “pill anxiety” — the fear that if one doesn’t receive their pills, they can end up pregnant or spotting.
Dr. Yen’s movement, #Periodsoptional, lets women know they can choose how often they bleed.
As she explained, “you don’t have to bleed every month if you don’t want to. We now have the technology to get rid of your periods. You could certainly do it with the IUD, with the implant, the shot … with 40 different pills I’m sure I could find one that could do it for you.”
Period pain is a prevalent issue for college women. Approximately 20 percent of American women have heavy bleeding that contributes to missed school and work.
This reiterates Dr. Yen’s point: “Who’s going to do better on the LSAT, GMAT or the SAT, the woman who’s bleeding in the middle of the test or just that week? Or the woman who can move it away from her finals, away from her exams?” Pandia Health is working to spread the word that bleeding is optional and birth control can relieve the pain that is associated with menstruation.
Pandia Health places a strong emphasis on making health decisions with “informed consent.”
“Informed consent is making sure you give everybody all their options,” Dr. Yen said when describing her company’s method of patient care. All the possible birth control and contraceptive options that can be sent by mail are considered for a prescription along with information about the patient’s background.
The doctors associated with Pandia Health reside in 13 different states and prescribe birth control based on health factors such as ethnicity, medical history and body mass index (BMI).
Dr. Yen explained how her company’s doctors are “evidence-based, academic [minded] and [apply] it to birth control.”
This means that these doctors use data from different ethnicities and BMIs to formulate the best pill or method of birth control for each individual patient. According to Dr. Yen, “what works for the Caucasian female does not work for the Latina, Black or Asian,” something that many pharmaceutical companies overlook. This makes all the difference in healthcare.
This idea that ethnicity affects the efficacy of birth control is a surrogate for the actual genetics involved. In the future, Dr. Yen hopes to have her company get involved with the genetic analysis of patients to determine if there is a direct correlation between genetics and how birth control is reacted to by different women.
Plan B is an example of why Pandia Health’s doctors take factors such as health background and BMI into account.
Around 2010, on average, about 25 percent of women aged 20-24 had used an emergency contraceptive like Plan B. Plan B is a commonly used emergency contraceptive, but there are many factors that affect its effectiveness.
“If your BMI is 26 or greater, it is not going to work,” explained Dr. Yen concerning Plan B. Although there are only theories on why this is true, it has been proven that there is a correlation between greater body fat and the ineffectiveness of Plan B. Pandia Health’s emphasis on personalized feminine healthcare is what allows them to provide effective prescriptions for each patient and avoid the need to change prescriptions often.
This doctor and female-founded company, led by Dr. Sophia Yen, is on a mission to spread important information to the female community. Because it was founded by females, there is more female understanding behind the company and more female representation among the employed doctors.
“if you’re going to have a woman’s health company, it should be woman-founded and woman-led. It should be doctor-led.”
-Dr. Sophia Yen, MD, MPH
The “Pandia secret sauce,” as she states, is “taking the experience of two-thousand women of different ethnicities, different BMI’s and looking at what is the best possible [birth control.]”
Her company continues to grow and take on new endeavors such as genetic analysis to make prescriptions and patient care even more accurate and effective. There are many options for reducing the stress that follows bleeding and Pandia Health is striving to give women confidence and choice in menstruation.