If you are unsure about which contraceptive is right for you, board-certified gynecologist Dr. Nicole Sparks has given us the scoop on seven popular types of birth control, including each product’s usage, effectiveness, and side effects.
Hello everyone my name is dr nicole sparks and i’m an ob gyn today i’m here with in the know and we are going to be talking about the birth control pill or the oral contraceptive pill this is a standard pack of pills and birth control pills are an example of a hormonal birth control pill they do contain estrogen and progesterone and this is usually what we’ll
Start our patients on if they’re okay with taking a pill every day you either have hormonal or non-hormonal contraception hormonal contraception includes things such as the pill the patch the ring so the way this works is it usually will suppress some of the hormones that help ovulation so of course if you stop ovulation then that will keep you from getting
Pregnant and this is how most of the combined contraception works so you’ll notice on a standard pack of pills it will have a sunday start date but you don’t have to start on sunday you can start on any day that you choose and most pills will have what we call a 21 7 meaning you have 21 days of an active pill and seven days of an inactive pill or they’ll be
More like 24 and 4 kind of like this one where they’ll just have four days of an inactive pill and during the inactive pill days is when you’ll have a cycle and then you’ll start the next pack of pills immediately after and don’t worry because if you do miss one pill you can go ahead and take two the next day and kind of get caught up if you miss more than two
Then we suggest that you talk to your doctor about what you should do next and as far as how effective the birth control pill is it really depends on the user so with typical use it kind of has a seven percent failure rate and that’s pretty high and that’s because people will forget to take their birth control pill every day if you’re really good at taking
It then you know it really has a failure rate of closer to one to two percent so you really want to make sure that you take your pill every day because of course the more you take it the more effective that it is so pills are pretty easy to obtain you can either get a prescription from your physician or even now we have lots of companies like bedsider and
Simple health who will actually let you talk to a physician over a television and they can mail the pills directly to your house or you can go to the store and get them at any pharmacy and the cost of the pill usually depends on your insurance some are as cheap as four dollars five dollars six dollars and some can be a little bit more expensive so some of the
Common side effects with birth control pills especially when you’re first starting include some things like nausea vomiting breast tenderness headaches and sometimes you might have some irregular or unscheduled spotting when you first started the good news is that after about three months once your body gets used to this new pill a lot of those symptoms will
Resolve so we have many different types of birth control pills so don’t worry because if you can’t find one that you like we can usually find one that will suit you there are also other types of birth control like the female condom spermicide and the diaphragm now remember all of the information provided here is for your medical purposes and information only
If you have specific symptoms or complaints make sure that you actually talk to your physician so they can figure out the form of contraception is right for you thank you guys so much for watching today i am an ob gyn by day but by night i’m actually a blogger and i do a lot of these videos and i really love to educate so if you want to find more information
About some of the things that we’ve talked about today you can follow me on any platform including instagram or tiktok and my username is nicole alicia md again thanks for watching today i hope you guys learned something you
Transcribed from video
Birth Control 101: Everything you need to know about the pill By In The Know
