I got on hormonal birth control when I was 15, and I haven’t thought about it much since. When I left my hometown to attend college, I had to move across the country, meaning I left my gynecologist behind. Now, I go back every year to get my prescription refilled, but if I have a problem, I have to either wait or go to a doctor I don’t know. Pandia Health is here to change that.
Pandia Health is a telehealth and birth control pharmacy combined. It is the only women-founded and women and doctor-led company in the birth control delivery space. It’s new to Florida and beginning to take hold here at UF. Pandia Health offers birth control delivery services, even for those that don’t have a current prescription. They offer telehealth appointments to provide a prescription – it costs $20 a year to use their doctors – and even provide birth control at reasonable prices for those without insurance. It costs $15 for most birth control packs, so it costs $45 for three months of pills. If you can’t afford the $45 at a time, they offer flexible payment options for $20 a month at a time. They offer the pill, the ring and the patch with free delivery to all 50 states. They are available to write prescriptions in 13 states, reaching about 50% of the country’s population, including Florida. Pandia Health is unique in that they don’t force you to use their doctor – if you already have a prescription, just transfer the prescription.
Dr. Sophia Yen is the CEO and co-founder of Pandia Health. She started the company five years ago to make sure no one runs out of birth control. As a pre-med student, she was taking her biochemistry final and “bam blood.” She got her period and faced a decision: Should she deal with her period or finish her final? She chose to finish her final. But as she made that decision, she looked at the two students next to her. They didn’t have uteri, and they didn’t have to worry about stuff like this.
Besides being female and doctor-led, Pandia Health also uses a unique algorithm to determine the best birth control option. The algorithm is based on women’s BMI, race and ethnicity to help choose the best birth control method with the least amount of side effects. Yen strives for inclusiveness in Pandia’s treatment of women.
“When I went to medical school, I was taught to use this type of birth control, and I think that works best in a Caucasian female who wants to bleed every single month, but if you’re Asian, Black, Latina or if you don’t want to bleed every month then we have a secret sauce,” Yen said.
Pandia Health is designed for those with uteri that have busy lifestyles, like students. Most students at UF are away from their normal primary care physicians and gynecologists, so if we have a problem with our birth control, it’s a pain to deal with because our doctors could live hours away or across the country. Yen says Pandia Health is ideal for students because “if you’re new to campus or just starting your birth control journey, you would want a company that is led by a woman, that’s led by a doctor that knows the pain of it.”
It’s also great for students without transportation or reliable transportation because you just “set it and forget it,” and it automatically gets shipped to you. If you go home for the holidays and need your birth control sent to your home, they can do it. If you’re going across the country for a summer internship, they can deliver to you. If you’re studying away for a semester (domestically), they can ship it to you. It’s flexible and designed to make it easier to have consistent birth control.
If you’re not interested in the pill, they do offer a patch and ring option. Pandia Health has recently signed a deal with Twirla – a brand of the hormonal birth control patch – which they do deliver for those with insurance. Yen explains that the Twirla patch has fewer side effects and is safer than other brands because it has less estrogen; it’s still enough to be effective, but it’s low enough that the risk of dangerous side effects like blood clots is seriously reduced.
Yen and Pandia Health are advocates for what they dub the #PeriodsOptional movement, encouraging hormonal birth control that allows those with uteri to not bleed every month, or ever. Yen says that it’s known that you don’t have to bleed every month, particularly if you have extraordinary circumstances, like a bleeding disorder. But what Yen is advocating for is to give
all women the choice to not bleed every month or at all. Only in the past five years, in which the pills that have come out that make it so users only bleed every three months, have we seen this acceptability in turning off periods. She herself uses this method and hasn’t bled in 12 years.
Yen claims there are several physical and mental benefits to turning off periods.
“Every time you build up the lining of the uterus you risk uterine cancer. Every time you pop out an egg, you risk ovarian cancer,” Yen said.
The only way to decrease your chances of ovarian cancer is to reduce the number of periods you have. She says that turning off your period for five years decreases your chance for ovarian cancer by 50%.
At first, I was skeptical of the idea of not having a period. However, in other parts of the world, women menstruate far less than the average American woman. For example, the women in Mali’s Dogo tribe have 100 periods in their lifetimes – American women have 350 to 400 periods in their lifetime, Yen said. The Dogo women start their periods later than American women at 16, and they have only eight periods a year compared to our 13. Yen says this is mostly due to their higher procreation rate. They have an average of eight children, whereas American women have an average of two. Women are designed to have this many children, and because we don’t, she says,“We are over here incessantly menstruating.”
I also figured that the “natural” patterns of hormones are ideal and altering them would have negative side effects. However, Yen says birth control methods in which you don’t get your period create stable hormone levels, “This smooth … is better for diabetes, seizure disorder, arthritis, depression, acne, asthma.” For women with endometriosis or Polycystic ovary syndrome, period optional birth control is actually ideal to counteract those disorders because the lining of the uterus is more stable rather than growing irregularly.
Women shouldn’t have to choose between dealing with a period and being a student. “The number one cause of missed work for women under the age of 25 is periods.” In male-dominated offices or professions, telling a male superior that you have to miss work because of a period is
seen as a weakness. Period optional birth control methods help to overcome the obstacle that periods cause in women’s lives.
This method of birth control is achievable through hormonal contraceptives, Dr. Yen says. Skipping the sugar pill week of any triphasic – a pill with three hormone levels – birth control pill pack will remove those bleeding cycles. However, Yen says it is easier to have a monophasic pill, which just has one dose of hormones for all four weeks of the month. Triphasic tries to mimic the four-week cycle of a natural period, but that still results in bleeding and massive fluctuations in hormone levels. Pandia Health has several #PeriodOptional birth control methods and is now available for UF students with uteri to use.
Pandia Health is also planning to move into other areas for women’s health, such as prescription acne, menopausal treatments and anti-aging products. They’re quickly becoming the one-stop-shop for convenient women’s health.